How to Use Your Limitations to Win in Life | Rev. John Riley

Well, have you been struggling with some limitation in your life recently? Are you bumping up against roadblocks? Well, today we are going to be talking about the idea of embracing those limitations so that you can find new creative ways to express that divine essence that is truly you.

We just finished a series of talks that were revolved around the idea that Unity has around God, God as the allness of life, love and wisdom. And in that idea, you and I are in eachness. That is, you and I are one with each other, one with God, for God is everywhere present. Unity minister, Eric Butterworth, used to call it the idea of “the ocean is in the wave”, that God is in you like the ocean is in the wave. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, said enlightenment is when the wave realizes that it’s the ocean.

Your Infinite Potential

And so, that idea that you have within you everything that you need at any given point, that that infinite potential is within you at this present moment — that spark of divinity, whatever you want to call it, that higher consciousness, that Christ consciousness, that higher self. But that is who you truly are. And you are here to express more of that in your life.

Now, I recently was in a class and we were talking about this idea and one person said to me, so often Unity talks about this infinite potential, this idea that the ocean that is in the wave, that God is within you in every cell in your body and every point in your consciousness there is that idea, that infinite potential, the allness of life, love and wisdom, that’s always there ready to express, that is expressing. And yet it’s our human consciousness, it’s our ego that gets confused by it or that shuts it down, that limits it so much.

What’s interesting is, by definition metaphysically, that Unity’s metaphysics talks about the idea of God as the allness of life and in it we are the eachness, but in order to be an eachness, in order to create and in order to be in this world we have to limit the allness. We have to give it definition, give it form and shape it like this flower arrangement or this plant. Everyone is a little bit different because we are limiting the expression of the allness.
So, limitations aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They are how we express in the world, by limiting the infinite possibilities. The challenge that we have as human beings, I think, the challenge that I see so often that people run up against — and see if this is true for you — is that we tend to focus so much on our limitations that those limitations become our identity, that we start identifying and living from those limitations as opposed to living from the possibilities.

Possibilities

So, the question is why do we talk so much about the possibilities. Well, you have spent your entire life limiting things, limiting your experience, even from when you were a baby trying to learn to crawl and trying to learn to walk. You started to learn your limitations at that age. Throughout life we were taught limitations. In society there are limitations, of course, and natural. Sometimes they’re good because we want to be able to exist with each other in a healthy way. So, naturally there are going to have to be borders that we have, boundaries that we have. The healthier our spiritual boundaries are, the easier it is for us to be in those situations and not feel diminished by them. So, limitations aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They are just a thing. They are just a part of life and I think if we start to look at it from that perspective, we can then take the energy out of all the limitations that we think are holding us back.

Embracing Limitations

There’s a great story of an artist. His name is Phil Hanson. He had this idea when he was in art school as a student, he loved the idea of pointillism. That is the giant picture that if you zoom really close it’s just all little dots. And then as you zoom back it becomes a picture, it becomes a portrait of Albert Einstein or Mother Teresa or something different. And each dot is perfectly round and that was his passion. Well, he was practicing it and during his — when he was in art school — he found that his hand started to hurt. So, he would grip the pencil harder to keep it from shaking and it started to hurt more. It got so painful and so bad that he gave up.

That became a limitation. He couldn’t draw a straight line anymore because his hand would shake so much that the line would come out wavy. So he left art all together. After a year or two or three, he decided I’m going to give it a try again. I’m going to go to a neurologist to see if there is anything I can do about my hand so that I can get back into the passion that I love and the medium that I love and keep doing it because it was so important to him. Well, he saw a neurologist and the neurologist determined that he had permanent nerve damage and that it would never improve.

But the neurologist said, why don’t you just embrace the shake. He went back and said okay. He said okay, he picked up his pencil and he just started allowing the shake to happen as he was drawing. Now, all of a sudden he was creating squiggly lines and you pan back and there is this beautiful picture of a portrait with squiggly lines instead of points. It dawned on him that, it’s like okay, what else can I do here. If this is my limitation, what other things can I do?
He started to do all kinds of different formats of art. There is a great TED talk about it and I will put the link in the description after the talk. You can go after the talk. But it’s a wonderful TED talk where he shows the different ways in which he was trying to use this idea of pointillism — one point, extrapolating into a big picture and in different formats. It’s just amazing the things that he created from walking on paper and dipping his feet into paint or dipping his hand in paint and hitting the wall, or food, chewing up food and spitting it out. Anyway, you’ve got to check it out. He created, he found all different kinds of ways to fill that passion that was once very focused on this one medium and this one format. Now, all of a sudden everything opened up to him simply because he wasn’t focused any longer on the limitation. He embraced the limitation.

Now, let me explain what that means. At the beginning we talked about the idea that we have limitations as human beings. That is just normal. Some of us have different kinds of limitations. We might have health limitations or mental or physical or emotional or — out in the world there are limitations for us. If we are focused on those limitations as our roadblock, we are identifying them as, this is who I am.
So, our limitations are driving us. Our limitations are keeping us from becoming anything, from achieving our goals, from becoming that neuroscientist, from becoming that neurobiologist, or that accountant, or that programmer, or that artist, or that writer because the limitations are in our way and we are so focused on them. But what he described as soon as he realized and someone thought “well, embrace it” he said, “Okay. Let’s see what happens when I do it. Let’s see what happens when I use this limitation, not as a roadblock but as a way to discover new ways to do things”.

