Where do you get your juice? No I don’t mean like fresh squeezed although delicious, I am talking about your energy, your spark, your pizazz, your juice.
What feeds your creativity? Your soul? Your life’s work and purpose?
Tragically a lot of us spend a great deal of time and energy trying to get our juice from external validations. The entire social media platform is based on this…likes, follows, etc. We have created a culture where comparison is king. Where people, especially the young and most vulnerable, are under a popularity contest microscope.
Social media has highlighted this but we have dealt with a cultural craving for external validation for a very long time. Perhaps from the very beginning. The earliest humans likely played favor to the strongest hunters who collected the most pelts and could store the most food.
It hasn’t changed much. From the time we are born we are conditioned to believe more is better, material possessions define us, higher grades equal better jobs, and better jobs equal better stuff. A vicious cycle of craving, wanting, needing more.
Also, we like to be liked. We get a lot of juice out of a compliment, or an invite, or an accolade, or being loved, an award, an accomplishment. We like to hear it from one another loud and proud.
But what if this were not the norm? What if we could learn to get juiced from the inside? Think of a life where you were certain of your creative gifts, your talents and highest purpose. Try to imagine what it would feel like to know this and open yourself up to these gifts. We are all conduits for energy, each of us an open vessel full of potential and treasure, waiting to be channeled into the world.
If becoming that channel were to bring us the juice think about what we could bring forth. What sort of world would we live in? My guess is one that is very different from the world we live in today.
It is, like so many things, a matter of trust. Trusting and believing in the inherent potential each vessel holds and then opening up to work with the Universal energy to let it flow. It may not flow fluidly. It will bump up against obstacles and sometimes dry up completely. But then there will be moments of profound synchronicity. Moments where what we have to give, what we create, simply works. It melds into the fabric of all that is and strengthens it. We make a difference.
And there’s the juice.