I set out to actively lead a life that truly feels good in the Spring of 2008 after a series of setbacks in my personal life. My aim is to spread whatever I learn about feeling good to others through this blog.
In a recent post I explained how other people’s opinion of you has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with them and how they are feeling, what they believe, their values and so on. In this post I want to turn that around and look at how your opinions affect your world.
Opions Are Formed on Everything
Opinions about people are just one way in which we view the world. We also hold opions about everything in life - our jobs, events in our lives, our neighbour’s cat, worldwide events and absolutely everything else. The point I was trying to get across in my previous post about opinions is that those opinions or viewpoints are formed internally and this applies to everything else in life too. As a result, how you see the world - your world, the world of your friends and family and the world at large, has very little to do with the actual physical circumstances of the world and everything to do with YOU and how you feel, what you believe, what you choose to think and so on.
Let me give you a practical example… Last month I had the great pleasure of seeing Madonna in concert at Wembley Arena in the UK. I have wanted to see her live since the early nineties when I saw a video of her latest tour. For me the concert was an absolute blast - it was everything I expected it to be and more. I had goosebumps all night long, I loved it and it was absolutely the highlight of my month.
However, not everybody felt the same way. There were sound problems and some people were so disgusted by it that they got up and left half way through. Apparently the next day there were complaints all over the Internet. While I was queuing up for the toilets after the concert there was a woman behind me on the phone to a friend about the experience. She complained about some of the songs and the way the set was arranged, the accompanying videos and so on. The very things that I thought were great were a turn off to this woman.
Did Madonna put on a brilliant show or did she let down her fans? Neither. The fact is that Madonna performed a concert and yet it is not logical or even possible to attach any labels to it such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because that is something that can only be placed by the individual and that label will be different for everybody even though the physical experience was the same. To me, she put on a brilliant show and to other people, it sucked. All of those viewpoints are accurate to those individual people and has very little to do with Madonna!
The Story of Two Villages
I don’t remember where I read about this story but I’ll paraphrase it here. There are two villages separated by a river and there is a man who conducts crossings from one village to the next. Very often when he takes somebody across the river they will ask him, “what are the people like in the other village?” and he responds by asking them, “well, what are the people like in your village?”. If they respond that in their village people are generally friendly and helpful he will tell them that in the other village they are much the same. If they tell him that the people in his village are unfriendly and just out for themselves the river man will tell his passenger that the people in the other village are much the same.
You see the river man understands the way the world works - he knows that his passenger is going to see in the other village pretty much the same thing he saw in his current village because what he sees and his opinion of the people in the other village come from within himself, and have nothing to do with the village or the people in it.
You Can’t Make Somebody Else See What You See
I have a friend who is a police officer working in London and she has seen a lot of bad stuff in her time and has also suffered several personal injuries through her work. I remember a couple of years ago having a long debate with her about people and the world in general. She believes that people are inherenly bad, and that the world is a bad place. I believe that people are inherently good and that the world is a good place.
Back then, I didn’t know the things that I am talking about today and I remember fiercely defending my viewpoint and our debate became quite heated! She still holds the same opinion now, and so do I but what has now changed is that I understand that the world is simply what it is, and that it is not good or bad as those labels exist only in our own judgements. I see the world as a good place because that is how I choose to see it but I understand why other people would see it as a bad place and now I can simply accept that we each see it differently, and that those experiences are different for everybody and there is no need to try and make another person see the world (or anything) as you do. You wouldn’t be able to - it’s impossible because you are not them.
The World is How You Choose it to be
You will experience the world - people, jobs, events, experiences however you choose to. Of course, when you have lived your entire life a certain way and hold certain beliefs that have been a lifetime in the making then it is unlikely that you will have any radical shift overnight. What I am hoping to do in this post is open your eyes to the possibility that something you are perceiving in a negative way might not necessarily have to be as bad as you think it is. Does everybody else feel the same way or do others see things differently? Are other people enjoying something you loathe? Is it possible for you to feel better about something by changing the way you think about it?
Fear of the unknown - it’s one of our biggest fears as humans, probably even more fearful than the fear of change but if you really stop to think about it, it’s a rather silly fear because there no unknown, it’s a myth and doesn’t exist.
