Can Pathwalking Be for Everyone Even if it’s Not One-Size Fits All?
Pathwalking is for everyone because it is an open practice with almost infinite options.
When I accepted the challenge to myself to write weekly, Pathwalking was born at the start of 2012.
Over the years since then, it’s evolved into a much larger, richer, and deeper life philosophy.
I like to think of Pathwalking as taking the best parts of other Universal life ideas and making them accessible to more people. I strive to do this with plain language, simplicity, and approachability.
What are these Universal life ideas? They are many, but they include The Law of Attraction and conscious reality creation, mindfulness, seeking and finding a direction of positivity, impermanence, and self-care.
You don’t need to come from anywhere special, practice a religion or similar tenet, or be anything or anyone specific. Pathwalking is available to you no matter race, creed, sex, color, gender, sexual preference, nationality, or any other devisor or artifice. Pathwalking is available to and for all.
I share this journey and my ideas for it because I firmly believe that when more of us are actively making choices and decisions for our lives, we spread empowerment to our friends and family and maybe even further.
Why does that matter? Because to change our fear-based society for the better, and shift towards a reason-based society, we need to begin individually. And one of the best ways to do so is to choose who, what, how, where, and why we ourselves, are.
Making active choices and decisions versus passive
I’ve written before that I believe there are 3 main ways for each of us to live life. We all tend to shift between them along the way – because change is the only constant in the Universe and life is fluid.
Still, they tend to look like this:
- Let life live you. What is, is. Just let it happen as it will. Take it however it comes. This is passive.
- Curl up in a ball and await death. Accept the belief that life is awful, you have no control, and don’t bother to experience anything that life offers you because it will ultimately crash. This is mostly passive but can be active choices of disempowerment.
- Grab life like a bull by the horns and go for a ride. Take what control you can and experience life as fully as possible. This is active.
Let me be honest – shit happens. Like it or not, things occur that we have ZERO control over. I didn’t expect – that November afternoon when I left my apartment to go to the Post Office to mail out my bills – that I’d wind up hospitalized and spending the next year recovering from serious injuries. But it happened and I could do nothing about it.
Except that I got to choose from the above choices. Let healing happen however it would, however long it would take? Lament my injuries and accept nothing would ever be the same again? Or fight, push hard with every therapy, and get back on my feet (literally) as soon as possible?
I’m pleased to report I chose the latter.
When we make active choices, we take life into our own hands. That opens the way to Pathwalking.
So how exactly does Pathwalking work?
The practice of Pathwalking
When we make active choices for our life experiences, they can have multiple effects.
One is that we can recognize and acknowledge where, how, when, why, and who we are in the present. Another is that we can see from this if there is anything we are displeased or discontent with and desire to change.
If we are intent on making/taking a new direction for our life, we’re going to place ourselves on a path.
Pathwalking is the recognition of this truth. It’s the active action of doing things mindfully to get from where we are NOW to where we desire to be.
But it is important to take three things into consideration.
First – we can only start from the now. Right here. Today. The present. Attempting to make any change in our life from the past is going to hit all sorts of obstacles. Why? Because the past is not the present – and it would be like being the age you are now and attempting to start a new path from where you were 20 years ago. It won’t work from a past starting point.
Second – paths are full of obstacles, detours, and the unexpected. Also, sometimes they shift and change while traversing them. This is perfectly normal because life is seldom predictable. As we say in melee fencing combat (all combat, really) – no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Third – mindfulness on the path is more important than the goal we’re striving towards. All sorts of things present themselves along any path we literally traverse. Like this truth, when we choose a metaphoric path, there will be things we encounter while traveling on it. Remaining mindful and consciously aware while on the path lets us recognize how amazing life is and can be.
Mindfulness is the key to it all
To be an active participants in our life experiences, we need to be mindful.
Mindfulness is not some buzzword notion to make our lives super amazing. It is the very realistic conscious awareness of life, the Universe, and everything in the only time that’s real – now.
The present is the only time that’s truly real. The past has come and gone and is often colored by our individual experiences, biases, prejudices, and the like. Meanwhile, the future is unwritten – and the unpredictable can and will happen to alter it – no matter how we desire to make it.
Most importantly, mindfulness is about ourselves. It’s conscious awareness of our inner mindset/headspace/psyche through our six senses and our thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. This also makes us more capable of seeing where our habits, beliefs, and values lie within our subconscious, as well as how our ego both projects us to the world without and mirrors us back to ourselves.
But what about the rest of the world? Shouldn’t we also be aware of what’s going on out there? Yes. But not to the detriment of our inner awareness. This is what tends to happen because we see self-knowledge, self-care, and any other way we might put ourselves first as selfish.
It is not selfish to care for ourselves first. But there are lots and lots of false narratives that make us believe that it is. And while it’s true that taking care of ourselves might make others feel that we are being selfish – we can’t impact the feelings of anyone else.
Remember – actual selfishness involves malice of forethought and acting in a way we know will cause hurt and/or harm to another. But we cannot think or feel for anyone else. Self-care might still seem selfish to them.
Pathwalking is an active practice
When we take the time to choose who, what, where, how, and why we desire to be – Pathwalking is literally a path we can take to get there.
When we are mindful and consciously aware, working to use consciousness to create our reality, embrace impermanence, and seek to find and/or create positivity, we are living actively.
We all know, directly or indirectly, people we consider to be “sheeple”. They are living passive lives, under the boot of this person or that person, and frequently swayed by others. They tend to only take an active approach of necessity.
Every single person on Earth can choose to live a passive or an active life. But there is no shame in having lived – or currently living – passively. There are plenty of reasons why this is. Sometimes situations and circumstances leave us too exhausted mentally, emotionally, physically, and/or spiritually to do more than live by rote and routine. But we are still living – we might just need time to recover from trauma and merely exist for a bit.
But to live passively all the time invites stagnation, discontent, bitterness, and other negativity. Nobody in the human race is merely here to exist and just survive. All of us are here to grow, change, have unique experiences, and ultimately thrive.
Active living – making choices and decisions for our life experiences – is the only way I’ve seen to best do this. Pathwalking is an active practice that anyone can employ to choose and decide new ways to actively live life as fully as possible.
Finally – we are all worthy and deserving of this. Everybody alive can choose and decide to be thus empowered. And that is why I continue to grow, evolve, and share this philosophy and practice with the world.
Do you choose to mostly live actively or passively?
This is the five-hundred and fifty-fifth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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