How to Take Control of Your Life

The title of this article contains a misnomer (albeit an intentional one), and that is the word: control. For the key to taking (or taking back) control over your life is to release control and instead direct the course of your life.

Consider the Source, the Life Force underlying everything, as a boundless ocean. You need to nothing to remain afloat in this ocean other than to stop resisting, stop flailing about in fear of drowning, relax, and let the water support you.

When we are still and free of resistance or – to frame it in the positive – allowing, we float, the water supports us. We can then choose to pause there awhile to enjoy the experience with all our senses or swim in the direction of a different experience.

Trying to control your life is like flailing about in the ocean for fear of drowning. Directing the course of your life towards the pursuit of your dreams is like swimming.

Constantly trying to control what is already under control is like constantly focusing on survival rather than your dreams. You’re already surviving; you mastered that skill years ago. You mastered it, in fact, the moment they cut the umbilical cord.

Without knowing you knew how to feed your body oxygen by breathing in and out. And you learned to cry when you wanted something until you got it.

As time passed, your survival skill set eventually expanded to include more complex ways of communicating your needs and eventually methods for directly getting yours needs met yourself.

You are such a master of survival that you don’t even need to think about it to do it; you never have. So why have you, then? Why have you devoted so very much of your time – the majority of it, no doubt –fretting, planning, and working so hard to get it met. It’s met!

It’s been met, and it’s not ever going to be un-met until the moment you die (and even then we propose that the core of you survives, but let’s stay focused on this life in this body for now). How much longer do you really want to spend fixating on avoiding one single moment in time (your death) at the expense of all the others (your life)?

The shift in mindset is simple and all-powerful: instead of observing what is so, imagine how you want it to be, and feel what it’s like to know that it is so.

That brings us to another part of our lives over which we so often try (with futility) to exert undue control, and that is: our emotions. It’s a fool’s errand to try to control your emotions, not because it doesn’t work (though indeed it doesn’t) but because it is completely counterproductive; it’s self-sabotage, in fact, to try and control your emotions.

Why? Because your emotions play a pivotal role in the perpetual fulfillment of all your desires, one that runs completely counter to the very idea of control.

Your emotions are your signals of how connected you are to the infinitely abundant wellspring of joy and fulfillment. Feeling good is a signal that you are in alignment with the steady flow of creative Life Force; feeling bad is a signal that you are not.

Trying to change your emotions, then, is like putting the proverbial cart before the horse. Feeling better won’t get you in alignment with the Source. Getting yourself in alignment with the Source will make you feel better.

An unpleasant feeling is no more than an invitation to remember your true essence as one with the Source of All That Is – always supported, always surviving, always directing and always in control.