Hit the Unsubscribe Button

I was talking with a friend and colleague. I was asking how things were going at the organization she was working for knowing full well that her bolder dreams were being dulled by a lagging status quo culture. She told me that she unsubscribed. That’s all she had to say. We both had a good laugh because we knew exactly what she meant and just how liberating that was for her.

We’re being asked all the time to subscribe to things. Sometimes very overtly like with company newsletters, but more often very subtly through the ideas, cultures and beliefs that we unwillingly invite into our consciousness; our precious attention which shapes how we understand ourselves and the world we embody. We are over subscribed to life numbing experiences and under subscribed to spaces that enlighten us.

When you scroll through Facebook endlessly you are subscribing to the Mark Zuckerberg world of a devolving social consciousness, which includes the insidious is your life hot or not expressed in the form of psyche-penetrating thumb gestures. Like Caesar himself, your life’s worth being decided by the turning of a thumb. It’s like a social coliseum, only the adversary isn’t hungry lions or a raging gladiator, it’s your primitive limbic system seeking validation that our filtered lives are okay to everyone else. If you want to live fearlessly, it’s time to unsubscribe to all of your social media hang outs. To be clear there is nothing particularly social in them and your consciousness will have limited space to expand beyond the frontiers of your lower brain functioning. Plus, how many more times can you hear that self-care isn’t selfish. Newsflash: it is 100% selfish and that’s what makes it 100% worthwhile. If you seek canned wisdom in the form of social consensus, you can never truly be free to explore the frontiers of your potential. That is what you give up when you are subscribed to life-limiting channels.

These channels are abundant, and they are narrowly shaping your life into everything you don’t truly want it to be. I know some people who spend hours unsubscribing from newsletters but not a lick of time unsubscribing from the experiences that are holding them back across their personal and work lives. Why is it easier to take out the garbage on your email than it is to take out the garbage permeating your life? Is your digital attention more important than the way you are investing in your hopes and dreams?

Your awareness is a sacred space. What you allow to occupy it should be equally holy, as in, that which invites you to experience being a whole person. Experiences that you subject yourself to that evoke feelings of inadequacy, fear, loathing, and animosity are not worthy of your attention. And yet, we turn to them. Why? Because we turn towards that which we are feeling. We can seek validation of our disjointedness in the most disjointing of spaces. The next time you find yourself occupying one of those spaces, ask yourself how you’re doing. If you are being honest with yourself, you will discover a deep wish that is going unfulfilled.

Take a few moments over the coming days and invite the space and time to decide what you are ready to unsubscribe from in your life. When you meet fear along the way, be open to unsubscribing to that as well. That’s just one more piece of life-limiting junk mail that needs to be deleted from the inbox of your limitless potential.