Live Like a King

Don’t judge the snake as bad. For our purposes here, he is very good.

This post is the script for its corresponding Awareness at Play podcast episode on Apple podcasts.

Hello! In this episode we’ll use a fairy tale to illustrate how we get caught up in wishing things were other than they are, and how we change to acceptance and enjoyment of how things are. 

There are myths and stories, repeated in cultures around the world throughout history with the theme of mistaken identity. 

There’s a Hindu one with a lion cub who thinks he’s a donkey, and there are ones where a prince gets cursed and turned into a frog, Shakespeare goes crazy with them.

The king and the beggar

There’s a European one, with a few versions, but the gist is that a king decides he wants to see what it’s like to live as a commoner. He dresses as a beggar boy in rags and goes out into the crowd in front of the palace. He quickly gets lost and wanders around being treated terribly and having to scrap for food. He ends up forgetting who he was, and the story is his path to self-recognition….re-cog-nizing his true nature.

So if we’re relating this to our inner life, the king is our true nature, without past conditioning that tells us we’re not enough and the world isn’t good enough either. The Kind perceives abundance and therefore lives abundantly.

Scraping for scraps

The beggar boy is our conditioned self and sees life as if everything we need to be happy and satisfied is over there, away from us. Our time is spent scraping for scraps. 

By scraping for scraps I mean we use figuring and willful effort, thinking we can bend reality so it seems more comfortable and easier for us. This scraping will only ever get us scraps. Even if it seems to go our way it’s temporary and shallow because it’s not needed. Our higher nature is already and always here, and knows it has all it needs. 

Being the king but thinking you’re a beggar is like that other analogy “standing on a whale fishing for minnows.” 

Recognizing our true identity

So how do we re-cognize that we are whole and abundant? We want to be like the king again, and do what the king would do. He lives like that naturally. 

There’s a saying, “That by which you fall is that by which you rise,” meaning, start with the ways we got off track first. From early childhood we saw the people around us teach us how to act. We learned to act like beggars. 

We might not think of ourselves as beggars. As adults, we have worked hard to look good, do good, and be good in the ways society has deemed we should, and we might seem like anything but a beggar. 

But our true abundant nature doesn’t measure in this way. A beggar, no matter how fancy on the surface, still feels there is something missing, something to accomplish or another way to be besides the way we are now. Or thinks that the world outside him and the people in it need lots of improvement. 

We got into beggar-hood early.  Our minds have been soaked in scarcity since we were toddlers. 

Acting kingly

If we finally found the palace and the palace people said, “we’ll teach you how to be king again,” we may understand intellectually we should start believing and living like the king, but we’d need to start by learning a few basic “palace manners.” 

We’d need to stop acting like we’re scraping for scraps. We’d be told by the palace people you don’t need to do that anymore. 

For most of us, scraping for scraps in daily life is a constant, unbroken mindset which, in our society, comes in the form of: go-mode, for the mind and body. Go for what? What are we going for? Go get that abundance that’s outside us, not in here. Our minds and bodies GO all day, even when we stop. We constantly obey a sense that something is required of us. A long and deep list with the words “I should” at the top. 

Sorry to mix metaphors, but we have to stop fishing for minnows for a minute and sit on the whale. We might not notice the whale yet, but we can sit. The whales not going anywhere, and we’ll notice it sooner or later. 

Actions plus mindsets

There are few ways we can enact a kingly (or queenly) outlook so we can re-learn abundant living until it’s natural for us. Of course we’ll also have to address the embedded mental scars from proverbial street-living, but that comes second. 

If we don’t at least try to enact cleaner everyday behavior, if we try to skip ahead to transcendent meditation or smart psychological concepts, it’s like the beggar boy wearing raggedy clothes and spitting on the floor in the palace while he’s learning Latin and which dessert fork to use at table. 

If he had good training, he’d toggle between embodying kingliness in his actions and retraining his mind from street smarts to palace enjoyment. Coupling both inner transformation with everyday behavior modification is headed in a direction aligned with freedom. 

