In this week’s meeting of the Mindshifters group we watched the second half of the lecture by Dr. Michael Ryce titled, Empowered To Heal. The first part of the talk focused on the difference between the physical body and the “mind” that accompanies the physical body, and the soul, and the “mind” which accompanies the soul. The idea was presented of the physical mind being survival oriented and unable to do anything other than react to circumstances in a programmed way, much as the robin that builds the same kind of nest each year, or the salmon which returns to the place of its spawning to lay eggs and die. The point was made that we have both the physical, “carbon based” memory which is reaction based, and the spiritual, energetically based mind, which allows us to choose our own actions. The soul and the energetic mind are seen to be the seat of real intelligence and the freedom of choice, or free will, which we have come to view as one of the things which separates us from the rest of the natural world.
Empowered To Heal Part II
One of the most powerful lines in the lecture for me was related to the fact that, “If I don’t know how the world works, and how my mind energy influences the world, it is easy for me to see myself as a victim.”. As one of the lines in the Reality Management Worksheet states, “With blame, I hide my power.” If I am blaming others for what I feel and what happens in my life, I am not able to see how I influence the events in my life and how I create all of my emotions and reactions.
I create my own reality, (my internal experience), and my interpretation and reaction to the events in my life is infinitely more important than the events themselves. As I mentioned in the last post, the research evidence is clear, we choose to be happy or sad, regardless of the events in our lives. This is seen clearly in comparing the happiness ratings for people who have won the lottery and those who have become paraplegic, and finding that one year after each event the happiness ratings are nearly identical for those two groups of people. How could it be that those who became paraplegic a year ago, are just as happy as those who won the lottery a year ago?What could possibly explain this finding? This is as powerful an example as I can imagine, to demonstrate that we choose to be happy or choose to be sad, and that the external events in our lives are not nearly as important as how we interpret and respond to those external events.
There is substantial research which demonstrates that we create our own happiness and some of it is reviewed in the book Happy For No Reason, by Marci Shimoff. In this book, Marci gives examples of people who have every external reason to be sad, angry or depressed, and yet they choose to be happy. Marci gives a list of exercises which anyone can use to develop the habit of being happy and maintain a positive outlook through the ups and downs of life.
The last 90 minutes of the Mindshifters group was spent working on Reality Management worksheets. This is the tool for canceling and dismantling a false reality in our minds. The tool is available for free from www.whyagain.com. This is a powerful tool for improving one’s quality of life by relieving negative emotions and the energy that goes with them. I did my worksheet on the anger that I felt when a file cabinet was delivered late, and turned out to be the wrong cabinet. This left me 90 minutes to completely re-arrange and re-organize my office and clean up the resulting mess, before I had to start seeing clients again. Near the end of this clean up routine and just before my next client was scheduled to arrive, I got angry when I tried to open a garbage bag to put something in it and found it was tied closed with a knot.
My anger at inanimate objects proved once again to be a difficult challenge for me to overcome. I realized as I completed the worksheet that I have been trying to hide my anger from others and that this was contributing to my difficulty in resolving the problem. It is our secrets which keep us sick, and I became aware that my desire to hide my anger was feeding my conclusion that I was unlovable because I had anger. The real good news is that now I can actively work to end the secret and resolve the problem of my anger response to inanimate objects. I feel a noticeable relief at recognizing the pattern of trying to keep my anger a secret and realizing that I no longer need to hide the fact that I get angry when things don’t work the way I think they should.
We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.