SunAgape's Spot: Why can I choose?

Showing posts with label Why can I choose?. Show all posts

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Choosing the Choose

I pulled the ¨Why do I choose?¨ card this morning. I just pulled it recently, so I tucked it back into the deck and tried again, and got it again, and a third time! I know when I’m licked, so here we go!

This is my favorite card, my favorite Creative Question. I think that it is the beginning of a most amazing, dynamic, powerful life.

When I decide to start consciously choosing, a lot of good stuff happens. I start paying attention to what I am doing. Wow. Just that single choice can make a world of difference in my life. As I pay attention to what I’m doing, I start to notice what I am thinking. Isn’t that interesting! Wow! As I start to pay attention to my thoughts, I begin to bring up my unconscious thoughts. That is amazing. Now I have the opportunity to make some compelling changes in my thinking, in my ideas about stuff, in my beliefs. Wow!

Why can I choose? What makes me decide? Why would I pay attention? How do I know I can change?

When I decide to choose, I am choosing freedom. I am choosing to own my own power, choosing to respect myself. When I decide to choose, I am deciding what I want rather than being buffeting by whatever is coming along.

When I decide to choose, I decide what I want. Knowing what I want makes life so much easier. How do I like to spend my time? Who do I like to spend time with? What do I enjoy? How do I want to live? How do I feel productive? What do I want to achieve? Where is my passion? What do I want to learn? What kind of an example do I wish to be?

As I practice choosing, I find more and more things are actually in my control. Wow. So many of us feel powerless deep inside, and so act in controlling ways to the people in our lives as though that will give us a sense of power where we need it. It never does, so we get more and more rigid, more demanding, more damaging to our relationships.

As I practice choosing, I notice my behavior more, I notice how my behavior impacts the people around me. And I find that I can choose to change my behavior. That’s power. When I cease to feel like my behavior is ¨just the way I am¨ and realize that it is the result of my thoughts and beliefs, I can choose to change those thoughts and beliefs to ones that are aligned with what I want, what I choose.

How am I powerful? What makes me strong? How do I know I am competent? How do I know I am capable?

When I decide to choose, I may find that I want to choose a teacher to help facilitate my transitions. It has been my experience that often just the act of deciding I want a good teacher will bring that teacher to my awareness.

When I find my good teacher, I do what they tell me to the best of my ability. I have had a lot of trust issues, and learning to trust a good teacher was a wonderful way to start choosing trust.

How have I changed from feeling I can’t decide to enjoying the freedom to choose?

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Taking the Conn

There are universal truths. They way you know you have found one is that it is true for everyone everywhere. People breathe to live. That is a universal truth, but did you know that there are scientifically documented cases of people who never eat or drink and are perfectly healthy? Amazing.

I believe that choice is a universal truth. I believe that we all can choose. I do think that many of us choose not to choose, and brother, does that make trouble for us!

In the course of a day, we make a thousand tiny choices. Each one of those choices points us in a direction. Is it a direction we want to travel in? Am I choosing activities and thoughts that support me or harm me? Am I choosing activities and thoughts that promote my goals and solidify my dreams, or hamper my progress? Do I even know what I want?

How do I know what I want?

I think it is remarkable how many of us don’t spend time thinking about what we want beyond, perhaps, very general things like good health, more money, nice relationships. If I don’t know what I want, chances are good I will be disappointed regularly, that sort of vague sense of dissatisfaction.

What stops us from deciding what we want? It can be a sense of resignation; I never get what I want anyway. We may have a feeling of not deserving, or of wanting too much. The thing is, we get what we put our energy into. If I spend time thinking about how I never have enough money, that is the ¨vibration¨ I put out and what I get back is not enough money. If I often think about how unhappy I am, I get back more of that feeling. If I am focused on not feeling well, I get more sick. We can call it the Law of Attraction, or we can think of it as just filtering our reality.

What happens if those thoughts are out of our consciousness? Creative Questions to the rescue! Because they are dynamic questions, they go to work on our unconscious minds. We can look at our results to see what the bad creative questions are that we are asking. We can then set up our new Creative Questions to get the results we want, but we do have to know what we want.

When I think about how I want more money, I could find a penny and that would count, but it’s not really what I mean. If I think, I want my income doubled, we have a measurable goal. That is something I can make a Creative Question from. I need to put the actual dollar amount in the Question. If I am making forty thousand dollars a year, I can start asking: Why am I making eighty thousand dollars a year? How am I making eighty thousand dollars a year? What makes me have an income of eighty thousand dollars a year.