Where is the Unknown?
Think about it, when you talk about the unknown, where does it reside? Or perhaps a better question is when? For the purposes of this question I am talking about your own life experience, not those of others which you may never know.
Is it in the past? No, you already know everything that has gone before. You may have forgotten parts of it but everything you remember is known. Is it right now in the present moment? Again, no because right now as you exist in this moment you know what is. So what does that leave? The future. The unknown only occurs in the future and what do we know about the future? It’s another myth that doesn’t exist because as we know, tomorrow never comes. All we ever have is right now, this present moment!
But, But…
When I first had this thought that the unknown doesn’t exist my immediate reaction was to dismiss it as absurd. Of course the unknown is real, I can never know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know where I might be living, or what I might be doing, or who I might be with, and on and on. But all of these are in the future and they are only unknown when we think about a future event from the perspective of the present moment.
Here’s a real world example: I am in the process of house hunting and right now I don’t yet know where I am going to live. So right now, it appears to be an unknown but right now I know exactly where I live and once I buy my new house I will know exactly where I live and here’s the key - with every moment between now and then, I will also know exactly where I live! There will never, ever, be a moment in time where I do not know exactly where I live! Well, unless I’ve been hitting the wine paricularly hard :-)
What Time Period Do You Live In?
The problem for most people is that they don’t live in the present moment. They either obsess over the past, lamenting what once was, beating themselves up and feeling guilty about something that is now over, or they live in the future, worrying endlessly about what might be, what might happen and so on.
When we live in the present moment, many of our troubles disappear. I used to have silly thoughts, along the lines of “what will I do if X happens at Y point in the future?”. Nowadays I can see the futility of worry so I don’t tend to have those but I noticed that if instead of thinking in the future I just bring myself back to the present moment and ask myself, how I am doing right now with things just as they are? I usually find that they are just fine for now. When you take things a day at a time, or even an hour at a time, things can seem much easier than worrying about what might happen in the future and it takes away that fear of the unknown because in the present moment the unknown is gone.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Byron Katie as part of Jenny Mannion’s Heroes of Healing group writing project. In the last couple of weeks the project has really taken on a life of its own and has grown tremendously. The project has a new URL, a whole new layout and a load more heroes! Here are some excerpts of some of my favourite ones:
Eckhart Tolle
I discovered Eckhart Tolle from his webcast series with Oprah about his book A New Earth. This was unlike anything I had ever read before and it really changed me profoundly in many ways and allowed me to learn to accept life with a sense of inner peace. Excerpt:
Eckhart’s essence is one of peace as he explains consciousness in accessible terms so everyone can understand. He has caused many people to “awaken” and to think about their life totally differently. His work and talks on the pain body and the roles we play in the relationships in our lives is something I feel most of us can greatly relate to and learn from.
Esther & Jerry Hicks
Esther Hicks is somebody who channels an entity of non-physical beings known only as ‘Abraham’. I don’t know much about channelling but the message that they give has affected me greatly over the last year. Their teachings are based on the Law of Attraction and they have been teaching this stuff for over 20 years, long before the movie The Secret came along. Excerpt:
Abraham teaches that ‘life is supposed to be fun!’ and that we can create our lives however we wish with effortless ease. They impart their wisdom, straight from Source Energy, in a way that is easy to understand and funny all at once. It is this sense of humor that seems to help people digest their teachings without the heaviness of the more ‘serious’ religious tenets.
Louise Hay
Louise Hay wrote a book You Can Heal Your Life many years ago and it has been a best seller ever since. I actually watched the movie before reading the book and I was instantly captivated by Louise’s charm. In her 80’s she is full of life, has an obvious love of life and just exudes confidence. Her teaching are also based around the Law of Attraction but the emphasis is on the mind-body connection. Louise healed herself on cancer in a very short time using her own teachings and many others have gone on to do the same. Excerpt:
As soon as I read Louise ’s story, it was like the sun came out and all of a sudden I could see that every day didn’t have to be cloudy. There was blue sky out there. I realized I had to change myself before I could ever hope to have the life I dreamed of. I desperately wanted to be happy, but the world I lived in was full of pain, criticism and trying to be perfect, and hating myself because I was not.
