There is a moment where you know you’ve been lost. It’s like you realized you’ve been crawling around in the dark looking for a flashlight when it’s been in your hand the whole time.
As humans, we go through life constantly looking for the problem, the cause, the root of everything wrong in our lives. We often attribute it to something outside of ourselves. “If I just made more money…” “If my partner was more loving…” “If they could just understand…”
We look at the world around us to find something wrong, something that needs to be fixed, something that needs to be changed – but there is nothing outside of ourselves that needs to do anything. The world is working perfectly the last time I checked. The sun rose over the Great Plains this morning and is slowly heading toward the tips of the Rocky Mountains. There is oxygen for me to keep breathing. My car went when I pushed on the gas pedal. Coffee was hot. Everything is perfect.
It’s funny, because like most people I spent my entire life looking at everything outside of me and wanting it to be different. I wanted a partner to complete my life because I was lonely and didn’t love myself. I wanted money because I perceived that if I could more easily pay my bills or live in a different area of town, I would be happier.
It turns out none of that was true. We have the ability to create any reality we choose through our perception of the world (how we believe the world works) and through our emotions.
If we choose to believe that we are fully supported by a loving and beautiful universe then we experience life completely differently if we choose to believe that the universe is indifferent, and shit happens then we die.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine winning a trip to … Disney World. You’ve just gotten the call, they are telling you that you’ve won an all-expense-paid trip (flight included!) to the magical world of Disney, and you’re getting the VIP treatment and front of line access. How do you feel? Exuberant? Excited? Ecstatic? Take a second and feel it in your body.
Now realize this: you just experienced an emotion from an idea, a thought. You chose to experience a reality were winning that trip was possible. Those feelings were always available to you.
Where am I going with this? When we chose to repeat the past over and over in our minds we are continuing to repeat the same emotions associated with the event. Often times our default programming is to continuously run all of the bad things that have happened to us. How wronged we felt. How justified we are in feeling the way we feel. How things shouldn’t have happened in some way.
Byron Katie says that the past couldn’t have happened any other way. Why? Because it already happened. Since we can’t go back and change our past mistakes we can choose to accept and learn from them rather than replay them over and over again making ourselves feel miserable every time we do.
As we look toward the future, if we are stuck in a negative past, we project that negativity forward as well. “Nothing ever works out for me…” “Things have been going well, but it’s only a matter of time before the bottom drops out…” “I’m never going to get out of debt…”
I don’t know how you feel, but it hurts me to think that way. I feel constricted and limited and I don’t choose that anymore. We have no idea what the future holds for us. The only predictions we can make are based on what has happened before, and if we want to choose to live in a better reality than our current one we have to let go of the idea that things can’t get better or will continue the same way until we die.
Our lives are infinite possibility. We have just as much chance of winning a million dollars tomorrow as getting hit by a car. There is nothing stopping you from shifting your perceptions, so you are more hopeful and more open to different things and experiences coming to you.
The loud scary voice in our heads is just that, a loud scary voice. It can’t hurt you. It doesn’t know the future. It’s afraid of losing whatever perceived control it thinks it has. It can’t see what it will gain, only what it will lose and if we want to change our lives, we have to stop seeing what we’ll lose and open ourselves to the possibility of what we will gain.
We are spiritual beings at our core, and this life is a temporary experience. We cannot be hurt or destroyed, only transformed through our lives here. Life doesn’t have to be a trial by fire, but it can be a challenging, exhilarating, stratifying walk up the mountain toward something more beautiful than the voice in our heads could perceive.
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