On the final day of this year, as the calendar page changes, let us talk more about how we can use spiritual principles to deal with changes in our life.
Yesterday we explored part one of a three-part Change Process derived from the messages in Conversations with God. Today: Part Two.
This second part puts you firmly in command of your experience. You may not have changed anything in your outward reality, but remember, it is the experience of it that we are out to change.
You, and you alone, decide what anything means to you. You, and you alone, get to choose what matters and doesn’t matter, what is “good” and what is “bad,” what is “okay” and what is “not okay.” You, and you alone, get to determine whether you are going to react positively about something or negatively about something–or, interestingly, have no reaction at all. Your emotions are entirely under your control. Your feelings are what you want them to be.
“That’s not true!” you may protest. “I don’t want to feel bad, I just do.” Yet this is not so–and the sooner you understand this, the sooner you will move to mastery in your daily living. You do want to feel bad or you wouldn’t. The trick is to look deeply into the moment to see why you want to feel bad. The answer to that question unlocks everything.
To reiterate, you decide, and you alone decide, what something means to you, and how you are going to respond to it. Yet this is a decision that most people make based upon past feelings, experiences, understandings and desires, or future fears, apprehensions, wishes or desires.
None of this has anything to do with what is going on right here, right now.
The idea, as Eckhart Tolle made so brilliantly clear in The Power of NOW, is to stay in the moment. I have come to see the real power in this in my own life.
When I “come from yesterday,” I frequently overlay meanings on things that are happening right now that are not in those things inherently, but that I have placed there as a result of a previous thought about them–or about something similar to them–from my past. (Going to the dentist might be a good example.)
When I “come from tomorrow,” I overlay an idea about some imagined future (and usually some imagined fear) on the events of today. These future realities may never come to pass (in fact, my life has shown that they rarely do), but what they often do is ruin any chance I had to maximally profit from the experience of the moment.
Only when I get out of my past and stay away from my future can I genuinely experience what’s happening right here, right now, within the context of just that: what’s actually occurring in the present moment. And–free from the interpretations of the Past and the Future–I can give that occurrence any interpretation I desire.
This was the greatest liberating lesson of my life. When I learned this, I understood at last that my experience of everything that is going on, is going on in my mind. I can stare into the face of events and I can choose to be whatever I wish to be with regard to them. I can be “okay” or I can choose to be “not okay.” I can be “happy” or I can choose to be “unhappy,” I can be “optimistic” or “fearful,” “powerful” or “powerless,” “complete” or “incomplete,” “destroyed” or “reignited”.
The decision is all mine. The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it.
Tomorrow, New Year’s Day, I’m off. You take the day off, too! And we’ll meet here again on Friday! Oh, and…HAPPY NEW YEAR!