What if you became curious about what other possibilities there were? When you think about a limitation you might have, might be a roadblock, it might be a sense of a self that you are not happy with a part of yourself, there might be something in your past or history that keeps coming up or that you’re bumping into, there may be a fear about moving forward. Whatever that limitation is, whatever that roadblock is, just look at it for a moment and look at it objectively. Don’t identify yourself as, I am that. But as you look at it objectively you can say well, you can become curious. “How can this benefit me? How can I use this?”
In the case of Phil, he discovered that when he had that single focus in art and because of the shake, he was now, it now opened him up to expressing and creating all different kinds of amazing art. His website is going to be in the link as well. You can check it out.

So, when we look at something with curiosity and say “well, what else can I do with this?” or “what other possibilities are there in this moment that are not linked to this limitation but what other things can I do that will get me towards where I want to go, that will move me in the right direction?” These new possibilities are always there, and we get to pick them and then move in that direction.

Dominion

Now, earlier in the service, Brenna was reading the Daily Word and the daily word was dominion. That’s the power within us. We have this idea called dominion. That is, we have power over our thoughts, our words and our actions. Now, sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. When we are triggered, all bets are off. But the power within you is to overcome that trigger. The power exists within you right now to overcome that limitation and to think about things in a different way, to think about things as possibilities and looking for different ways to move instead of focusing on the limitation and how stuck we are, and how frustrated we are, and how we can’t move anywhere because of this limitation. “I am now that limitation”.

So, dominion gives us that ability to say “No, I’m not going to focus on that. I am going to release. I am going to let go. I am going to accentuate the positive. I am going to let Spirit run my life. I am going to let that divine inspiration flow through me and I’m going to follow it. I am going to let that divine wisdom guide me and I am going to heed those warnings”. We have the ability. You have the ability within you right now to make a new choice in your thoughts, in your words and in your actions.

Non-Resistance

The other idea, the principle that comes to mind is the idea of non-resistance. It’s like “okay, here is the limitation” instead of ignoring it and pushing it away where we can bump up against it. Anything that you resist, persists. Non-resistance just says, “Okay, here’s the thing. Here’s an experience I am having. It’s not the all of me. It doesn’t define me. It’s just something there”. If I can embrace it, or even not resist it, and can just say “there it is” without giving it a story, without creating a drama out of it. Because it’s in the story we create and the drama where our suffering occurs and the suffering of all those around us, trust me.

So, instead of focusing on that story, take a moment to just recognize “hey, here it is”. Non-resistance, awareness, awareness of how we are dealing with it and when we are frustrated, we’re frustrated. But I don’t have to be frustrated all the time. When we are sad, we’re sad and I can let that sadness simply flow through me as long as I don’t create a story about it and relive it every day of the week. It can flow through us and then we have the ability to become curious. We have the opportunity to look at all the possibilities.

Limitations as a Catalyst for Creativity

Now, there’s a flip side to this coin. There is the idea that we do have all these possibilities. And have you ever felt stuck, frozen because of all the possibilities? Maybe you have a big dream but to get there you have all of these steps that you need to take. You need to go to school, you need to get this job or that job, you need to be able to learn these different things before you can do something. It’s another way of becoming paralyzed by too many options or too many possibilities. Well, this is where limitation can help you.

One of the things that Phil said was that I wanted to see, he wanted to see how limitation could generate creativity. He said when he first got this excitement that he was back into art, he got a job so he had a little bit of money and he went out and bought all these art supplies, he said and he sat there to create something new and different. And he sat there and a day went by, and two days went by, and a week went by, and nothing was coming. He was all excited, the possibilities were endless and he was stuck. That is the point in time when he thought, “I wonder if limitation can be a catalyst for creativity. What can I create if I can only spend a dollar on materials? What can I create if I was going to create something, but it was destroyed immediately afterwards? What would it look like? Instead of looking at the whole field of infinite potential, what if I was only going to be able to do this little thing right here?”

Whatever that thing is or wherever you’re stuck in your life, think about how you can limit yourself a little bit more. There are some people that have so much to do. There are. They could work nonstop and never get it done. So, how can you limit yourself a little bit more, maybe to get things done quicker or get things done in a different way or look for different resources to get them done, look for creative ways in which you can get it done?
There are some of us who have this goal — and let’s just take something simple, meditating. I can’t tell you how many times I talk to people and we talk about meditation and “Well, I was going to meditate for twenty minutes but I only did ten”. Okay. “I was going to meditate for five minutes but I didn’t do it”. Okay, so where is your power of dominion? Where is your power of will, your ability to choose to do something? If it’s not there doing that little thing, doing that five minute meditation, then where is it? Are you limiting yourself simply by thinking, “I can’t do it. I’ve got too much to do”?

Whatever it is that is holding you back, whether it is something out there, some limitation that we have that we are bumping up against, whether it’s too many choices in our world, take a moment to just allow it to be with you, to observe it. While you are facing that limitation, whatever it is, don’t identify yourself with it. Don’t make it a part of you so that it’s now driving you. Just hold it out there and say, “There’s the thing. There’s the thing that I am experiencing. Now what can I do? How can I get curious about it? What other possibilities are there and maybe I will move in that direction and see what happens.”