Driving the Space Shuttle Down the Street

I hear the term "will power" thrown around quite a bit. It usually comes up when people relate their latest failure in doing something they wanted to do. "I just don't have the will power", is a common refrain. When most people refer to their "will power", I don't think they're actually referring to the power of their human will (aka spirit or heart). Our will is designed to be the place where decisions are made for the rest of our selves. It's supposed to be in charge. But most of us don't navigate life by our will; instead, we navigate by emotions, thoughts, or by our bodily urges.

The problem with going through life this way is that our will ends up at the end of the line, pulled around by the other parts of ourselves instead of leading them. These other components have a fleeting, unpredictable nature. This means that whenever we're navigating life by one of them instead of our will, we will of course be on a roller coaster in our lives instead of walking on a wide plateau of stability.

I must confess that I have spent much of my life navigating life by my emotions. In fact, I recently realized that I have identified with my emotional state for much of my life. In other words, I have equated my emotional state to who I am as a person. This put incredible pressure on myself to monitor and manage my emotions. If I was feeling less than ideal, I would do all I could to stamp out that emotional state or change it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this meant that I was often short-changing myself in my emotional life by not allowing my emotions to be present or to allowing them to be processed naturally.
I now realize (through a painful process of self-discovery) that I am not my emotions. Rather, my emotions come and go, but they don't affect my true self, or heart (spirit/will).

We often complain that we don't enough power to change the things we want to in our lives. The simile that I sprang to mind around this idea was this: navigating life by our emotions (or any other component) instead of our will is like trying to drive the space shuttle down the street and then complaining that we can't navigate it properly. The space shuttle is not designed to drive down the street, it's designed to go into space. Likewise, the human will is actually designed with power to do things beyond our wildest dreams. But we relegate it to tasks it wasn't designed for, and put it out of order. The result is frustration and failure. But putting our will in the center and navigating by it is like lighting those boosters - it unleashes a level of power so immense that it will carry us right beyond our barriers into the stratosphere of our lives, where anything is possible and there's nothing holding us back.