Does anybody know what your mojo really is? My understanding is that it means your life force. When you’ve got your mojo, you’re cooking!
We all know that experience of “cooking with gas” or “being in the flow.” When we are “in the flow,” life is much more effortless. If you are a writer, the words come effortlessly to the page. If you are an athlete, it is as if some bigger force is propelling you—you are not working on your own steam. Sometimes you’re dancing and it is as if the music is dancing you. In all of these examples, it feels as if something is coming through you instead of coming from you. Beethoven said that he heard the music in his head, and just wrote it down. Many great artists say something similar. You can experience this cooking dinner, or working on a project when you suddenly look up and don’t know where the time has gone.
When you’re feeling your mojo you’re feeling a sense of aliveness, a vitality. What keeps us from having that sense of vitality is our compulsive thinking: worry, fear, embarrassment etc. So how do we get our mojo back instead of dragging our sorry old bodies around? There is only one answer to that: We have to reconnect to our experience of the Divine flow.
Being part of the Divine flow is your true nature. You are made of star stuff. The same force that guides the stars guides you, too. You don’t have to “fix” those worried, fearful or embarrassed thoughts; you’re not broken. Your connection to the divine is your default position. You can relax. You are whole. It is your true nature.
The only thing that keeps you from experiencing this in every moment is your thinking.
“I am not enough. I am a failure. I’m going to be late. Did I spill coffee on myself? I should call my mom more. Is there a cop behind me? Oh shoot, I forgot my lunch. What should I make for dinner? They don’t appreciate me. If only I was thinner…” When you’re lost in endless thought, you’re not connecting.
If you can slow your mind, you can connect to that place inside of you that is beyond the circumstances of your life. That place where nothing is missing is just a thought away. For most of us, our minds are bouncing around like balls in a pinball machine. (OK, I grant you maybe Einstein’s thoughts were important and meaningful, but for us mortals it’s just constant static, always jabbering away.)
Haven’t you found that solutions come to you when your mind is quiet? Have you ever struggled with a problem at night, and woken up with a solution in the morning? Has a solution ever come to you in the shower, or walking in nature? Very often what happens is that we get what in Yiddish is called an “einfall,” meaning “falls in.” We have all had that eureka! moment. Somehow when your mind is quiet the universe can send you the solution. Have you noticed that this never happens when you are frantic, upset, freaking out, obsessing—pick your poison.
Our thinking can be so compulsive that we do not realize that we simply do not have to think those thoughts.
We feel as if we have no control over what we think. In truth, you do not have the ability to control your thoughts, but you also do not have to take them so seriously. I think of my thoughts like a ticker tape. They’re always running—but the big difference now is that I realize that they are just thoughts, and do not need to be taken seriously or acted on. Wow, so incredibly freeing!
You do not have to be the victim of your own thoughts.
You don’t have to give a lot of attention to what you are thinking. As an example, I used to feel that if someone said something to upset me, I had to be upset. I didn’t even think about it. I was just upset. How could I not be upset? Anybody would be upset if somebody had said something like that to them. But do you know what? You don’t have to be upset. You do not have to go down that road. That thought does not have to be like a racehorse running out of the gate—and if it is, you can just let it run for a minute, and then you can stop before you work yourself into a frenzy.
Here is a perfect example. I thought I just “lost” this article while I was writing it in my computer. My immediate reaction was to go into my Total Freakout mode. But I caught myself, remained calm and did not freak out. I calmly tried a few things (I am not tech-savy), and the article magically reappeared, thank God. If it hadn’t, I might have freaked out; but even then it would for sure have been a shorter and less intense freakout because of this understanding.
When you realize that your feeling comes from your thinking and that you do not have to take your thoughts so seriously, you can fall back into your true nature—which is where God lives for you. You can let your mojo do its thing.
By Jewel Safren, LCSW
