If you’re reading this, chances are you fit into one or more of these categories:
- are a friend or loved one of mine
- are interested in what I write
- are intrigued by the idea that we create our own reality (or experience of it)
- would like to *make sense* of this idea
Here’s my ever evolving take, with a little history.
A close friend who is very good at holding me accountable in my life, Nadine, asked me if I was ready for a change.
I was certainly at a point where I wanted to be done with victim hood. I wore the hat proudly for many years, while trying to make it invisible most of the time. Except for the times I longed to identify with others, to feel one, part of the group, like I absolutely had something in common with others and they would like and support me for it. But the hat had become glaringly apparent and experience after experience kept “happening” to me. I emailed Nadine over and over and finally, she asked what it would take for me to stand up for Me. She had an answer if I was willing to entertain it. So I sent a $100 deposit to a self-improvement workshop she recommended and committed to figure out a way to get myself across the country to actually participate.
This was a soft boot camp style introduction into the idea that we create our own reality. I didn’t know that at the time, though. I just viewed it as an opportunity to break free from what I was experiencing. As we weaved our way through what brought us to the workshops, and a myriad of other activities to expose and release old thought patterns, I felt better than I had in a long time. Free. Free to be myself.
At the end of the first workshop, Journey, we were challenged to do something I couldn’t really even comprehend. The idea was to take an experience that we viewed as awful, done to us, absolutely sure we were the victim, and turn the table to explain how we could have created it. I was flabbergasted. I had such an experience I’d been carrying with me for over 15 years and I just could not even think how I created it. NO way.
But it was part of the workshop to consider this and as I sat across from the woman who I had experienced through out the 36 hour seminar to be very loving, I grasped at words to explain how I could have possibly been at fault for this experience. And there’s the kicker. Don’t many of us think that’s what it means when we think of an experience that is so bad, and then consider the perspective that we created it?!?! Please read my post The Role of Guilt to explore this phenomenon and ideas on how to release it.
So I took the time to look at this experience from a new perspective, and that truly was my first step into entertaining that this idea that we create our own reality may actually be something of value. But it didn’t feel very good with the mindset and patterns of thought I had going at the time. I chose to play a little more with the idea, then I left it alone for almost 5 years.
More to come.
