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Living From the Inside-Out

Have you ever noticed

that wherever you go,

whatever you do,

your attitude goes with you

and colors your experience?

This is why it is critically important that we raise the level of consciousness from which we are living our lives.

How? By choosing to be conscious and responsible for how we show up in the world instead of just functioning on autopilot.

We come to each moment of our life with a story that we are living in. Through our accumulated experiences we have constructed a signature way of being. There is a fairly predictable way that we will respond to new experiences.

Most of us could benefit from a bit of housecleaning of our fundamental beliefs and the mental and emotional dynamics that define our interior world.

In times of difficulty, self-observation and reflection often reveal that we have been living primarily through the filter of our ego. This means our perceptions have been characterized by:

  • Seeking safety, validation, and control rather than truth, presence, and love.
  • Unexamined unconscious beliefs, fears, and coping patterns that we inherited or developed.
  • Societal training that taught us to measure worth by achievement or perfection rather than the quality of our inner experience.

Here’s an example of stepping into conscious responsibility for the way we show up. My friend, Betty, and I had a falling out over a misunderstanding a few years ago. We each retreated to our own stubborn judgment that the other was at fault. Then, one day we ran into each other in a store. We smiled. We didn’t pretend not to see each other. We said hello. And we began to exchange pleasantries. Without ever explicitly saying so or hashing out the disturbance we had, we invited each other back into our lives. We just had to make caring and kindness more important that our self-righteous points of view.

Life is much more pleasant when we choose to rise above the perspective of our ego. Next time you suspect that you are caught up in a dysfunctional pattern of reaction, ask yourself some good questions like:

  • Is there another way I can look at this situation?
  • What else might be going on here other than my point of view?
  • Given the choice, is this really how I want to respond to this situation?

It helps to remember that we truly live our lives from the inside out. By getting to know ourselves and how and why we make the choices we make, we open up the possibility of upgrading the quality of consciousness we are expressing.

 

If you are interested in doing some mental and emotional housecleaning, I invite you to book a free 30-minute conversation with me to see if my mentoring services might be a good resource for you.

 

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Leaving the Past Behind

Are you keeping your past alive in the present? Or have you harvested its lessons and learned from it? We all have scars from our past. But what do we do with them now? That’s a really important question.

In mentoring clients, I typically find that their current distress mirrors unresolved upsets from the past. For example, Ellen who was never able to feel loved by her father. She has now been repeatedly drawing men into her with whom she also failed to experience love. Why did this happen? Think of it as a karmic pattern that is seeking healing.

Your life will continue to replicate an unresolved situation until you are able to neutralize the state of consciousness from which you relate to it.

Ellen was caught in a pattern in which she had convinced herself that she was fundamentally unlovable. As I observed her, I noticed that she was turned off by men who liked her. Instead, she was attracted to those who gave her no encouragement and treated her badly.

Could it be that she was simply staying in her comfort zone? This is counter-intuitive but typical. She knew herself as a woman who was rejected by the men whose affection she wanted. That became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

She didn’t know how to be a woman loved by men. Through her eyes as a child, she recognized that her father didn’t show her love. But she had falsely concluded that the reason was because she was unlovable. As a child, she could not see that he had difficulty expressing his caring for others. She carried that unchallenged belief forward into adulthood until we were able to expose it and release it together.

She came to see that the faulty conclusion of her past was inhibiting her from experiencing love in the present. It was wonderful to watch her realize that she had the power to change how she saw herself. She began taking pride in herself and replacing her old, self-rejecting belief with appreciation for her own goodness. As a result the affection of good men became desirable to her.

She stepped out of the belief that she was unlovable. She left the past behind. I asked her what life lesson this had taught her. She told me she learned to pay attention to her own beliefs about herself when in situations that were difficult for her to see if she was sabotaging herself.

I had a similar situation during a recent weight loss journey. I reached a plateau and couldn’t get the scale to move despite following all the rules. In observing myself, I realized the issue was emotional. In listening to my self-talk, I kept hearing, “I don’t know her.” When I explored this, I recognized that I was afraid to go past that particular number on the scale. In my mind it represented a level of success with which I was not comfortable. I knew how to be almost successful, but I didn’t know how to go for and get the brass ring of success. It took several months before I was able to break through this barrier. Now I am learning new life skills and a level of self-trust that was not apparent and therefore not available to me before.

When we become too familiar with failure, we have to push through our own resistance to the unfamiliar territory of success.

Leaving the past behind often requires that we recognize the ways we sabotage ourselves out of fear of moving into the unknown. Being good at failing and being disappointed doesn’t mean you can’t also be really good at success and exceeding your dreams. It simply requires a new point of view.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

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3 Truths: Mine, Yours, and Empirical Reality

Two of the biggest mistakes we make in figuring out what is going on in our lives are:

 

  • to assume that our perceptions of reality match empirical reality. 

 

  • to assume that anyone who disagrees with us is simply wrong.

 

One of the great ironies of life is that no two people see anything exactly the same way.

 

 

Rumi taught the teaching story depicted above about four blind men encountering an elephant. Consider the significance of the following points:

 

  • Each one encounters a different part of the elephant because the elephant is too large for anyone of them to fully know all at once.
  • They are all blind.
  • The “truth” of what an elephant is does not change as a result of their various points of view.

 

Each one of us functions the way we do as a result of our unique journey being who we are. Some of us get quite stuck and set in our ways, while others remain open – learning, evolving, and changing.

 

Relationships get really complicated in this context. We perceive ourselves and each other through our unique information filtering processes. The fact of the matter is that no two people will experience and understand a shared experience in exactly the same way.

Ironically, the empirical truth is often less significant than the ability of those having different points of view to seek understanding of each other. Next time you are baffled by another person’s point of view, try looking through their eyes, and see if you can get them to take a look through yours as well.

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