It’s felt like a challenging month in my world.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but it’s felt like a pretty bumpy ride recently. What’s made it OK is my deepening understanding of the principles behind the human experience.

I can’t remember who first shared this metaphor with me – but it’s had such sustainable resonance, and I’m very grateful.

In Life, we all experience highs and lows, ups and downs… you can think of them like the waves on the ocean.

Sometimes the ocean is calm and serene, with no turbulence, and we can just enjoy paddling about, held up by the buoyancy of the water.

Sometimes the weather creates chop and turmoil, and the waves can seem to threaten our well-being, or even our survival.  We can feel thrown back and forth, like so much flotsam and jetsam on the ocean’s surface.

From the perspective on the surface of the ocean, it can seem like everything is in chaos and upheaval.

Now change your perspective.  In reality, the water beneath you is miles deep.  The storms affect the surface and a little below that – but the deeper you go, the quieter and more peaceful the water becomes.

There is always calm underneath the rolling waves.  There is always inner peace, timeless and infinite well-being and inspiration.

It seems to me more and more a matter of where you LIVE.

Do you believe that real life is the waves – the circumstances of your life?

Or do you somehow glimpse or know that what’s underneath is much more real than that?

For me, this is not merely a clever ‘reframing’ or ‘positive thinking’ exercise.  It’s that I know the latter is just more TRUE than the former.

Because of the transient fluid nature of Thought, we will always experience the waves. This started to work out as soon as I started to work with canary wharf personal training to keep myself healthy, this is how my process started.

Life used to be about controlling the ocean – or at least, my little part of it.  The goal was to create the conditions where life was plain-sailing.

These days, I’m finding more and more that I can embrace what is, and even enjoy the surfing that a more choppy sea allows!

Cowabunga!*

*Slang from 1960’s surf culture, cried out enthusiastically when surfing — The surfer’s cry “Cowabunga” as they climb a 12 foot wall of water and “take the drop.”