If I am spending my time focusing on my aches and pains, that is what I am filtering for. The more attention I give them, the bigger they get. That’s how filtering works. I could use a Creative Question like, Why do I feel great? but that might not get me far enough away from attending to my discomfort. Asking a Question like, Why do I live a joyful and vibrant life? can get me deeper into living, helping me to focus on the activities that bring me joy. When I bump into objections, I will put the words would or could into the Question, Why would I be happy today? How could I feel joy today?

By paying attention to what we are choosing as we move through our daily lives, we can take charge of our thinking, and steer it into the directions we want to go. By spending a little time thinking about what we actually want, we can make those corrections much more easily.

How have I changed from drifting in dissatisfaction to directing my life as I choose?

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Deciding to Choose

I got my favorite card today, “Why can I choose?” This is where the action is, this is where change starts, this is the beginning of the life I want.

Why can I choose? How do I know I decide? What makes me notice my choices?

It is also something that we tend to deny.

What’s that you say? Why would I deny my choices?

Each of us has a huge pile of beliefs. We believe them We trust in them. We forget that they are beliefs and act as if they are just the way the world is. We have beliefs about ourselves and everyone else. We have beliefs about aging, beliefs about success, beliefs about limits, about nature, about food and art and music and joy.

So much of what we believe we took on as little kids. And a lot of it is just plain wrong. We mislearn based on watching our grown-ups do stuff. We mislearn based on listening or observing with baby-minds. We often forget the experiences that led us to our beliefs, and so we take them as fact. Or truth. And then we end up in trouble.

Drama is a good one. We get the idea that giant feelings are normal. Rage, grief, fear, resentment; we have the idea that holding onto these feelings is the way to go, and we let them build until we are yelling or weeping without end, saying horrible things to each other, hold onto perceived wrongs that others have done to us, or feel guilty for decades about things we did that we think are wrong.

Poor little we.

Taking things personally, feeling better than or less than, hiding our gifts, suffering, controlling, and looking for the worst are more examples of mislearning.

As we start to practice choice, we begin to be aware of our thoughts, and then aware of our beliefs. Recognizing that I believe X to be true means that I can look at that belief and see if it supports me. Recognizing that a belief is an idea, and not a law of nature, means that I can erase it, or rewrite it, or tweak it in a way that will make my life easier, freeing up my energy for things that matter to me.

Sometimes I need to take action to change a belief that harms me. Sometimes I need to delve into my past and complete an experience, one where I shut down before I got to the end. There are a lot of ways to do that. Find the ones that suit you best and clean up your emotional basement.

One of my friends refers to making these kinds of changes as using our want-power. For most of us, will-power just doesn’t work. We end up feeling weak and like we have failed. When we choose what we want, and then remember that we want it, we can unchoose behaviors or thoughts that get in the way of that desire. That’s easy.

How have I changed from believing my beliefs to knowing that I choose?

Monday, November 03, 2014

I’ll Tell You What I Want, What I Really, Really Want

This topic has been showing up a lot around me lately, always a good cue to do a little writing. The card is one of my favorites, Why can I choose?

This act, the act of choice, is what makes the difference between a sucky life and a happy life.

I have been seeing articles claiming that positive thinking is bad. Seriously. That happiness is overrated. These articles seem to promote sour grapes, and they both have very interesting, and erroneous takes on both positivity and happiness.

Why can I choose? Why I can choose to be miserable, why I can choose to feel good?

Positive thinking is not daydreaming about the future. It is not pretending things are other than they are. It is not living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Positive thinking is the difference between “I can’t” and “I can.” Positive thinking is relaxed. Positive thinking flows from gratitude and appreciation.

Happiness is not pie-in-the-sky thinking based on outside stuff, but rather it is connecting with our perfect selves deep inside and finding the peace and joy that are already there.

If I am miserable, I am not present, I am not aware, I am in my head thinking, “Things should be different,” but often not having any idea what different would even look like.

And there, as the saying goes, is the rub.

Dissatisfaction is often best friends with “I don’t know,” as in, “What would make me feel better?” “I don’t know.” “What would be more satisfying?” “I don’t know.” And so on.

That little phrase, I don’t know, is a killer. Thing is, we do know. Thing is, we have to take the time, care enough about our well being, to go looking for the answers. They are all there, inside us.

