What if I could share with you an insight that would allow time to always be on your side? In order for time to be on your side, it’s essential for you to side with time. For this to occur, you would have to accept how everything in time is either happening or not happening — not as a karmic punishment, but an instigator of your highest evolving potential.
The question remains, what pearl of wisdom allows you to see this truth so clearly and authentically? What insight inspires you to acknowledge the hands of time as one of our most enlightened teachers, instead of viewing it as a problem to fix?
The answer is simple, but it requires some unpacking to truly absorb its full potency. It is the wisdom of realizing — you are not your urges. This doesn’t mean it’s wrong to have urges. Equally so, if you find yourself solely motivated by the seed of each frenetic surge and constantly reaching out to satisfy each momentary craving that bubbles up, you cannot develop the proper space to gain such a clarifying perspective.
Whether you are blessed to be in a position to fulfill each urge, or constantly chase after each sudden impulse, if you are someone whose life is run by the fulfillment of urges, you are operating in a state of survival mode. Since a core belief of ego is identifying with urges as a means of personal survival, through your conditioning process, you become hard-wired to think that fulfilling each urge remains as necessary as breathing.
You may not walk around conscious of this belief but it often reveals itself through the repetition of your daily patterning.
What are the urges you must fulfill the moment they arise? How soon after something either good or bad happens are you obligated to text someone about it? What do you feel in your body if the phone rings and instead of answering it, you just watch it go to voicemail? What arises in your body when there isn’t a world to check in with on a virtual level? Can you go to dinner and maintain an open level of conversation without looking at your phone, even when the other person goes to the bathroom?
Such questions are not meant to out anyone, but to expose the hair-trigger like responses that you may not realize run your life. That which runs your life tends to ruin your life, until life is run solely by the light dwelling within you. This means as long as our lives are governed by the fulfillment of satisfying momentary urges, we live in a state of urgency.
Whether aware of it or not, when your nervous system is wired with ongoing programs of urgency, you tend to live in a matrix of ego consciousness. This occurs no matter how much high level wisdom has been absorbed.
And isn’t that the strangest part of it all; so many people awakening to high level wisdom, while unaware of the patterning of urgency that runs them on a personal level. You might be able to zip across the Universe and taste the joy of the cosmos, but if your body remains caught in a loop of checking your email box or texting all day, you haven’t brought all the wisdom from the stars back into the body to be grounded and integrated.
As a commentary on the stickiness that eludes many bright lights along a modern-day spiritual journey, these words would only be of the deepest service if they included what to do about it, when and if, you find yourself playing out such patterns.
This might not even be applicable to your lifestyle, but a snapshot into the framework of what keeps others from showing up for you in the way you show up for them. In either case, the way out of the urgency matrix is to clearly see how you aren’t your urges. They may feel as if they belong to you. They may remind you of all the things you like and prefer that you associate with feelings of well-being, and they may be so cleverly placed to erupt within you the moment you aren’t feeling your best.
Despite how personally-crafted each urge may be, especially during a time when emotional relief is needed the most, once you begin seeing each urge as a part of a pattern playing out within you, you begin to see yourself, not as your urges, but as the witness alive within their orbit.
In order to gain space from each impulse, to directly see that you are not your urges, please consider these helpful strategies:
1. Each momentary urge is like an ad campaign personally targeting you to continually buy into the vibration of ego. The ad campaign needs you to assume you aren’t whole and complete exactly as you are, so you can look outside of yourself for other people, places, and things to fulfill you. Each time an impulse arises, with the “make it or break it” energy of urgency, as if your life will amount to great loss unless you act upon its demands, you are given an opportunity to either maintain your membership in ego consciousness or step beyond it.
The key is allowing each impulse to arise without assuming it’s your destiny to fulfill it. When the fulfillment of urges become greater choice points, instead of dire necessities, you are beginning to see the ad campaigns that can only target your preferences when lost in the urgency loop. It’s one thing to not buy what someone attempts to sell you on a retail or even a political level, but it’s a whole new level of liberation when not even your own urges strike you as something that need to be fulfilled.
2. When in doubt, go without. If you are someone who’s knee-jerk reaction is fulfilling each urgent request, it may be a sign that you are run by the insatiable hunger of an unconscious mind, instead of nourished by the wisdom of an awakening heart. If you’re unsure whether your heart truly resonates with the endless demands of your mind, simply employ this fiercely-discerning wisdom: when in doubt, go without.
If you don’t know how perfect, whole, and complete you are without something, how do you know that thing will do anything but make you hungrier for more? How do you know checking your phone for texts or updates will make you feel better, if without the awareness of how happy you are already? Perhaps by going without or limiting your phone usage, you’ll see that constantly checking doesn’t create greater fulfillment. It merely perpetuates a pattern where you are teaching your brain to have this same craving a few minutes from now.
