Welcome to the Grow Inward Podcast, I am your host Adrian Petrillo.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Hopefully you have had the opportunity to listen to the first few episodes of this podcast, as they will help you to understand that we have been slowly building a bit of a foundation from which you can build upon, when it comes to approaching inner work. I mentioned a framework with some areas of focus that I have found particularly useful and holistic in nature, which is mindset, movement, and meditation.
I try to simply offer up a few helpful suggestions for consideration, as you begin down this path. Of course, it is ultimately up to you to find the things that inspire and motivate you on our own personal journey. I am simply sharing the things which I have found very helpful and effective after many years of practice and exploration. As we go forward, we will explore all sorts of different things. I am certain you will find things that will inspire and motivate you, regardless of your interests or personal goals.
It’s very humbling for me to even speak about many of these things, because as much work as I have done I still feel so far behind sometimes. It brings to mind the saying that the more you learn, the more you realize how little you actually know? I can truly relate to this sentiment, and you will never hear me profess that I have it all figured out, because I most certainly do not! It’s a never ending journey of learning and shifting challenges, and yet, one that I have always truly enjoyed exploring.
This episode is something that wasn’t as easy to talk about, because I still struggle myself. But the more I thought about that, I realized that this is something that we can all relate to in our lives, and so we should talk about it. Even if I don’t have everything figured out, or working flawlessly in my own life, the simple act of discussing and sharing helps us all to learn a little more about ourselves and others. I don’t ever want to give up on doing that, we should always seek to understand more and use that understanding in the most useful and positive ways that we can.
It is this realization, and an acceptance to always be honest and open with ourselves, which facilitates our ability to make real progress. Doing inner work and striving for growth in the many different aspects of ourselves is extremely humbling, but there is something very special contained deeply within that. This is something that we all share, it is often in our imperfections where we will find the greatest opportunities to learn and to grow.
Our experience of imperfection is often extremely frustrating, and can leave us feeling utterly defeated at times. This is a perfect example of what we last spoke about on this podcast, which is mindset. How is it that you choose to view your imperfections and challenges? Do you see them as an opportunity, or do you see them as proof that you are not good enough to overcome them for some reason?
This is such an important point, and one that you should think about very seriously! Your perspective is everything, and it can catapult you ever higher in your growth as a result, or it can send you into the darkest depths of despair. Either way, the choice is completely yours. This is where free will can become its own challenge. Life can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, it is your choice, always!
With this idea in mind, I would like to speak with you today about taking responsibility for your life, and what that means from my perspective. With free will, there is a deep sense of responsibility which is intrinsically connected to it. I say this, because there are always consequences which will be intimately tied to every choice that we make. If we fail to consider and respect what these consequences might actually entail, we can easily wander down a path that hurts us more than it helps us.
And yet, these consequences will always provide new opportunities for a different perspective. Opportunities that are elegantly designed with precision to bring out the very best in us, if we have eyes to see it. Of course, they can also bring out the very worst, and sometimes we find ourselves somewhere in between. These are the waves of life, the waves that are constantly moving beneath us. If we don’t decide to put up a sail and steer ourselves in some particular direction, we can feel hopelessly adrift upon a massive and often turbulent ocean, unable to find a shore where we can rest and enjoy some much deserved solace from these waves of uncertainty.
To me, this ocean is our subconscious mind, and the waves are our endlessly shifting emotions, all of which are largely unpredictable and out of our conscious control. Our conscious mind and everyday reality exists only on the surface of this vast ocean, which is what we are able to easily see and partially understand. From our perspective, we can see for miles in every direction, and this gives us a sense that we see everything quite clearly, after all, we are looking right at it with our own eyes?
And yet beneath us there is this massive ocean which is largely unexplored and unknown, and it turns out that what we are seeing on top is only a tiny part of the totality of our inner lives, because we have failed to take many of the strong undercurrents beneath us into consideration. This is why we must dive into the depths of our inner world, to explore and learn how to better understand this larger unseen part of ourselves, which has a very powerful influence over everything that we experience on the surface of our lives.
