by Deborah Baron
Previously published in Medium.com on May 11. 2020
In the summer of 2017, for the first time in a long time, I gave myself permission to be me. It had slipped away so slowly that I had not even noticed and having it back was like being reacquainted with an old friend. Familiar and easy and wonderfully comfortable. It was the beginning of my journey into the teachings of Syd Banks, toward an understanding that has changed my life, increased my well-being and allowed me to find a level of peace that I previously thought I would find through accomplishment and success. Want this? Start here…
Notice the inside-out nature of experience
Let’s start with an easy example: You and I are both staring out the window and it is pouring outside. I scrunch up my face and say, “what a miserable day”. You sigh and say, “I think it is beautiful, I love the rain”. It is not so hard to see how our individual thinking in this moment creates our experience. The rain is not creating our thinking. We are both seeing the same rain and yet we are experiencing it differently. Our thinking is creating our experience.
Trickier example: We are both sitting in a meeting with our boss who raises his voice to argue with Joe. I say to myself “our boss is such a jerk”. You say to yourself “I hope the boss is OK, he must be feeling pretty crappy today to have such a strong reaction to Joe’s comment”. Again, you and I are experiencing the same moment and yet our thinking is creating a unique experience for each of us. The experience isn’t creating our thinking, our thinking is creating our experience.
Go out into your world and start noticing this. Many of us spend our entire lives in the illusion that experiences create thinking. You will start to notice, if you look, and keep looking, that every experience is created from the inside-out. And nothing, no exceptions, is created from the outside-in. Outside-in is the biggest illusion we live in but keep looking and you’ll start to see.
Why does seeing this impact well-being? Because when you see this, you stop feeling like a victim. If nothing outside of your thinking can ever create your experience, then there is always the possibility of a different experience. Mind you, I am not suggesting that you change your thinking. There is nothing wrong with the thinking you are having, it just is not coming from the experience, it is coming from your own creativity. And while I don’t think you can actually change your thinking, knowing that new thinking is possible can bring a sense of hope. And when we find hope, we find our true selves.
Experience your true self
Our minds are unbelievably creative places. All day long, we create thought from nothing. In more spiritual jargon, we create form from the formless. That formless space is your true self. It is the space in which hope, possibility, and creativity are born, where a new day is born. Remember, we are both spiritual beings and physical beings. We carry a life force energy that allows our hearts to beat and our blood to flow through our bodies. This energy carries us and holds us. It gave us the wisdom as babies to teach ourselves to crawl and walk. It gives us great ideas in the shower and when our thinking slows. It gives us that sense of knowing the next right step and gives us a space to explore when we don’t yet know. In this space lies your true self. And I know, I didn’t trust it either. I thought that all the “shoulds” that came from other people’s thinking held more wisdom than my own inner knowing. Yet in finding that freedom, to listen to your quiet voice, to touch that space between formless and form and be able to hear what comes forth; we find love, and possibility, unlimited creativity and potential. As Michael Neill says: “the unlimited potential of the entire fu@$!&# universe.” This is your true self. With love and hope inside of you every minute of every day, what more could you ever need?
Be OK with the vibrational frequency of life
And yet we are human. That is what G-d gave us in the garden of Eden. Humanity mixed with divinity. And in that humanity, we forget. We forget our creative nature and that we create our experiences from the inside out. We experience human emotions that we wish we did not. Our consciousness drops and we get angry, sad, nervous and insecure and we look for a way out. And yet there is beauty in each of these emotions as well. We can find the beauty in the cycle, the ups and the downs, and we can know that this emotion that we are experiencing is being created from our thinking in the moment, and it will pass. Maybe today, maybe next week, maybe next month or next year. We never know how long but we do know that our feelings, our thoughts are always changing. Minute by minute and day by day. And so, we wait, and we ride the wave. Quoting Syd Banks, “If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their own experiences, that alone would change the world.”
Welcome to well-being. I wish you joy and sorrow, love and anger, contentment and frustration on this journey we call life. And in the learning, I hope you begin to see the inside-out nature of your experiences in each moment. Look inside, get to know your true self, and know that whatever you are feeling is perfect for the moment. You are being held by an ever-wise energy and as we experience good or bad or pleasure or pain, in the now, we are all OK.
Deborah Baron is a Transformative Leadership Coach and a 3 Principles practitioner who helps her clients achieve so much more with an ease they never thought possible. Sign up for her “Back of the Napkin Coaching” blog at www.deborahbaron.com.