In order to break-free of your personally-targeted inner ad campaigns of ego, you must be willing to go without. If there is a feeling of desperation and anxiety when going without, as if you are missing an important experience in life or even feeling left behind or out of the loop, that should be the tip-off of where each urge is coming from.
3. What happens if I don’t? Another helpful strategy to see how you aren’t your urges is to respond to each urge with a question, “What happens if I don’t?” Such a question is calling the ego’s fear-based agenda into full awareness where ego is invited to use the threat of loss to sell you on fulfilling another momentary urge. The pattern is constructed out of one simple but limiting belief: I have to keep acquiring more, in order to be further away from the threat of less.
By responding with the question, “What happens if I don’t?,” you are consciously inviting the ego to reveal its game plan by sharing with you the threat of loss that looms overhead if you don’t cower to its impulsive needs. Once it shares its doomsday-like scenario, you can respond with the question, “And then what happens after that?” The strategy is to keep authentically asking the ego what happens after each threat of loss occurs until the very ego structure attempting to sell you on any particular urge dissolves back into the wholeness of Source.
For those who are willing to question their urges versus cower to any degree of impulsive pressure, great relief, eternal freedom, and existential joy become your natural state of being expressed in full embodied awareness.
4. The soul always exists prior to each urge. As the eternal witness experiencing its radiance of light throughout your personal senses, the soul watches the coming and going of urges, only gravitationally pulled into their orbit to the degree of ego that has yet be cleared out of the cells of the human body. If you take a moment to recall any momentary urge that felt as if the fate of the world depended on you acting upon it, you may be able to see how you were only able to notice its arising because you were already there. If you notice an urge arise, it indicates that you must have arrived first, in order to notice it.
Even if you see urges as fleeting and shape-shifting, notice yourself as the inner witness, whose awareness does not come and go like each urge tends to be. Whether noticing yourself as that which is prior to each impulse or the constant stream of awareness within the orbit of each fleeting request, you are gaining the proper space and perspective to acknowledge urges as experiences, instead of as extensions of self.
5. In order to embrace and act upon your soul’s deepest desires, each urge must be given permission to pass. Many get stuck in misunderstanding the urgency of ego with their soul’s deepest calling. Because many of us live in a state of struggle, urgently awaiting the Universe to call upon us for a special mission to spare us of the insufferable boredom of everyday life, we often misperceive each urgent request of ego as a heavenly message.
When we receive messages from Source, they are affirming, straight-forward, expressed with a calm voice, and contain no ultimatums such as “do this or else” or “If you don’t do this, bad things will happen.” Even if you passed on the guidance of the Universe, it would faithfully orbit your field until you acted upon it. This makes the proper use of intuition to be rather fool-proof when not caught up in a race against time scenario.
When you are not secretly looking for ways to escape the majestic fate of your current climate of circumstances, you are then able to truly feel into the governing wisdom of Universal Truth versus the oscillating desperation of urgency in motion.
“When we receive messages from Source, they are affirming, straight-forward, expressed with a calm voice, and contain no ultimatums such as “do this or else” or “If you don’t do this, bad things will happen.”
6. This may be one of the best strategies and is one that will unravel any remaining aspect of ego. It is a way to see through the facade of believing you are your urges — once and for all. It is how time can always be on your side, but can only occur, once you side with time. In order to know that (drum roll please) time is always right. The fact that you have more time away from what you desire is right from the standpoint of time — giving you space to recognize your true inherent wholeness, whether anything external gets worse, better, in any variation of more or less.
The fact that you have all that you have and don’t have what you don’t is done on purpose. It is time’s deliberate attempt to free you from your conditioned spell of inner negotiation, where you withhold your most radiant qualities until the objects of your desire are given.
Not wanting to live our lives at full capacity until things change in our favor is the battlecry of ego. Daring to live with joy, faith, openness, gratitude, love, and ease, no matter what comes or goes is the perfection of our souls in action. Whenever outcomes don’t seem to go your way or you find yourself having a lot of time separate from the fulfillment of your desires, it remains an opportunity to thank time for being one of your wisest teachers.
Thank you time for putting me in this position; to discover how perfect, whole, and complete I already am, by showing me I don’t need more of this or less of that to have better experiences. Most of all, thank you for helping me see that I am not my urges but the inner witness of all that arises.
From this space, the simplicity and peaceful calling of our soul’s deepest desires can dawn within and guide us forward, whether giving us what we want or offering more than we’ve ever imagined along the way. Only by seeing through the facade of urgent patterning, can we embrace a journey that steadily prepares us to receive far more than any urge can crave.
This begins an exciting brand-new chapter of our soul’s journey.
Welcome home, beautiful one. Welcome home.
All For Love,
Matt Kahn
“Matt Kahn: You Are Not Your Urges,” August 14, 2018, at httpss://mattkahn.org/you-are-not-your-urges/