Wayne Dyer
I have been listening to Wayne Dyer CD’s for quite a few years but it was only in this past year after learning about the Law of Attraction that I really understood his teachings. Nowadays he is one of my favourite people to listen to. I listen to archives of his radio show, The Power of Intention (free from Hay House Radio) almost daily. I can’t get enough of him - he speaks with such simplicity in a very down to earth way that is easy to understand. I prefer his approach to the more metaphysical teachers out there. Excerpt:
With many books, audios and televised events as well as speaking internationally — he has encouraged and helped millions of people find their inner strengths. Dr. Dyer’s books range from his powerful talks on “Intention” to one of his most recent where he gave up most of his belongings for a year and LIVED the Tao Te Ching. He has 7 children and STILL maintains a constant sense of presence and calmness.
In the last post I talked about resistance and discussed some ideas for how to release it. Generally speaking resistance is a bad thing - it puts you in a negative mindset and blocks you from getting what you want but are there circumstances in which it can be of value?
The Role of Resistance in the Law of Attraction
I’ve been listening to a lot of Law of Attraction material lately - CDs from Abraham Hicks and archives of Wayne Dyer’s radio show on Hay House Radio. The basic premise seems to be that the only factors that affect the speed of manifestation of what you want are the strength of your desire for it and the amount of resistance around it. Most of us don’t have a problem with the desire part; it’s the resistance that trips us up. We roll around negative thoughts in our heads, we don’t believe we can have whatever it is that we want, we get frustrated with our current circumstances and so on.
So that is why its a good thing to work on releasing resistance and even if you’re not really a believer of Law of Attraction principles, resistance does not feel good so its a good thing to release it because it helps us feel better.
Where’s My Stuff?
There have been many times when I have not had what I wanted but I could see clearly why - because I just couldn’t get that negativity out of my head. I just couldn’t seem to stop focusing on the bad stuff, going over the past, beating up on myself and so on and this also added further resistance into the equation because I knew that all these negative thoughts were just pushing away the things that I wanted.
But over the last few months in particular, the resistance has slowly but surely lessened and my general state of being now compared to how it was just 5 months ago is radically different. But here’s the kicker - just as I start to feel better about everything and focus purely on what I want to manifest for my future and feel good about that, I start to get this nagging voice in my head that’s asking the question, “so where’s my stuff?”
You see, if my desire is strong (it’s red hot!) and I’m feeling good about it and I have let go of all those negative thoughts then surely I should be steaming towards what I want at a very fast pace. And if it has been this way for a while now then why isn’t it here yet? WHERE’S MY STUFF?!?!
Of course, as I’m sure you can see, getting impatient and frustrated is just another form of resistance. Sometimes I feel like I can’t win. On the one hand I know that the better I feel and the less resistance I have the more likely I am to be able to manifest what I want but on the other hand if I feel great all the time then I get frustrated if my desires don’t show up as quickly as I think they should.
Where Resistance Can Be Helpful
I’m living with family at the moment and probably will be for quite a few months. It’s ok but sometimes it can be annoying. My mother is very set in her ways and we see things very differently on many subjects so sometimes we clash and annoy each other a bit. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me and I’m just grateful to have somewhere to live but sometimes I can feel the frustration rising. I’m getting impatient, wanting to have my own place more quickly, or wishing my mother would just see things my way more often :-)
However this frustration is mild, it doesn’t cause me any major negative emotions and is more of a gentle nagging feeling. A walk in the fresh air or a few minutes with a good book usually gets rid of it. So I don’t stress over it too much. I doubt that having a little mild frustration is going to manifest anything disastrous in my life - but it could slow down my manifestations a bit.
This last point made me think that perhaps a little bit of resistance can be helpful. I think there are probably very few people who are absolutely positive 100% of the time and never have any negative emotion whatsoever. I’m sure even the most ‘enlightened’ of beings have some form of resistance now and then. So when I start thinking that I have it all sorted, that I’m totally positive and therefore should be manifesting my stuff at any moment, it’s probably a bit of an illusion.
The problem is that we are often blind to our own faults. So when I feel a little bit of resistance, or more importantly, I notice it, it lets me know that I’m human, that I don’t have it all sorted and this allows me to chill out a little bit and not expect everything to just fall into place overnight. In this way I find it easier to focus on the things that are going well, to notice the little improvements here and there which in turn does make me more positive overall.
