Some mornings, the angsty compression in my chest seems unbearable. It feels like there is only so long I can stave off my own insanity about what the future holds. We stumble forward into a world that is changing both too fast and too slowly to make sense of anything. What does it all mean? No one really knows.
Then the little details of daily life take over, and the existential questions are forgotten for some time. I answer emails, make a cup of tea, reply “haha yes totally” to a friend’s message.
Outside, the puppies are tumbling over each other again. Both had found homes and then came back. Their potential families realised that raising a puppy is inconvenient and exhausting. I worry about them more than I should. I had happily agreed to foster them temporarily, but now it feels as if they’ve been forgotten about.
Human beings do this constantly, I think. We fall in love with the idea of something and then realise it’s not as easy in reality.
This morning, as I type these words to you from my bed, I am thinking about the different layers through which we experience life. How they relate to flirting with life. How we can cultivate abundance through playful awareness.
There is the human layer.
The layer of personality, memory, conditioning, ego, fear, longing. The part of us constantly reacting to life and trying to make sense of it through story. The part of us that spirals at 3 am, that wants certainty, reassurance, answers. It narrates everything. “Why did they say that? What does this mean? Am I behind? Am I safe?” It interprets reality intellectually to feel some sense of control over it.
A lot of people live almost entirely from here, mistaking the narration of life for life itself.
There is the soul layer.
The deeper layer underneath the performance of the self. The layer that seems far less interested in comfort or social approval and far more interested in growth, truth, expansion, evolution. The soul does not experience events in the same way the human self does. The human self says, this is painful, unfair, humiliating. The soul understands life as a curriculum. It asks, ” What is this trying to teach me? Where is this trying to lead me?” It sees meaning in the challenges of life.
The cyclical bodily layer (for women).
The hormonal landscape that alters perception, sensitivity, intuition, emotion, desire, energy, openness, grief, creativity, sexuality, tolerance. Women underestimate how much wisdom lives here because we’ve been taught to distrust the body and worship output instead. But the body knows things long before the mind catches up. Truths become unbearable at particular points in the cycle. Desires surface. The female body metabolises reality differently depending on where we are within ourselves.
The observing consciousness layer.
The awareness capable of noticing the story without completely becoming it. The part of you that can witness your fear without obeying it. Witness your heartbreak without turning it into your identity. Witness the hormonal wave without assuming it is permanent reality.
This layer is where free will begins. Maybe not total free will. But the capacity to choose how you meet the moment.
This is the layer that understands that the quality of your life is not determined entirely by external conditions, but by your relationship to them. The part that knows happiness is not something handed to you by circumstance, but something cultivated through attention, perspective, meaning, devotion, openness.
Depending on how developed this observing awareness is, it changes your entire experience of the other layers.
A person fully consumed by the human layer experiences life as something happening to them. A person connected to awareness experiences life as something they are participating in consciously.
This is why flirting with life matters so much.
Flirting with life is the practice of consciously bringing your openness, curiosity, playfulness, sensuality, attention, warmth, and aliveness into your experience instead of waiting for the world to hand those feelings to you first.
It is a way of participating in your reality.
The more conscious you become, the more you start noticing how your inner state shapes your reality. How openness creates more openness. How warmth invites warmth. How attention reveals beauty that was always there. How curiosity creates connection. How playfulness creates possibility. And how abundance, in all its forms, tends to flow toward people who are fully participating in their lives instead of defensively withdrawing from them.
Flirting with life is really just conscious participation in your own existence.