Aids

I once read somewhere that people who tend to have problems keeping their balance, meaning, they stumble and lose their footing a lot, may need to examine if this is a physically manifestation of their lives being out of balance.

Being out of work early last week, I decided to watch a movie to past the time. And I certainly got a similar “message” from a romantic flick, “Ready to Launch”. In the movie, the lead guy, who refuses to leave his parents’ house despite being over 30 yrs old gets into outrageous and unthinkable disasters. Throughout the movie, he finds himself attacked by supposedly harmless and human-friendly animals (ex. a dolphin, a chipmunk, etc). At first he doesn’t have a clue to what was happening. Then it keeps happening again and again and his friends pointed out to him that maybe nature was sending out signs that there must be something wrong in his life, an imbalance, something that attracted all of these weird accidents. Obviously, he needed to realize that he was overstaying in his parents’ house and second, he was denying his love for the lead girl. When he finally had an epiphany and made changes to his life, the attacks stopped.

Of course the movie had to be humorous, thus, the extreme approach to convey this simple truth. But I think this is an undeniable fact — the universe sends out signs. Whenever we are face with crossroads or important decisions to make — the universe always sends out signs to help us. Always.

Is there really a way to know if you’re living your life in balance with the universe and the powers that be? Yes, of course. Knowing that we have a problem is not the problem. We know what frustrates or disappoints us about our lives. Things that basically, make us unhappy, prevent our growth and happiness. But figuring out how to solve these problems, what paths to take can be difficult. This is where signs are supposed to help us.

But, that’s where the movie and real life differs – reading the signs can be a problem. It’s not a linear thing and it doesn’t happen overnight. Some signs can be as glaring as the summer sun, the solutions as unmistakable as the problems the signs are pointing to. But that’s probably true only ten percent of the time. Most are hard to decipher.

If it happens to us, how can we learn to read the signs loud and clear and know what those signs are pointing us to do?

Well like most people in this planet, I am also struggling to read the signs. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t.

When I pray, I always say, “Lord, can you please send me signs where I’m supposed to go?” I joke around saying that God probably doesn’t hear my prayers because 90 percent of the time I usually don’t get a clue as to what to do.

But that’s not the whole truth. I need to admit that maybe its because I am also blinded by my own ego, that even if He probably sends out all kinds of signs, I am too caught up in my own wants and desires that I miss the signs.

Maybe being able to read signs has something to do with openness. Being able to let go of expectations can be the hardest part — we often expect signs to point to what we actually want to happen rather than what should happen.

Maybe, we also tend to think too much. Because we are too anxious and impatient when it comes to solving our problems, we tend to rush the process of discovery. We become too alert, reading too much into everything that happens to us. Besides, I think the universe operates in the simplest ways. I think if the universe is trying to send us signs; it will communicate with our spirit in the simplest and most obvious ways. You’ll just feel it in your gut. Ahh, there’s the sign.

And furthermore, since we live in modern times, skepticism gets the best of us. It can’t be that obvious! But how many stories have we heard where hundreds of people found what makes them happy through following seemingly coincidental leads or events in their lives? Don’t you think that the universe has enough intelligence to be able to have its ways of communicating to you? Its not mystical, pure luck or coincidence and it can happen to anyone.

I believe reading signs is a skill, it is not something that a few have while most don’t. And like any skill in this world, it takes a little training to make it part of our problem-solving kit. It does however take certain things into account – openness, patience, and believing that the universe will conspire to help you (paraphrasing Coelho in the alchemist).

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2006 at 6:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.