Because I am no longer assuming that my vibration is 100% positive I am not expecting everything to manifest itself instantly so it allows me to relax and just let things come in their own time scale. Basically, it allows me to stop getting impatient and yelling, WHERE’S MY STUFF?
My friend Jenny Mannion who writes the wonderful blog, Heal Pain Naturally wrote to me to ask if I would participate in her group writing project, Heroes of Healing. The idea is simple - a group of bloggers writing about people who have been heroes (or heroines in my case) of a healing process, be it emotionally of physically. I have several of these heroes and have already mentioned them but I chose to write about Byron Katie for my contribution.
My Healing Journey
Since starting this blog I have been posting weekly chunks of my story that has lead me to the point of going through two major crises within six months and starting this blog. I reached such a low point that I knew that the most important thing I could do for myself would be to learn how to cope with the pain that life throws at you. Often we try to escape our pain, or arrange our lives so that we don’t suffer from any more pain but that kind of thinking tends to cause us to live our lives in fear. Instead I felt it better to accept that sometimes life sucks and find a way of learning how to surrender to life and how to cope on an emotional level.
I had several ‘heroes’ during this time and one of them was Byron Katie. Her book, I Need Your Love, Is That True? was one of the most transformational books that I read in that time and it was also the most relevant to the situation I was going through.
Byron Katie & The Work
Katie (as she prefers to be called) has created a process called The Work which is a process of inquiry where we question our thoughts to determine whether or not they are true. Katie believes that our emotional pain is caused by believing our thoughts, many of which simply aren’t true. The process is very simple and yet, so very powerful.
The questions are:
1) Is it true?
2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3) How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
4) Who would you be without the thought
She then invites you to turn the thought around. These questions seem simple but when asked against the right thoughts they are capable of creating an ‘aha’ moment that releases you from the prison of your own thinking.
Katie was recently interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and she did The Work with Oprah. Oprah chose to use her weight as the issue. The first step is too find the thought that causes the pain and Oprah decided that it was “my body is too big” which I’m sure is a thought that many of us can relate to. So Katie asked if it was true and Oprah blurted out “Yes it’s true!” but to the second question she hesitated a little bit. Could she absolutely know that it was true that her body was too big? Of course the answer was no.
Slight digression here but this concept has also been touched on by Eckhart Tolle who says that everything is just as it should be and how do we know that? Because that’s what it is. We say things like, my body is too big but what does that mean? Too big to survive in? Obviously not or we’d be dead. Back to Byron Katie & Oprah…
Eventually Oprah had to admit that she couldn’t absolutely know that her body was too big and was able to move onto the next question. When she believed that thought it created a lot of stress and worry, particularly over food. If she didn’t have the thought she concluded that she would feel peace instead of stress.
Why Is The Work Effective?
If you have a look at your own thoughts that are causing you pain you will find that many of them are arguing with “what is”. My partner should not have left me, I should not have cancer, I’m poor, my sister should not be in prison, I hate my job, my mother should love me etc etc. All of these are caused by somehow fighting with current reality and that is always madness. We cannot fight with what is, because what is, just is!
There are many spiritual teachers who teach this message that you cannot argue with reality but the trouble is that many of us do it anyway - it’s human nature! Although I had read this many times before and I understood it on an intellectual level that did not help me stop doing it. I still kicked and screamed in frustration about my current circumstances.
Byron Katie was the first person I encountered who actually provided a practical, workable process that showed me exactly HOW to stop arguing with reality. When we realise that many of our thoughts just aren’t true and that believing them just turns us into stress-monsters, it becomes easier to slowly let those thoughts go. Even if it doesn’t happen overnight it opens a door because every time that thought pops into your head again it doesn’t have as much power as before because inside you know it isn’t true.
Byron Katie’s Story
As with many of our great teachers of today, there is a story behind the person that is there today. In the 80’s Katie suffered from severe depression and self loathing. She hated herself so much that she slept on the floor because she didn’t feel worthy enough to sleep in a bed. She didn’t leave the bedroom except to use the bathroom, her life was a mess. Then in 1986 one morning she got her wake up call. In her words:
I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.