What do I want? What makes me feel good? How do I know what I desire? Why can I choose? Why do I choose?

In making the transition from miserable to happy, I had to choose a lot. I had to do a lot of soul searching. I had to make some challenging, life changing decisions. I chose to leave my entire community not once, but twice. I chose to change my life style. I had to choose to act, to impose some discipline on my life. These were not easy to do, but they were simple, and the impact they had on how I felt and how I behaved with my loved ones was huge.

I need to spend time thinking about what would make me feel better. As I am going through chemo, there are days when I am having a lot of distracting sensation. I have days when I am really tired. At the same time, I don’t have days when I can find nothing to appreciate, to be grateful for. Since this whole shebang started, I’ve had two bad days. That is by choice, and by action. One of the questions I ask on those days is “How do I feel good?” Then I inventory the parts of my body that feel fine. Why am I responsible for how I feel? How do I take responsibility for me? What makes me accountable?

By owning that I choose this or that, I give myself the power to change those choices to ones that support me. And when I am taking care of me, I am a better friend to you, too.

How have I changed from denying my choice to choosing to act on what I want?

Friday, August 15, 2014

The Power of Choice

The most fundamental superpower we have is our power to choose. And for so many of us, it is our least developed superpower. We kind of bumble through our lives, mostly in habit and routine, barely aware that we have any choice at all. We do the same, we feel the same, we think the same, and call it security, even if it’s not very nice.

Choosing from awareness is a dynamic thing. It’s powerful, deeply transformative, and a serious act of personal power. Wow.

Why do I choose? What makes me decide? How am I powerful?

By practicing choosing in awareness, I am placing value on myself. For many of us, this is in itself a rather daring act. For many of us, the habit of discounting our worth to bargain basement value is old, deeply ingrained, and we think of it as Truth.

As we practice being aware, of our surroundings, of where our bodies are, of how we feel in our physical selves, in our emotional selves, of our thoughts, we start to claim our lives as something worth living.

This practice helps us notice when we are caught up in habits that hurt us. It isn’t unusual for us to have a nice life, a decent place to live, enough money to manage on, friends and family who love us, and for us to feel bad. I lived there for a long time. I was so sad. I was so stuck in paucity. I lived deep in the Lack Tree Forest, focused on what I didn’t have, and choosing unconsciously to stay there.

It was an insidious habit that ate holes in my life. Awareness helped me notice that I was choosing to look at everything as a burden. My shoulders ached all the time.

Little by little, I began to choose to appreciate what I have. Little by little, I felt grateful for the help I receive, for my job, for my home, for my friends and family. As I practiced choosing gratitude, I started to move out from the Lack Tree Forest into abundance.

Why can I choose? How am I strong? What makes me competent?

Exercising choice, consciously, over and over every day, a thousand tiny choices, means that when I have big choices to make, the path to choosing is wide and clear. I have come to know my mind. I can choose to change my feelings, I can choose to change my thoughts, my attitudes, my environment, even my relationships.

Exercising choice over and over gives me a sense of control, of my personal power. When I let my life be run by my unconscious habits, I feel helpless, out of control, and often powerless. That feels awful.

When I choose gratitude, I relax. I recognize the fullness and abundance of my life. I can make changes from a place of power rather than a place of desperation. By choice, aware, thoughtful, mindful choice. This is power.

How have I changed from letting old thoughts run my life to practicing my superpower of choice?

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Doom or Bloom?

Helpless, hopeless, doomed. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever goes my way. Everything happens to me. My misery is all your fault.

Huh.

Some of us feel like this. I was one of them. I couldn’t leave my rotten job for a hundred reasons. I couldn’t leave my rotten living situation for a thousand reasons. I couldn’t leave my abusive relationship for a hundred thousand reasons. Most of them were your fault. And then, when I got fired, or evicted, or dumped, well, that was clearly your fault, too.

Please accept my apologies. I had a powerful heap o’ mislearning I needed to dump.

Can’t is a crazy word. Can’t stops us cold, tenses our muscles, cramps our thoughts, constrains our behavior. When I choose can’t, I stifle myself. I curb my enthusiasm, I cage my heart, I chain my mind. When I choose can’t, I don’t grow.

Why am I capable? What makes me choose?

I drew those two cards this morning. When I throw in “Why am I competent?” and “Why am I strong?” I can unchoose victim/martyr. I can choose to accept the circumstances I find myself in. I can choose to do what I can to change them. I can choose to get some help. I can choose to leave.

