What To Do When You Hit the Wall Part 2

Yesterday we discussed the paradigm of  “seeing is believing.”  We’ve all heard it many, many times.  Most of us hold this belief as true whether consciously or unconsciously.  Here’s where I want you to question, look deeply and have your flashlight ready.  If it gets dark for you, shine the flashlight of your consciousness; your awareness and the shadows disappear.

Here we go!  Just like the walls we talked about in part 1, what if, just maybe the circumstances in your life, both now and in the past, are the results of your beliefs?  Can you allow that maybe your thought about something shapes the way you perceive it?

Science has given us a great example of just this idea when we look at light.  Light can manifest as both a particle and a wave.  If we believe (expect) to see particles, we’ll see particles. Same thing if we look and believe we will see waves.  (Google the whole story of this conundrum for scientists.  Its fascinating!)

Our walls are no different.  We see them and feel them because we have believed they are there.  If you “believe” you are limited in any way, you will indeed see evidence of that belief all around you.  If you believe things will never get better, they won’t in your experience.  In other words, you will create the walls, the very conditions needed, to verify your belief.  Please understand, I’m not saying we all sit around and consciously decide to have bad things in our lives.  We do it by our lack of awareness and mostly without questioning our thinking about it. It has become unconscious.

The Good News is that you can choose to change your life by changing your beliefs about how your life “is.”  The process is simple, infallible and immutable; but … it is seldom easy when we first start out. Like any new skill it takes practice and perseverance.  We must be willing to examine, with great compassion toward ourselves, our habitual ways of thinking about everything!  It takes believing even in the face of what looks contradictory.  Be aware though, that in the beginning, you’re likely to continue to “see” the results of your previous thoughts.  Just realize they are thought-forms you’ve already birthed and they must play themselves out.  Hold onto the grace that will come from your new thoughts!

The Buddha said, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”  The Bible says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”  James Allen expressed it so well in the poem:

“Mind is the master power that molds and makes,

And we are mind, and evermore we take

The tool of thought, and shaping what we will,

Bring forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills.

We think in secret, and it comes to pass,

Our world is but our looking glass.”

Believing is seeing!  Believe those walls are an illusion and you will see them dissolve!

What To Do When You Hit the Wall? Part 1

We’ve hit the wall when we feel like life has handed us just too much of the bad stuff!  We feel like we’ve run out of options. There seems to be no way out of the circumstance or situation.  Maybe we feel trapped, cornered or even like giving up!

I certainly understand because I’ve hit my own walls many times.  Those walls feel very solid and very real!  Its a lousy headspace to be in, for sure!  But what if those walls really aren’t solid or real at all?  What if its just an illusion that you believe to be real?

Now I’m not talking about those day to day problems like the car breaks down or the washing machine quits working.  That’s just life.  Sh** happens!  What I’m talking about is our day-to-day illusions of how we “believe” life works for us.

Back to those walls ….  Walls are only walls when we believe they are (in the world of thought).  Rather than being solid and rigid, walls can become soft, malleable and even dissolve when we realize that we are responsible for their creation by our limiting beliefs.

Limiting beliefs are those beliefs we consciously or unconsciously hold about the way things are, how “life” works.  I’m willing to bet that most of us never even question those beliefs.  We don’t even ask ourselves how we came to believe them.  We’ve held them for so long, they’ve become our “reality,” our worldview.  Perhaps the reason we don’t challenge those beliefs is because we see them verified every day in our own world.  We have accepted (albeit usually blindly) the paradigm that says seeing is believing.

What IF it “ain’t” necessarily so?  What if science has proven otherwise?  What if it’s the real lesson that all the great masters have pointed to for millennia?

We’ll talk about it tomorrow in part 2 of this post.  In the meantime, question everything.  Look deeper.  Bring your flashlight.

MIS-TAKE

This quote showed up in my newsfeed this morning: “More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying them.”

Interesting quote, don’t ya think?  Is it true?  Why is it that we all have such a hard time admitting when we’ve made a mistake or are wrong about something, anything?

There was a minister at a Unity church I used to attend who loved to take words out of our vocabulary and look at their root meanings or reframe them in such a way as to focus our attention on them differently.  I remember his taking the word mistake and breaking it down to “mis-take.”  When you look at it this way, its quite like taking or making a mis-step.  We’ve stumbled, taken a false step, obviously didn’t have all the information we needed or ignored it if we did, we need a retake.  In golf terms, we need a mulligan, lol!

So I guess I’m back to asking why we have such a hard time admitting it when we make those mis-takes?  Why do we fight so hard to deny them?  I think its a combination of things: how our family of origin reacted to them, how society frowns so hard on them, how our culture has fast become a “them vs us”  overall mentality and last but not least, our egos!  Somewhere along the ways of our lives, we’ve absorbed that we must be perfect.  If we’re not, we might lose someone’s love, we might lose our jobs, our charm, our beauty, our way of life.... You get the picture.  Somehow we will have fallen short of perceived notions of what we should be, either our own or others', which makes us “less than.”  Heaven forbid! Ego alert here!

Here’s your newsflash: none of us are perfect and likely never will be.  We can abdicate all that prior conditioning. And think about this. If we’re always running scared of making mistakes, and denying them when we inevitably do, we will have missed the very beauty to be found in them!  Yes, even those really, really, bad, horrible ones have the beauty of a lesson, a path to growth in them! Know what happens when we don’t learn or grow from those mis-takes? When we keep denying them to ourselves or others? We condemn ourselves to making them over and over and over, again.  Delightful, yes?  I didn’t think so!

Let’s make a deal, you and me.  I’ll slow down and admit when I’ve made a mis-take, try to learn the lesson, forgive myself (yes, that’s a vital part) and move on toward making better choices.  Will you allow yourself the same latitude? OK! Game on!

Faith Isn't A Feeling

What?!?!? Yes, I really said that!  I mean it can be a feeling; but it usually isn't at first.  Faith is a decision. Its a decision to act "as if" something is so even when you don't feel it or even believe it deeply.

A friend of mine and I were having this conversation just the other day.  I told her that something she had just done was an act of faith. "Funny," she said. "I really don't feel I have that much faith right now."  That's when the words "faith isn't a feeling" just sprang into my head. (As a spiritual intuitive, this happens to me quite often and I simply love it.)  I continued by telling her she didn't need to feel it, yet.  Just keep acting as if she did.  Feeling faith comes with patience, practice and intention.

The universe, Spirit, God, whatever you choose to call it, responds to our intentions! Merriam-Webster defines intention as: "the thing that you plan to do or achieve, an aim or purpose, a determination to act in a certain way."  So to me, intention is an act of faith!

Want to have faith?  Act "as if" you already have it!  Watch the miracles happen!