Making the Shift into Consciousness
Most of us live our lives identified with the stories in our minds, rarely being here for life. If you could open a little door on your forehead and see what your storyteller is talking about all day long, you would see that it believes life is happening to you and you have to change your experience by fixing it, controlling it, or resisting it. For example, you might experience this when you have the flu or you are fired from your job or somebody cuts in front of you in line. This belief is the storyteller’s most common way to relate to life and it causes you to feel like a victim to your life experiences.
When you are in victim mode, the mind often moves into control mode. Your mind might say, “I have got to start washing my hands more often, so I don’t get sick;” or “I need to tell the person who judged me how wrong they are;” or “I need to call out the person who cut in front of me.” I am not saying you shouldn’t do those things. I am inviting you to see that the healing you long for is not found in being the victim to your life experiences.
There is another way to experience life and it is living in the belief that Life is for you. In other words, it is what Eckhart Tolle means when he says: “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”
Imagine what it would be like if you realized that life is not happening to you. It is happening for you. How would your life change if you woke up every morning with a sense that whatever the day brings is exactly what you need to see and see through in order to fully engage with life?
I worked with a woman once who was deeply embedded in the idea that life was happening to her and she had to figure how to either change the people around her or change herself (the endless game of struggle.) This woman, I will call her Ann, lives with her 86-year-old invalid father. Ann has had four different relationships with men in the past few years and they ended with her feeling rejected and judged. When we met for our first session together, she said “Mary, I want you to help me to stop attracting these kinds of people into my life. I need you to help me figure out how to stop this. It’s not okay.” Can you hear that she experienced this all as life happening to her and that she had to fix this in order to be okay?
I asked Ann to tell me about her father. She said, “Oh My God, sometimes I can’t be in the same room with that man. I feel so judged and criticized and put down by him. It has been this way my whole life. My siblings won’t have anything to do with him, so I am the one who is stuck with him.” As she told me the story, it became clear to me that the way she described her relationship with her father was exactly the way she described her relationships with men. I shared with Ann my belief that, Life is set up to bring up what has been bound up so it can open up to be freed up so you can show up for life! and I suggested we work on connecting the two, i.e. her experiences in her relationships with men and how they were similar to those with her father.
As we talked through it, all of a sudden, she ‘got it,’ and in that moment, she wasn’t a victim to her life any longer. She said, “I realize now that the reason why all this is happening is so that I can see all of these wounds inside of me that have been festering all these years so I can set them free.” In that moment, she unhooked from the victim mode and began to become fascinated by what her life was showing her. Of course, she will slip back into victimhood and unconsciousness from time to time and that is okay, but she is on the path to discovering that she can find freedom through her own accepting attention.
This journey of coming back to ourselves and back to life is the work of a lifetime, and it is something we need to continue to cultivate every day. That is what my book, What’s in the Way Is the Way is all about. Just keep that title close to your heart to remind you that life is giving you the exact set of experiences you need in order to see through your struggling self and come back to the joy of being fully alive.
If this resonates with you, invite you to listen to my upcoming radio show on Dreamvisions 7 Radio: The Phenomenal Power of Your Curiosity. It will air on Thursday, April 3rd and 10th at 5am and 5pm HERE. After the 10th, it will be available on demand, along with every other radio show I’ve ever done HERE. Please feel free to explore my catalog and listen to topics that call to you.
Offerings:
Free Live Call with Mary:
Thank you for another amazing and intense free live call. I’m excited to share the details of the next event! It will be called: The Field of Joy that is Our Birthright! We will be meeting, on Tuesday, May 6th at 5:30 pm PST for an hour and a half. We will continue to meet every two months, so keep an eye out for future events!
Here is a snippet of what we will be talking about:
We are living in a time that is superfood for our struggling minds, fostering fear, divisiveness and judgment. No matter how big the struggles of your life are right now, there is a field of ease and peace that is always with you. Join Mary in discovering how to unhook from the struggles in your mind enough that you can rest in the joy that is your birthright.
Don’t forget if you can’t make it on the day, you can still participate by sending your questions and enjoying the recording after the call at your convenience. I hope to see you there!
Click HERE to learn more and register!