Doubt

It’s hard to let go when you don’t know if you have made the right choice in the first place. Doubt lingers and ties us to the past. Many relationships end in divorce because of a lack of commitment, but that lack didn’t grow over time; it was present from the very outset and was never resolved.

It’s important not to make critical decisions when you are in doubt. The universe supports actions once they are begun, which is the same as saying that once you take a direction, you are setting a mechanism in motion that is very hard to reverse.

Can a married woman feel unmarried simply because she wants to? Can you feel that you aren’t your parents’ child simply because you think it would be better to have different parents? In both cases the ties to a situation, once it is in place, are strong. When you are in doubt, however, you put the universe on hold for a while. It favors no particular direction.

There is a good aspect to this pause and a bad one. The good aspect is that you are giving yourself room to become aware of more things, and with more awareness, the future can bring you new reasons to act one way or the other. The bad aspect is that inertia isn’t productive – without choices you cannot grow and evolve.

If doubts persist, you have to break out of stasis. Most people do this by plugging into the next choice, catching life on the rebound: “This didn’t work out, so I better do something else, no matter what.”

Doubt is destructive to the one quality that awareness is trying to bring to you: knowingness. At a deep level, you are the knower of reality. Doubt is a symptom indicating that you aren’t in contact with the knower inside.

There is no formula for removing doubts because finding the knower inside is personal. You have to be committed to expanding your awareness. Don’t be in doubt about that one thing. If you turn inward and follow the path that leads to your inner intelligence, the knower will be there waiting for you.

Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004).