What’s your context for life?

By Lian Brook-Tyler

I recorded a podcast episode yesterday with a lovely chap, a psychotherapist, called Paul Leslie.

Part of our conversation was about the idea of a “context” for our lives, meaning the frame or perspective we live our life from.

This context acts as a filter for how we see the world and it also acts as a boundary for what we can create within it.

Some of the common contexts we touched on are:

A problem solving life
I’m here to make a difference
Life’s a struggle then you die
Life is about survival
A magical existence
People are out to get me
Life is about helping others

From within each of those contexts, we will see and create our lives completely differently.

As much as I spend so much of my own life thinking and talking about things like devotion, gifts and soul purpose, this feels like a slightly different lens, one I suspect I’ve looked through before but not for a while.

It got me pondering what my life context is and if it’s different to why my soul is here and if so, whether they work together…. Where I’ve got to so far is here:

I already know that my deepest devotion is to Union (the Union of all kinds of polarities, especially the magical Union of Masculine and Feminine) and my context is something like “Walking in beauty”

With beauty before me may I walk.
With beauty behind me may I walk.
With beauty below me may I walk.
With beauty above me may I walk.
With beauty all around me may I walk.

These words are from a Navajo prayer, and from my understanding (albeit possibly limited due to domestication I’m still liberating myself from), it’s more than a prayer, it’s a way of being… I first read about this way of being in the excellent book “The Way of The Human Being” and it immediately felt like home.

And for me, Union is the quintessence of beauty so I guess it makes sense that this devotion and context are jiving together in this particular karmic soul/body occurrence called Li.

Btw, I’ve shared before that my top strength on the VIA Survey of Character Strength is “Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence” – that makes me chuckle as it could sound so shallow and yet, it’s so accurate for me, it really is the filter through which I see and create everything (Mr B agreed, and he’s the best BS filter this dream-soaked sprite could ask for).

I’ve just remembered too, a recent conversation with a dear friend when we were out in London for cocktails about “If we had a rickshaw…” and she said “Well, I know yours would be beautiful.”

So beauty, it is. What do you think your context is?

P.S. Here’s the VIA assessment if you want to give it a whirl too.

Art: Golden Girl by Frank Frazetta 

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