Video Blog Transcription:

(00:00):
Welcome to the Natural Way of Being Video Blog. This video is titled “Looking Inside, Looking Outside.” We're conditioned to look outside of ourselves, to the world, to friends, to the internet for things that they’re just not able to provide.

So say we have an important decision to make. We're looking for direction or guidance for our lives. It could be: Do I stay in a relationship? Do I take this job? What do I do with my kid who's acting out? And we're looking for guidance in one form or another.

What our tendency is, again, is to look outside ourselves. We might Google it, go online, ask a friend, read a book, or talk to a life coach, and say, “Tell me what to do. I have this problem, and I don't know what to do.”

(01:05):
Our tendency is to look outside ourselves, and it's not morally wrong to do this, but it just doesn't work. Now these things can provide possibilities. They can provide ideas and clues and places to look, but ultimately we're going to have to go inside into our heart, into our intuition to find out what's right for us.

Similarly, we may look outside of ourselves to find out who and what we are? And that's something that something outside of ourselves can't provide either, that has to come from inside.

Or maybe we look outside to complete ourselves or to be whole. “If I find the perfect soulmate, I'll feel whole and it'll be good.” Well, we know that doesn't work. I know everyone watching this has tried that, right?

(02:03):
You can call it codependency or whatever else, we have to find that wholeness, joy, and completeness inside of ourselves. And then we can share that with our soulmates, with our friends, with our community, with our family.

One of my favorite movie quotes says this really well. It's from the movie, The Matrix, and the quote is: “The matrix cannot tell you who you are.”

It's really important to realize that our whole culture is structured around looking outside to find these things. It’s structured to have us look outside for decisions, guidance, to find out who we are, and to find happiness and joy.

(03:02):
So just realize there's this momentum and most of the people that you see in the world are going to all be looking outside to find these things.

Now, conversely, there are also things that we cannot meet inside of ourselves, and we need to go out in the world to find. For example, say we found a sense of who and what we are, and now we have this need to go share it with other people.

Or perhaps we have a feeling which happened inside, and now we have this emotional need to express that feeling outside of ourselves.

(03:54):
All of our true emotional needs like the sense of belonging, being heard, being loved, and loving others are meant to be met outside of ourselves. As human beings, we're herd animals. We're meant to be part of something.

And getting that sense of belonging is another thing that we can't find inside a monastery or inside of our living room. To find that we need to get out and be part of something.

And that's really a huge need that we have as human beings. Maybe you've noticed this during COVID when we stop meeting these needs and being with people, we start getting a little weird, we start getting a little unbalanced.

(04:52):
And as I mentioned before these things work together, right? Say we experience an idea or a vision of something inside, and then it gets to a point where we need to share that outside of ourselves.

That's a lot of what we talk about in my tradition with the medicine wheel. In the space of the east, we experience a vision or an idea, or a new beginning. And then when we move down to the south, we start to offer that out and see how it affects people.

Or say I experience a sense of purpose in the east inside myself and say this is my purpose, this is my dharma. This is my reason for being and the reason I came here. That's great to understand that.

(5:45):
But then there gets to be a phase with that vision or that purpose that we need to go out in the world and try it on for size and see how it affects people and see how it makes a difference. And then we integrate it into our lives.

We have the awakening spiritually, then we go outside and we integrate It. They work together. One's not better than the other. They're just providing different things depending on where we're at with something.

(6:17):
So of course the trick is to understand what's going on with you, which may be going inside, and what you're looking for. And then getting a sense of where the right place to find that is.

That is my video blog. Thank you so much for watching. I wish you a great week where you're able to get what you need from both the inside and from the outside worlds. I'll see you in a week.