Came across this past nugget from The Grasshopper:

“Our Personal Baggage: We’re Over-Packed For The Trip Of Life.”

Over the years I have been fond of labeling someone I couldn’t cozy up to as having too much baggage. That meant they had too many obstacles in the way of me getting closer to them.
The real discovery was it was my own baggage that got in the way of me getting to know someone better.

Let me re-label baggage as our “prejudice, patterns or conditioning.” We accumulate a lot of conditioning along the way and it weighs us down when it comes to warming up to others.

The key to better relating is to discover we’re not better than another – just someone who’s been conditioned differently. When we trace the conditioning path we have traveled, we can see the stops where we picked up a specific piece of luggage.

Oftentimes, we picked up the baggage by osmosis, meaning we learned the new patterns, prejudice or conditioning without knowing we learned it. It just seems to be something we were born with. Tracing our path shows us it was not.

Examining our conditioning, dispassionately, shines a light on our own baggage, allowing inspection to be much easier. What you’ll discover is that you are carrying too much. The key, going forward, is to pack lighter, by leaving the extraneous behind.

This results is you being lighter (translation: less serious) and not taking yourself so seriously. This lightness will open you up to more people, resulting in more ease in relating because there is less baggage to bog you down.

Packing light allows us to see more of the light and exposes our dark side, so we can leave it by the wayside.

All the best,

John