Why Notice Your Occupants

​Dear Why Team member,
Two important ingredients in the secret sauce of an abundant life is gratitude and curiosity. 
After hopefully, having enjoyed a special tradition with your loved ones and feeling grateful, again, for all you have, I hope this week’s message finds you well and curious. 

Audio: 🗣

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This week we consider what occupies us and why.
Are you:
Comfortable with space?
Comfortable with silence?
Comfortable sitting still?
If not, why not?

Why do so many of us often stuff into our lives as much as possible? 
Do we not wish to become more conscious, more aware? As discussed in previous weeks, this is best accomplished during the times we slow down and make space; yet so many people today are uncomfortable with quiet, silence, and being alone.
Could there be fear of what might emerge from the dark?

What occupants are we ignoring when we seek to add more occupants to our lives, ie: people, behaviors, thoughts and actions that occupy every waking moment?
Is it any wonder so many people today have difficulty sleeping, turning off the noise; why the constant noise?
Maybe there is an inner voice we’re seeking to drown out.

Have you ever been around a particularly anxious person who keeps repeating out loud their own intrusive thoughts in an effort to exercise them from their life - only to keep moving their anxious thoughts into the minds of those around them?
Is it any wonder that we tend to move away from those who seek to occupy our lives and minds with negative thoughts and behaviors? Maybe this is why we prefer to be around others who have more favorable occupants within their minds, more positive mental roommates lifting and enhancing their own life and the lives of those around them.

Consider your home, whether you have other human occupants or not, who or what else is occupying your mind?
Is the occupant a positive or negative? Are they lifting or limiting?
What or whom do you allow to occupy your mind and why?

I know this week’s message is filled with a lot of questions, but curiosity helps focus the mind as the mind does not like unanswered questions. 

“The quality of our life depends upon the quality of our questions”
- Tony Robbins

Consider now, more specifically,
what thoughts occupy your mind.
Any addiction to distraction?
Are there unattended thoughts that keep calling for your attention, affecting your sleep and your peace?

What we don’t face stays in our face. Clear communication with the ones we allow around us is so important – after all, speech and thought is what separates us from animals. In case you’re at a great impasse with any of your close ones, children, spouse, roommates, or just having trouble with negative rumination’s, consider mediation; 
if you don’t already meditate, observe your occupants, both physical and mental, and ask why you have allowed and maybe even invited them to stay. 

Why live with destructive occupants? 

Consider the freedom a great eviction would bring - eviction of addiction - to all forms of numbing behavior. What good riddance is in order for you? 

Consider making more space for curiosity and re-creation.

When I slow down the busyness in my life my awareness and love of life rises and the cup from which I can serve others fills up again; I often become more inspired, in spirit, called to write, observe, become. Life seems to use me, rather than me using life. I relax into a stream that carries me, a space of peace opens with no desire to occupy it with noise. An enjoyment of being invites me to relax all the more, and open all the more to what life has for me to learn.
The peace of being as opposed to the distraction of doing.
Joy and gratitude in knowing there is no place I have to be in this moment, nothing that has to be done in this moment. The joy of being - a peace beyond thought and understanding – 
I wish this for you.

Peace precedes and informs more effective and enjoyable action - action filled with more presence - being in and more aware of the stream of life. Not in a hurry, not regretting, not worrying, not criticizing self and others - not mentally “occupied” by forces that can push us and rule over us, but rather making space that cuts the strings that pull us this way and that.

The power and peace of being with vacancy: non-occupancy.
Quiet contemplation.

This week and beyond, consider leaving more room for just being - become more through the awareness of how little you need -
evict the noisy negative occupants that come to destroy and you will be able to better appreciate your 
Best Day Ever: Today!

All is Well and All Will be Well.
You will not cease to do, but only become more effective at your doing the more you lean into and make space for being; be to do, not do to be.

Now is Enough!

Live each Best Day Ever and you’ll make your Best Week Ever!

Steve Luckenbach