I can choose to accept you as you are, and stop fighting to make you be different. I can choose to take responsibility for my well being and walk away from our relationship if I need to.

When I approach the world from a place of resourcefulness, where I believe all the support I need is there for the asking, I feel powerful. In the olden days, I believed I was powerless to impact my life, except sometimes with a tantrum. I learned that when I was very small, and it was pretty true then, but I got older, and bigger, and it became less accurate, and a deeper mislearning.

Why can I relax? What makes me peaceful? Why can I decide?

Every so often, something would happen to shake that belief, until I finally noticed that I actually did have some power of choice. I began to seek out good teachers, I began to leave “friends” who encouraged me to stay small and helpless. I started to notice my really bad habits that left me feeling awful, like abusing recreational chemicals, and got help to replace them with habits that showed me new ways to think.

I didn’t change this overnight. I did take baby steps. One little change here, one little change there. Some of them took right away, some I had to revisit again and again. Some I am still revisiting. The habit of being competent, of feeling capable, of knowing I can, has gotten stronger. The habit of taking responsibility for my own well being is stronger, and easy most of the time.

Each of us is the only one who can change our own internal experience. Each of us has all the resources we need available. We just need to learn how to ask.

How have I changed from being wedded to “can’t” to feeling the power of “I can?”

Thursday, July 03, 2014

Picky Picky Picky

Everyday I have the opportunity to transform my life. From the moment I wake up until I fall asleep, I have the opportunity to choose. Sometimes it is a pretty neutral choice, like whether to have coffee or tea with breakfast. It can be a choice we barely notice, like whether we greet the day with a smile or a frown.

Tiny choices all day long.

Why can I choose? What makes me decide? How do I pick my path?

When I choose to start my day on an upbeat note, I will make my tiny choices to support that. When the little snafus happen, like dropping the toothbrush, they make me laugh instead of pissing me off. I can do my routines, but with awareness, so I can change them up if they aren’t working as best they can. I can remember that I like you before I start kvetching at you.

I get to decide.

When things happen, I get to choose to flow with them. I start by practicing with little things like changed plans, dropped stuff, computer foul-ups, misunderstandings. Then, when the big stuff shows up, I automatically choose to flow with it. And life is easy, and I can have fun, and it’s all good.

Why is it so easy? Why do I enjoy myself? How do I know how to choose?

When I choose to stay sad, or blue, or depressed, I don’t have fun. People disappoint me. Stuff goes wrong, I feel misunderstood, sunshine feels mocking. I have a difficult time feeling productive, I often don’t sleep well. and the list goes on.

I also make bad decisions, choices that keep me stuck, and stuck often means that I just sink deeper.

Sometimes, I feel like that because I am keeping myself in a bad situation. And I get the idea that I can’t leave it. Can’t. That’’s what I chose for years, can’t. I can’t do that, I can’t leave him, I can’t go there, I can’t can’t can’t. It all just sucks.

Victim. Martyr. It’s all your fault, and no one else can do what I can do. Except when I can’t.

The way I get out of it, the only way, is to choose. I have to decide that I am going to make my life nicer, and do what it takes. I may need some help, I will need to change some of my favorite bad beliefs, I may need to lose some relationships. Misery buddies don’t support a nice life, they adore to rehearse the bad stuff, so I will have to break up with them. There have been times in my life, twice, when I had to leave a group of misery buddies. I got lonesome, but I felt way better.

Choosing to smile, choosing to look for the good, choosing to seek out the hidden fun, choosing to connect, choosing to engage, is all my choice. The more I choose that stuff, the easier it gets, the nicer my day goes, and the faster I remember to chose it when I can.

How have I changed from choosing the dark side to choosing the light?

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Feelin’ Groovy

When I’m feeling crappy, the last thing I want is to be reminded that it’s my choice. Frankly, it’s one of the reasons I love my decks of CQ cards, because then it’s the card, and not you, who is reminding me.

How do I know I’m responsible for me? What makes me take charge of my life?

Guess who’s been feeling kinda crappy kinda a lot lately? Oh, yeah. So, I sit on my porch, feeling not-good, thinking about all the changes in my life that I’m having negative emotional judgments about, and I see in my mind’s eye, Pema Chodron, pacing in the snow and saying something like, “When you feel bad, Pam, it is a reminder that you are in a bad habit-loop. You can choose to get out of it, Our natural state is feeling good.”