When he fails at his palace manners, it points to where he needs to tend to old scars of the mind. When his thoughts are out of hand, he can help out with a shift in behavior. They feed each other. 

So what are a few behavioral tools that will help us learn to trust in abundance?

Rest Stop

The first action tool we’d learn is Time Out. Stop the go mode. If you picture the beggar boy having lived on the streets. He’d have been in constant fear he’d not be able to keep up with getting food or avoiding scary situations, so his nervous system would be ramped up. Like ours. 

We can take a time out and stop for a few minutes or even a few breaths throughout the day. 

The basic practice here is to Pause. Forget about anything lofty, we’re just stopping what we’re physically doing, and sitting still. We can do it standing or laying down if that’s better. 

Our mind will likely still be running, so we notice the breath, and slow it down, make it a little deeper and smoother. 

And we relax. Relax our breath, our muscles. We place our attention on relaxing and noticing how we feel, not trying to change anything, just giving our nervous system and body a rest. 

This is a powerful practice. It would be like telling the scrappy beggar boy to stop climbing all over the furniture and learn to walk at an indoor pace and notice the fine tapestries and taste the delicious food. He’d learn to slow down and appreciate his surroundings instead of allowing his stressed out drama condition to rule his behavior. 

Even one or two of these Rest Stops a day opens our eyes to how ever-present and unpleasant go-mode is. 

Reframe

The next practice works anytime, but is especially helpful when we feel tension, uneasiness, or dramatic feelings. The practice is to step back and reframe our mind state. Is scrappy street mentality really useful in these palace situations?  We can listen to how we’re interpreting our present situation and repeat it back to ourselves without any adverbs or adjectives. Take the drama out of it. 

In the case of the beggar boy, he may be thinking “these servants are uptight and picky and judgy and I need to stuff my pockets for later because they just want to turn me into a boring snoot.” When really, without the drama, he could just address the straightforward present moment. “The servants offered me a snack with a napkin.” A quick sentence is all we need to sum up what is happening right now. It helps deflate our wild stories. 

This practice is meant to calm an untamed mindset so we don’t lash out at others or ingrain our old way of seeing even deeper. It’s not meant to solve or cover up deeper issues. That’s another project. 

Act better than we feel

One last practice for the palace is to ask ourselves, how would we be acting if we were comfortable with this situation? We can feel uptight, overwhelmed, or depressed, but we can still act better than we feel. Instead of following our tendency to want to escape or put up an objection, we can do what we’d do if we were casual and OK with the situation. 

The beggar boy might feel like stealing from the kitchen or tossing around the priceless antiques, but could redirect to playing outside in the maze or petting the horses in the stables. It’s not easy to stop old tendencies in their tracks, but the attempt to move in that direction started to break up the assumption that we are victims of our habits. 

All together

So. Stopping to pause, stopping to rethink our drama mindset, and shifting to less triggered activities are three actions that are more aligned with our palace nature, but it’s important to make clear, again, that this isn’t a squashing or snuffing out our tender and bruised psyche. These practices make things smoother in life so we can have a safer, calmer space to tend to our mental discomforts. 

We can gradually develop these skills, going back and forth from changing our mental habits to changing our behavior habits until they flow and grow effortlessly together. 

We aren’t in military training, trying to be better people, adding more to our Go Mode list. We are doing the opposite. We’re stepping back and allowing Go Mode to settle. 

We’re not actual doing anything except for observing, allowing and being open to shifting, sheerly out of a sense of curiosity. How does this new behavior work in this new situation? 

Awareness

These few shifts in behavior help us stop and be aware. What do I see when I step back and just observe? What’s the palace actually like? Are there actually threats of starvation and danger around every corner?

If my misaligned mind still thinks it looks like the streets, I can look closer. And slow down more. And of course, get help from the palace staff. They already know how to do this stuff. 

Seeing and living like abundant beings is possible, natural, and available always. These tools may be simple and you may have heard them before, but anyone who does them knows how powerful they are. Most of us need reminders, often to trust in them. So there’s my little reminder.