Trust: Choosing the Highest Potential Path

It seems to be a widely held idea that if one chooses their ‘highest potential path’ in life they are going to experience more joy and love and peace than if they make fear-driven choices. This may in fact be the ultimate truth, as wisdom, generally speaking, does lead to greater ease. However, something that is less widely discussed and acknowledged is that at some points on the journey, choosing your highest potential path is actually fraught with periods of extreme loneliness, pain and uncertainty. The greatest rewards may become apparent eventually but in some instances not before you’ve run the gauntlet.

When we are faced with the big choices of our lives, when we come to massive forks in the road, more often than not the fear-based choice is much more cosy, less disruptive and ‘easier’, so to speak. It is often the choice that means we don’t have to change anything, that ‘no one gets hurt’ and that we keep the status quo alive.

On the flip side, in many instances making the choice that best serves our spiritual expansion, the choice that helps us to heal and clear intergenerational trauma and outdated traditions, that choice that means we are in full alignment with our heart and that will lead to us fulfilling our highest potential, ends up looking like, for want of a better phrase, a ‘shit-show’. Knowing you are choosing a path in alignment with your heart can be the most painful, uncomfortable and utterly gut-wrenching choice you will ever make. On top of that, even if you make it with the certainty you are following wisdom and not fear, for years afterwards you may be told by others you made the wrong choice or worse, you may come to doubt your own inner knowing because what you chose feels so insecure, lonely and even torturous. Many of the greatest figures in history who ended up living out their full potential experienced this somewhat counter-intuitive reality.

So, we may ask, what exactly is the point of choosing the ‘highest potential path’ if it will be painful, uncomfortable and at times seemingly unbearable? Sounds loony, doesn’t it?! Who would do that?!

I don’t pretend to have one definitive answer to this question but I will offer what I have gleaned so far. I believe that the point of choosing a path from a space of wisdom, but one that ends up being a path that rips you to shreds, is that it will lead to a shedding layers of the ‘false self’ you wear that are not really ‘you’ - layers that actually block you from experiencing a state of love on a daily basis. SO what the heck does that mean? Isn’t that just some cliché spiritual excuse for pain and suffering? Well, maybe. I guess we can’t truly know until we reach the end of our stories. However, I have a deep intuition that it is not merely rhetoric.

When we take what is commonly known as a ‘leap of faith’, jumping because we followed the heart and not logic or fear or custom or tradition, what we are ultimately saying to the universe is, “I put the outcome in your hands because even though I can’t see the ending to this story I trust that when I surrender to the flow of life instead of resisting it (because of preconceived programming, fear and ideas) that eventually I will be taken to the highest possible timeline available to me, the one that best serves my expansion”. We are saying, “I wish to live from an expanded place of ‘love’ without conditions”.

These ‘conditions’ I mention could be likened to the eggshell surrounding an unhatched chicken. If a chicken is to be born into the world and participate in life here on earth the shell must break and fall away altogether. The chicken can’t possibly know what lies outside of its shell as it is forming but one day it feels an urge or intuition to push from the inside, crack the shell open and emerge into the light. This could actually be called an act of faith and trust. How can it know that life will even continue outside of its only known home let alone be better? It doesn’t. However, in order to reach its full potential as a chicken, it must break out of the shell if it is to expand into all it is meant to be. Just like this our soul is encased in a shell of conditions in the form of ideas and limiting beliefs. We can’t know exactly what will happen if they are ‘cracked open and allowed to fall away’ but many of us sense intuitively when the time is right to start pushing from the inside (or life makes us so uncomfortable that staying within our limiting beliefs feels far worse than entertaining the notion there may be a more expansive reality to enter). We can’t know what lies ahead and yet we can choose to move with the flow of the call of the heart to expand. Consider the difference between the restriction of being inside an eggshell and being free, able to flap your wings and move around? Imagine this kind of freedom energetically? Doesn’t that sound worth ‘breaking a few eggs’ for?

Now, we can’t actually begin to live like this if we don’t believe that it is true. Our minds have been programmed over millennia to cleverly keep us safe from harm by controlling as much as we can. It is a rare individual who can live this kind of surrendered existence without at least a tiny bit of proof that amazing things come from surrendering to the will of the whole through the practice of following the heart. In my experience, what seems to work best for an individual to adopt this as a way of life is to begin with small, fairly insignificant things. For example, booking a little holiday but not pre planning every detail, surrendering the agenda to the flow of the universe instead - handing over the trajectory of the holiday to the flow can be a great way to practice feeling confident enough to hand over the trajectory of your life in general to the flow when you are ready. We can practice in conversations with others, letting go of controlling the outcome and ‘how they see us’, and instead truly listening to what the other person is saying. We can practice in the traffic, not resisting and reacting and judging everyone else’s driving, but rather manoeuvring with whatever comes and releasing attachment as we go. We can practice playing a card game, not ‘trying to win’ but just playing with full presence and enjoying the fun.

What tends to happen is you begin to see that life will often bring you to a beautiful place or experience that you may never have thought of planning for yourself. Or, life may bring you to a difficult experience where you learn the most helpful lesson you could have possibly hoped for. Either way, surrender continuously ends up leading to greater freedom.

From my observations and experience, life tends to give you little treats when you begin to practice this process. I remember when I decided to really give ‘living in the flow’ a try I had some mind-blowing treats come my way, including being upgraded to business class for free on a flight to Europe just moments after I made a choice to act in accordance with my worth instead of in accordance with fear.

So what could possibly be the downside to following your heart? The bad news is once you have made this process a way of life, experiencing the ultimate freedom that surrender brings over many years, once you reach the point of no return because you simply couldn’t go back to following fear, patterns and ‘that which no longer serves your highest good’ if you tried, and just when you think you’ve nailed it, then life is going to take you through much higher levels of practice and potentially the most excruciating initiation of all time. Each person will be ready for these experiences at different moments and some will not even be close in this lifetime because it is simply not their time yet to let go. The process cannot be rushed. However, for those who are ready…well, you had better be ready.

This ‘next level’ initiations will be the ultimate tests, if you like, for you to really practice your skills of surrender of the conditioned mind. In fact, they will be the greatest opportunity to finalise and release all of the last buried remnants of the mind that tell you to do anything you can to protect yourself in this harsh reality and that in order to experience peace many, many conditions must first be met. At the highest level they will most likely show up as your worst possible fear, perfectly designed for you. You will likely have an experience where your ultimate condition appears to have been met and then is taken from you.

So what is the point of this torture, you ask?? VERY good question and one I have repeatedly asked myself many, many times.

Well, I believe it may be that maintaining surrender in the face of your worst fear being realised is the only way to know the true experience of love without any condition. It’s the only way to raise our vibration high enough, to shake us out of the illusion of the mind, to give us the biggest slap in the face imaginable, so that we stop believing love can only be experienced once ‘X’ is achieved or found. With your ultimate ‘X’ being shown to you then ripped away, you will be forced to find peace outside of your ultimate condition. You will be led closer than ever to the highest possible levels a human being can experience of unconditional love.

And what do I mean by ‘you had better be ready’? Well, to put it simply, in order to face one of these higher level initiations into surrender you must have decided deep in your heart that no matter the level of gut wrenching pain you experience, you will stand by your choice to honour your heart, your worth and to let go of control. This is faith or what might be called ‘living in a state of trust’…and this, I believe, is the ‘point’ of the whole journey - to surrender to love without condition.

This above all else, in my humble view, is what we come to Earth to master.