Western culture spends a huge amount of energy directing our attention and activities to consumerism while idealizing an image of the nuclear family with one parent providing the entire income and both parents in residence, etc, etc. Basically a reality that rarely exists at this point and is nearly impossible to maintain at any given time. The question is, why?
Consumerism I get. It’s all about the money. And as long as we don’t realize that and don’t realize that all the values we are being sold are just a means of getting us to buy ‘stuff’ then no one can complain or even really care that they end up with nothing of value. And the ideal family that is the carrot always out of reach keeps us looking away from the real. But what if we did turn to the real? What if we started tuning out all the yelling and advertising and demands to ‘buy this so you’ll be happy’ and started listening to ourselves? Catastrophe? A breakdown of all civilization? Hmmmm….maybe not.
I just met a lovely young woman who is listening to herself and trusting what she hears. She started doing yoga and Qigong, left a relationship that could not survive her choice to listen to herself and honor what she heard, became a Qigong master, and is now on tour teaching Qigong workshops all around the use to hundreds of people per session. And loving her life. And her joy is not intertwined with having a nuclear family, or a house with a picket fence, or 3.2 children, or having a bunch of things. ????? Amazing! How revolutionary would it be for us to just listen for one day to what we actually have going on inside us? I don’t know that all of us would become Qigong masters, but we might actually have true happiness in that moment. And that’s earth-shaking, isn’t it?
