Recently I travelled to Cape Town, South Africa to visit my son who works for a non-profit there. My wife and I had a super time. Sadly, South Africa has an antiquated electric system resulting in frequent periods where the electricity gets shut off – often for hours at a time. Apparently, a government bureaucrat contrived a unintentionally humorous euphemism for this – load shedding. Perhaps undergoing load shedding rather than a shut-off or cut-off (or other more representative terms) of your electricity makes it more bearable!
After returning from vacation, I discovered the term load shedding stayed with me, but in an entirely different context. I can’t think of another term more appropriate for the process of releasing psychological conditioning than load shedding. During the course of life you accumulate countless ideas of ‘I’ from family and society. These assumptions about personal identity color perceptions about self, others and the world, making for quite a heavy psychological load to carry.
Through various awareness techniques, you can begin your own version of load shedding, lightening your load while traveling through life. As assumptions about yourself and others arise in your mind, through awareness these can be released – to see the world in a new light. You can perceive others and the world without prejudging everything. That’s a much more positive load shedding than losing electricity! Your load gets lighter as you no longer carry all these tiresome preconceptions about virtually everything. That’s a journey towards freedom.