Did You Watch The Morning Show?
Feeling helpless or alive? Which one are you feeding?
For the past 22 years, every morning begins the same way.
I open a small book (Opening Doors Within by Eileen Caddy) and read the day’s meditation.
Then I pick a card. A quality to carry with me as an ally through the hours ahead.
This morning, the card said: Motivation.
I held it for a moment. Motivation. Not inspiration, not discipline: motivation. The inner yes that moves you forward.
And then I read again Eileen Caddy’s message for the day. I’ll share it with you in a moment. But first, I want to ask you something.
Did you watch the morning show today?
Not the news. Not your phone. The actual morning show: the one that has been running every single day without a break, without a sponsor, without a missed episode, for as long as there has been a sky.
The morning sun coming up. The light shifting through the trees. The first birds. The dew on the grass, or the frost, or the blossoms, depending on where you are and what season is holding you right now.
Pretty dramatic, wouldn’t you say?
We forget to watch it. We wake up and reach straight for the human drama: the headlines, the devastation, the scroll. And there is real pain in the world, no question. We can hold that and still turn toward the beauty. We can grieve and still notice the light.
The news will always give you reasons to feel helpless. The morning sun will always give you reasons to feel alive.
The question is which one you feed.
Through the Lens of Expansive Living
Eileen Caddy’s message today stopped me. Here it is:
“Bring down My heaven upon the earth. It is up to you to do it by the way you live and by your attitudes towards life. Life is wonderful, but you have to open your eyes and see the wonder and glory of it. You must be willing to see all the good in life and to concentrate on it, ignoring the bad, the negative and the destructive and giving them no life force. All around you are the wonders and beauty of nature, and yet you can go through a whole day without even noticing what is around you. What a lot you miss in life by simply shutting it out of your consciousness and by refusing to raise your consciousness to the state where you blend with all life! Take time to stop, look and listen, so that you miss nothing and can enjoy everything. Then give eternal thanks for it all. Start this day to create a better world around you.”
What she describes is active gratitude. It is a daily decision about where you place your attention and what you allow to move through you.
And here is where motivation comes in.
We often wait for motivation to arrive. We think it will show up on its own: that one day we will wake up feeling ready, feeling clear, feeling called.
Motivation is something we create by choosing, consciously, what we feed.
The morning show does not motivate you by accident. It motivates you because you turned toward it on purpose. That turning, that small, deliberate act of choosing aliveness over drama, IS the motivation. It does not come before the choice. It comes from it.
Here is the thing: we are being pulled into drama all the time. The world is very good at that pull. And the drama is often real: it lives in the news, in the body, in the places where old wounds still echo.
So you need inspired motivation to choose wonder. To build the muscle that says: not today, not this moment. This moment I am turning toward the awe.
What you focus on grows. When you turn toward beauty, the world shows you more of it. When you stay in the drama, that too grows.
I cycle between healing when I need to heal and choosing wonder when I am ready.
If I stay only in the healing, I risk getting stuck there. If I skip the healing and jump straight to wonder, I am bypassing. The two work together: that is the rhythm.
One way to find that rhythm is exactly what Eileen Caddy describes: turn toward the wonder. Let the awe in
.
The other way (and this is something I explored in the article — Healing Backward. Living Forward — is to choose which origin story you are standing in.
The short version: you were born before you were born.
Because the story you call your beginning shapes the fuel you have available to you right now.
In Healing Backward. Living Forward., I asked you to sit with two origin stories as a felt experience.
Story One: your life began at birth, and the wounds of those early years are the master file.
Story Two: you were born before you were born: before the womb, before the family, before the name, as part of an ocean of conscious, creative energy.
The question was never which story is true.
The question was: which one gives you access to motivation? To joy? To the sense that something alive and possible is available to you right now?
When you stand in Story Two (even for a moment) you are not waiting to be motivated. You already are. You came from something that was never wounded.
That is the experiment. To remember that you came from somewhere larger than the wound.
You need to build that muscle: the one that remembers who you are at source. Because from that place, the wonder is something you already have.
It is already there. Every morning. Without fail.
Try This
Tomorrow morning, before you check your phone, before the news, before the noise, set a timer for just three minutes.
Stop. Let your body be still.
Look. Find one thing of beauty. One.
If you can step outside or stand at a window, let it be the morning sun, the light on the trees, the sky.
If you are inside, let it be a meaningful object in the room: something that holds beauty or memory or warmth for you. One thing. That is all.
Listen. What do you hear beneath the human noise?
Then ask yourself:
What is this morning giving me?
That is the whole practice. Notice what happens to your motivation from there.
I Would Love to Know
Did you watch the morning show today? What did you notice?
I send your way blessings of inspired motivation,
Anna