01/07/2026
🌿 Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you
Group Med *7.30pm* TONIGHT
All welcome. Register via link in profile
I was surprised to find that it was Jim Carrey who said this. It has been coming up a lot for my students and clients and especially while watching someone very close to me move through a hard transition, gripping tighter with every attempt to predict and control what’s coming, and finding that the tighter she holds, the harder it gets.
It made me want to write about what it might look like to loosen that grip.
Most of the time we move through our days from the small self, the part of us that takes everything personally, that reacts, that measures each event as good or bad for me (and remember we are not wanting to rid ourselves of this part, we are learning to love it!). From here, life can feel like something happening to us. Things go wrong. People let us down. Plans fall apart. And the small self tightens around all of it.
But there’s another perspective available to us, one we touch every time we sit for meditation. As the mind settles and we drop beneath the noise, we start to glimpse a broader perspective. We see that we’re part of something much larger than our personal story, a whole intelligent flow of nature that’s been organising life long before we arrived and will keep organising it long after. Seasons turn. Rivers find the sea. Nothing in nature is trying to control the outcome, it’s simply unfolding.
This is what it means to establish ourselves in Being. Not withdrawing from life, but returning again and again to that quieter, steadier ground within us, so that whatever we do from there carries a different quality. We still act. We still show up fully for our work, our relationships, our responsibilities. But we hold the outcome more loosely. We do our part, and then we surrender the rest.
That’s the shift. From the small self, life happens to us. From Being, we start to trust that it’s happening for us, even the parts we didn’t ask for and wouldn’t have chosen.
I’d love for you to bring this question into your sit this week: what changes if I trust that this is happening for me?
Ax
