It can be pretty easy to accept what’s going on around us when we like something or when we feel pretty good. There is no need to ‘change’ things because we perceive everything is going great. Is that a truth?
How many times have we tried to change the people, things or situations around us? When we are in a place where we find something challenging…to the point where we are really bothered…we try to make a change of some kind. We try to change what someone may be doing so we aren’t bothered anymore…. Trying to change the things around us is like giving our power to whatever is ‘outside’ of us…if they change then we will feel better…if they don’t do that then we can be at peace. This implies how you feel is based on whether or not something outside of you ‘changes.’
Consider this example…I have talked about how my dad does a lot of yelling. For many years I tried to get him to stop yelling because I didn’t like it. Getting him to change never worked for me. Still to this day my dad yells. If I wanted to find peace inside myself, I had to feel those feelings I didn’t want to feel so that I could be in a restful place when it came to my dad. As I found peace inside, I noticed my perspective of my dad changed. Somehow I could feel compassion in ways I hadn’t been able to feel before. Shifting my perception resulted in a growth in consciousness.
Allow me to express this scenario as an analogy for ‘growth in consciousness.’ Let’s say you are shopping with a friend in a shopping mall. As you walk along you see a store you would like to go into on the next level up in the mall. You head up to the second level as your friend continues to shop on the main level. When you are done in that store, you look down over the railing to see where your friend is. When you spot your friend what has changed? From the second level looking down, in that moment you perceive your friend is smaller in size. That change in perception of the size is coming from inside of you…from where you are now. To your friend…they are still the same friend you left a few minutes ago.
Growth in consciousness, it is like moving a level up in the shopping mall. You move up to the second floor and the people on the main level stay the same, yet something shifted in how we see them from the second level. You aren’t making any changes to the shoppers on the main level.
Now taking that analogy into your everyday life…what would that look like? We don’t have to change the challenging messengers and messages in our life because the change takes place inside of us. We can go inside ourselves to be with ‘whatever is there’ moving us through the challenges and gaining a new perspective. This new perspective allows us to get a clearer view of what is actually happening to us right now, helping us to see or feel things in a different way.
Sheila Unique
