The Delicate Art of Waiting

Mostly when I tell people they have a design to wait and respond to life, they sigh. All the rest, the one's who don't sigh, are relieved. They sensed it all along, but didn't trust the process.

Learning to trust that what is yours in life will come to you is a challenge in a world that expects, demands, that you get out there and hustle your **** to get what you want.

In Human Design, anyone who has a defined Sacral Centre is designed to wait to see what life has to offer and then respond. Even if you don't have a defined Sacral Centre you will have quite a few gates that have the Generator energy, or you may have a defined Solar Plexus Centre, which means it's healthy for you to wait for emotional clarity before you make decisions. In one way or another, almost all of us are designed to wait.

I believe that most of us don't have a clue what life has in store for us. As a friend said to me last week, looking back over 20 years of friendship, 'who'd have thought?'. Neither of us are anywhere near where we expected to be at this stage in our lives. I couldn't have begun to imagine.....

That's the key. We can't imagine who we could be if we loosen up the grip, relax into the moment and leave the details up to whatever form of higher intelligence we believe in.

While I was writing this article I was mucking around with my I'Ching coins and got hexagram 32, which coincidentally says this:

It is not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression. It is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing movement of an organised, firmly integrated whole, taking place in accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending.

Which means?

That waiting doesn't mean sitting at home watching Big Brother and eating chocolate (although that can be part of it!). There's a great quote in my book on Celtic Runes that says something like - 'when not out fishing, the fisherfolk repair their nets'. Similarly, when you are waiting you are not being like an amoeba, but turning inward to find what needs to be attended to within yourself prior to moving outward again. Without this inward progress, the external outward movement is restricted - you will achieve far less than was possible.

And this, from Ken Wilber's book, Grace and Grit, a quote from the journal of his wife Treya:

Father Thomas Keating says: "The chief act of the will is not effort but consent... To try to accomplish things by force of will is to reinforce the false self... But as the will goes up the ladder of interior freedom, its activity becomes more and more one of consent to God's coming, to the inflow of grace." I usually have to insert the word "Spirit" where he says "God"; the latter is too loaded with male, patriarchal, and judgemental overtones, too much like a separate being or parent, while Spirit feels more like the all-encompasing One or Emptiness beyond form that I can somehow imagine myself absorbed into. But I like Keating's emphasis not on trying, but on receiving, opening, consenting, an opening that is very active in it's own way. He says, "Trying dilutes the basic disposition of receptivity..... Receptivity is not inactivity. It is real activity but not effort in the ordinary sense of the word...It is simply an attitude of waiting .... "

So you can see that word WAITING is really misleading. It's more like surrendering to becoming. I love the phrase interior freedom, that I've emphasised in the quote above. That exactly describes my own experience of waiting - an ever increasing experience of interior freedom. What you are becoming is someone who lives life without strain. Everything is always in motion. We are accustomed to viewing life only from the material realm, to value abundance in financial terms, success as external achievement.

Although I am waiting for something to materialise, my internal landscape is always in movement. Like the process of the in breath and the out breath, there is a time and place for everything. We only view this process as 'waiting' if we view it from the material perspective.

I often get asked by people 'what are you doing at the moment?' I find it difficult to answer. I always feel tempted to say 'nothing'. Because, compared to how I used to live my life - the strife and struggle to achieve something supposedly worthwhile - I do feel like I'm doing nothing. Sometimes I feel a tiny bit guilty about all this doing nothing. But what I am becoming is far from nothing. It's something alright!

Ra Ur Hu says of Generators that we don't know what we want. We don't know what we need to make us happy. I don't know about you, but that was certainly my experience. I struggled and strained and didn't feel all that inspired by what I got in return. Now I wait, see what life offers me, and respond with a heart-felt yes or no. My life fits my heart. I believe that is a rare and precious thing. I also believe it's available to all of us if we follow the lessons of our Human Design.

Every person's design is unique, and so is their experience of waiting.

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