What Do You Do When You Don’t Have Choices?

I don’t think there is a situation where you don’t have a choice. If all you do is focus on thinking, it may be that you just haven’t thought about it yet, so your thoughts don’t serve you. When I find myself in that situation, my greatest choice is to focus beyond my thoughts.

When most people find themselves in a situation where they think they do not have a choice, they resist or panic. Actually most of our choices are not really choices; they are the expressions of our past conditioning. We choose what seems to be harmonious with our past habits and we think that is free choice. In reality, that choice is just focusing on our thoughts and following our past conditioning.

A quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti gives another way of looking at how we participate in life. "To observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” If we avoid our thoughts and that evaluation, we observe what happens connected to what I call The Wisdom of the Body. Unfortunately, we are conditioned to focus on thinking and our observations always seem to have choices. What if when we face a situation that doesn’t have obvious choices; we learned to appreciate that higher way to evaluate what is happening to us?

Without focusing on thinking, we stop searching for alte
ative ways and we learn to trust the Wisdom of the Body. That doesn’t mean we don’t search for alte
ative ways; it just means we approach that challenge from a deeper inner wisdom. From a conscious perspective the alte
atives we choose become more effective. We eliminate the old habits that compromise our efforts and we utilize exte
al resources at their potential.

Within the body of every individual exists powerful inner resources. These are needed when you face a challenge you cannot control, such as dealing with a chronic illness or disability. Connecting to this deeper wisdom is the role every patient must accept, regardless of what your treatment is.