The transformation that followed was dramatic and swift and those around her could not fail to notice. People began asking her what her secret was and she began to help others question their thoughts in the way she had questioned hers. Over time this process of inquiry became known as “The Work” and is what she teaches today.
What I Learned From Byron Katie
The most profound thing that I learned from Byron Katie is that there is some entity inside of me (I call him my little demon!) that LIES to me. He puts thoughts in my head which are designed to hurt me and these thoughts simply are not true. I also learned that I didn’t need to believe these thoughts - just because they were in my head didn’t mean that I had to own them and make them mine.
Many thanks to Jenny for running this Heroes of Healing project - do be sure to check it out as there are a great many other heroes that are being covered including many of my other favourites such as Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer & Esther Hicks.
My mother used to bang on about the virtue of having lots of willpower but I never really thought I had any. Recently I started to look a little deeper about what it is and what it means.
What Exactly Is Willpower?
I’ve asked a few people what they think willpower means and there seems to be a subtle difference in the semantics used. I decided to check it out on a dictionary and even found differences there:
Dictionary.com describes it as “control of one’s impulses and actions; self-control.” . That’s how I have always seen it - more precisely, having the power to stop yourself from doing something that you feel as being bad, such as stopping smoking for example. However the American Heritage Dictionary words it in a subtly different way: “The strength of will to carry out one’s decisions, wishes, or plans.” The difference is that this time the power seems to be in pushing yourself to do something rather than stopping yourself from doing something.
Now it doesn’t really matter which definition is correct but I do want to examine both ways of defining willpower and look at the implications that can have on our lives.
Is Willpower Positive or Negative?
In the first definition we are using willpower to stop ourselves from doing something. Now I don’t know about you but I have always been astonishingly bad at doing that! Seeing as that was the definition that I was using, I have always said that I have very little willpower! I used to beat myself up about this quite a lot!
Now that I know a little about Law of Attraction this starts to make a lot more sense to me. We create more of what we push against so if we are trying to prevent ourselves from doing something we are directing our attention precisely on the behaviour we are trying to stop which is rather futile. What about people that are really good at controlling themselves in this way? Well if you’re one of them I’d love to hear from you!
Now the second definition feels a lot better - having the strength of will to carry out something you want to do - I’m very good at that. There’s no way I would be able to work from home on my own business if I didn’t have bucket loads of that kind of willpower!
So I think that the first definition is very negative, it just encourages you to focus your attention to unwanted behaviour but the second definition feels a lot more positive and keeps you focused on something that you want.
How To Use Willpower More Effectively
Let’s say you want to lose some weight, or to be more precise, lose some excess body fat. A lot of people start out by deciding all the things that they should stop eating - no more chocolate, no more alcohol, no more pizza and so on. Taking this approach rarely works because it keeps the attention on those things that are not allowed anymore so of course you just want more of them. I’ve been there, I know :-)
A far better way is to use the willpower in a more positive way. Instead of focusing on a big long list of banned foods, instead you could think about ways to incorporate more healthy foods into your diet. If you naturally eat more foods that are healthy and keep you full then you will simply crave the ‘bad’ foods less - this is a lot less effort than using willpower to try and stop yourself from eating all those foods that you have deemed to be bad and it will promote a long term change in lifestyle that can keep the fat off permanently.
This is fine for situations where you can easily replace a behaviour that you don’t want with one that you do but what about those situations in which you simply want to get rid of something altogether without replacing it with something else? For example, I tend to nibble my fingers whenever I’m watching something, reading, driving in the car - whenever I’m partially idle. The difficulty is that most of the time I’m just not aware that I’m doing it and then when I notice I curse myself and get all in a fluster which of course just ‘pushes against’ the behaviour that I don’t want.
So I’m trying to find a way to turn this around. I don’t want to just replace that habit with another one - I simply want the habit gone! What do do? I’m not sure, I haven’t figured that out yet!
I’d love to hear your feedback on this. How do you see willpower? Is it a good thing? How have you used it? Any tips for my annoying habit? :-)
I set out to actively lead a life that truly feels good in the Spring of 2008 after a series of setbacks in my personal life. My aim is to spread whatever I learn about feeling good to others through this blog.