Why can I choose? What makes me decide? How do I know I can?

Now who can get mad at a phantom Pema? Um, I can. And then I think about that advice, and I remember that I get to choose how I feel, I can change my feelings like my socks.

My phantom Pema isn’t telling me not to feel what I’m feeling. Rather, she is simply reminding me that when I am feeling bad, I’m resisting what is. I’m saying no to what life is offering me now, and any silver linings that may be had.

Sometimes, that’s exactly what I want to do. (Insert “raspberry” here.) (Or is it a Bronx Cheer?) (You know what I mean, that sound you make by blowing through closed lips with your tongue sticking out.)

So I feel my bad feelings, and then they move on through, and I can go back to feeling good. Except that sometimes, I get the idea that feeling good is bad. I feel guilty for being happy. As though the loved one I’m grieving, or the changes that are happening, would be mad at me for not suffering on their behalf. No, I’m serious, I do that. Until I catch myself.

Thing is, when we let life flow, our feelings and emotions flow, those feelings and emotions don’t last very long. We are a powerful, dynamic system, and thoughts are moving through at a brisk rate.

‘Nother thing is, the purpose of life is to be happy. Not stuff happy, or event happy, but all the way through, deep down, soul happy. Part of that happiness is experiencing life all the way through, just as it is right now. Sometimes right now has loss in it. And, if we are paying attention, we will notice that there is always loss, and always gain, in each moment.

This is really good news for us because it means that we can feel good about feeling sad, or scared, or pissed off, when we are feeling it clean. And it’s a wonderful motivator for cleaning up our stuff.

I know a bunch of you don’t wanna do that because you are apprehensive about wrecking relationships with your loved ones by uncovering bad or scary stuff. There are ways to resolve your ancient traumas without having to have conscious memories about them. Look ‘em up, seek ‘em out. Cleaning that stuff up makes such a difference.

I choose my quality of life, and if my life sucks, I’m the one responsible. The sooner I own it, the sooner I can fix it. And it’s okay for you to Bronx cheer me on that one.

How have I changed from blaming to knowing the choice is all mine?

Friday, February 07, 2014

Fanning the Desire Fire

What is the most powerful Creative Question? I bet you know. It’s sure my favorite question.

This question is the beginning of everything good, the transition from stuck to splendid, from sad to glad, from meh to yay.

This is the question that is fundamental to each moment, however brief, in our day. It directs our thoughts, our emotions and feeling, our actions. When we claim this question as our own, we have started to take responsibility for our lives, and better they will most certainly become.

Why can I choose? What makes me decide? Where do I want to go? How do I want to be? What do I want to do?

Choice. Thousands of them all day long. We are so used to making them that we mostly don’t even notice. They are often out of our awareness, and, in long strings, they become our routines, our habits. We start the instant we wake up, and chug along making them for the rest of our day. We make choices that support our well being, make us comfy, put things off. We choose to be kind, to be mean, to love, or to hate. We choose what to eat, whether we’re thirsty, if we want to pee.

We choose to believe lies, to be afraid, to worry, to ignore. We choose to create beauty, simplicity, ugliness, complexity. misery, joy.

We choose to look at our crap and own it, or not. We choose to clean it up, or not.

How do I know I am powerful? What makes me strong? Why do I choose to see the good?

I admit, there are times when I feel like I have no choice. When I notice that feeling, I like to start making up outrageous choices. Crazy things I would never, or could never, do. They help me remember that feeling like there is only one thing I can do is in itself a choice.

Why am I so creative? What makes me find solutions? What is my heart’s desire?

It is our baby nature, our immature self, that likes to focus on what we don’t want, what we don’t like; the toddler, sobbing on the floor over a broken cheese stick. I haven’t got it down pat, I have days when I feel like that baby, and want to fall on the floor kicking and screaming for something I can’t have or don’t want. But, little by little, more often than not, I am past that, with an eye out for the opportunities to move my life in the directions I want it to go.

Why do I choose to shed my fixed delusions? Why do I choose to unchoose my unsupportive beliefs? Why do I choose to dump my mislearnings?

That’s profound stuff right there. Those questions will transform our lives in ways we can’t imagine in the place we’re currently at.

It may not be comfortable. It may not feel familiar. It may feel taxing, but boy, howdy, it’s gonna shake things up in a really good way. Like, in a what’s the most wonderful thing you could ever imagine happening kind of way.

Why am I worth it?