This is talked about quite a lot in psychology, and you often hear references to this idea of iceberg theory coined by Sigmund Freud, where the tip of an iceberg is just above the surface, and it represents our conscious mind, but the much larger pre-conscious and unconscious minds lie just beneath the surface. It is important to recognize how powerful of an influence our internal and unconscious world is having on us, and that this influence can become largely invisible to us from our rather limited perspective, if we don’t learn to fully appreciate this and actively engage with it. This is somewhere where I believe meditation is a powerful tool to begin attempting to understand what drives us.
If you think about all that we have just discussed, you can see how taking responsibility can be quite difficult, given the fact that our perception is not always entirely clear to us. There is so much that we don’t understand, so much we need to learn and explore within ourselves before we can begin to unravel all the ties that bind us in our lives. I still struggle with this myself, and it is often hard to accept just how difficult it still is for me, even after working so hard to unravel my own challenges for years now. Don’t get me wrong, I have made great strides and progress to be certain, but it is humbling to realize just how difficult some parts still are to overcome.
This is something that we all share, there are no exceptions, only different flavors. This is a very human thing that we all have in common, which leads to an interesting perspective I would invite you to consider for the purposes of this conversation. If we all share these experiences of challenges, disappointments, growth, and achievements, all which are being affected by this powerful unseen part of our inner selves for our entire lives, doesn’t it seem logical that this is literally the purpose of being here? Might we be here to learn more from each of our experiences by having the courage to look deep within ourselves to find the answers, and explore these connections with our own true nature? I believe that this is a very substantial part of the answer to the eternal question, why are we here?
Assuming this is true, what would be the other part of that equation? How do we bring this together to answer such a large question? Well, I can’t pretend to have the “right” answer, but I do have a suspicion that it isn’t nearly as difficult as we have all made it out to be? I think that the other part of the equation lies in the very heart of this conversation, and that is taking responsibility for our lives. It comes back to the metaphor which I used earlier of putting up our sail and steering our lives in a direction that we would like to be heading.
Our direction is never going to be exact, and there are most assuredly going to be obstacles and changes of course along the way. However, by actively choosing to take radical responsibility for your life and the direction of it, regardless of the obstacles and changes presented to you, you have proudly put up your sail and pronounced to the universe that you have a direction which is meaningful to you! You have decided to follow that inner voice, that subtle inner guidance that brings you joy and hope, and it makes absolutely no difference what that actually is for you. What matters is that it is for you, it is what you love, it is what you hope for, it is what brings you meaning and purpose.
There you go, that’s the meaning of life in a nutshell (laughs). I kid, but kind of not? I have put a great deal of thought into this over the many years of my life, and this is the conclusion that I have come to, at least so far? But, it’s important to note that I could have never come to this conclusion without deciding to engage with my inner self, or without continually working on removing the many barriers I have created within myself throughout my life. There are so many things that we have created over the course of our lives, things which may not be true, or that actually serve us well any longer.
Many of the motivations and beliefs that are steering our lives lie far below the surface of what we believe we fully understand. It’s important to ask yourself if you are 100% sure of that conclusion, and if you are ready to plum the depths and begin taking full responsibility for where you are and where you want to actually be going? If you are, I urge you to walk out to the edge of this ocean and look out across the water which you are about to dive into with both curiosity and courage. You are about to dive into a whole new world, one that is full of questions and answers, potential and possibilities, knowledge and wisdom, and best of all your own peace and purpose. This is your ocean, and it is waiting for you to dive in and explore who you really are and what you are truly capable of.
Please follow this podcast, and leave a comment. It’s very helpful for the show, and always appreciated. You can also email me directly using the link below if you have any questions or comments, or would simply like to connect.
I talk more about important considerations around taking responsibility in one of my blog posts, which you can find here.
Until next time, never underestimate the power you have within you, and keep growing inward.
