“People often think that the feelings they experience are caused by external events, situations, and the actions of others, but it is what we think about these things that really determines how we feel…”
-The Thinking Feeling Connection, Center for Clinical Interventions

​I woke the other morning with a realization, one that empowers me, empowers all of us, and this is it.

Our true power, the power that has been with us throughout our lives, is that we get to choose how we want to experience our lives. We can’t always choose what we experience, but we can choose how we experience it.

That means that whatever happens in my life, whatever situation I find myself in, whatever people I interact with, whatever things are there to support my daily life, I have control over what I choose to think, and therefore feel, about all of it.

The thoughts that we choose to think about whatever is happening in our lives decide how we are going to feel about what is happening and determine our experience.

For example, I drove into a gas station with four pumps. I pulled up to the pump directly in front of me. It was the only one available. The attendant pumped my gas. I paid him and was waiting for change. The car in front of me finished and pulled out of the station. I was having a conversation with my young daughter seated beside me when I heard a banging on my window. I turned to see a red-faced, spluttering man standing there. I rolled down my window (foolish me) and he raged at me for not pulling up to the next pump so that he could pull up where I was. Something inside me dug in my heels at his rudeness, and I told him I was waiting for change and would leave when I got it. He spluttered and raged some more, then got back in his car and roared around to the pump on the other side.

Shaken by all that anger directed at me, I went home and stewed for hours about what I should have said or done.

That’s when I had a choice to choose how I was going to feel about that experience. Instead of supporting myself in my thoughts, I directed all of my power to feeling bad about myself. At the time I didn’t know how else to process the experience.

What if instead I had just allowed myself to feel my feelings. I was upset. And it was OK to feel that and allow it to move through me and out the other side.

Feel your feelings and move on. Don’t allow yourself to wallow or become attached to the negativity, but do allow yourself to feel what you need to feel. Then, as soon as you are able, move into more positive thoughts. 

As I felt ready, I could have allowed myself to perceive the event in a more positive light, even if I wasn’t yet feeling positive.

Choose the thoughts you are going to think about the event and use positive self-talk and affirmations, to positize your experience of the event.

I could have affirmed to myself, “Everything is for my benefit. I love myself. God loves me. I may not know how this will benefit me, but I know that it will. I love myself. God loves me. Anger is my teacher. My world is my mirror. Perhaps there’s something I’m angry about that I haven’t acknowledged? I love myself. God loves me.”  

Our true power source is our ability to choose our inner experience of everything that happens in our lives.

We choose the thoughts we think. We can choose to think thoughts that support us.

The belief that you are always loved and cared for by God, makes it possible to perceive even a seemingly negative experience in a positive light.
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A firm belief in a beneficent Universe, the belief that everything that happens, happens for our benefit, makes this all possible.

“Everything is always working out for me.”
-Abraham-Hicks

It can be supportive to look back at your life and see your growth.

It can be beneficial to look back at all you have overcome, and the growth that might not have happened had you not lived through what you did. Everything is always working out for you, even if it isn’t easy to understand it when you are going through it.

At the age of thirty-five, with two young daughters, I lost my first husband to cancer. The experience eventually thrust me head-long onto my spiritual path. A path I might not have pursued so avidly had I not lost my husband. I did not perceive this benefit at the time, yet it set me on my life path.

“Remember who you are. You are a powerful being. You can do anything you want to do, as long as you want to do it. Looking in hindsight will prove that to you. In the past you would not have thought that you could do what you did, going through all the things that you went through in your life. Yet looking in hindsight, what you went through, you can pat yourself on the back and say, ‘I did go for an adventure, and not only did I survive, I got stronger because of it!’”

-Red Feather, Mystic Pearls of Red Feather

When you think positive, self-affirming thoughts about each experience, each event, each person, each thing in your life, you feel better.

As you consciously affirm yourself and your experiences in your thoughts, pretty soon you feel good. As you feel good and continue to feel good, you attract more of what feels good into your life, because what you focus upon increases. That’s the lovely side-effect of choosing thoughts that feel good. That’s the benefit of consciously creating your inner experience of your life.

You are a powerful being!

You have been all along. You have been creating your experience of your life with each thought that you choose to think. You’ve been sending out the vibes and attracting more of what you’ve been thinking about.

Now is your opportunity to make that a conscious choice and take charge of this power you’ve been wielding all your life.

This upcoming New Year of 2020 is the perfect time to resolve to become the conscious creator of your inner experience of your life. You are more powerful than you know.

“…Unwarranted fear or worry will always be based upon something in your imagination or your memory.”
― Gavin de Becker
 
Has fear shown up in your life recently? Do you have fears, birthed in the past, that recur triggered by events in your life?
 
As uncomfortable as it can be, this kind of fear is a gift, because it can show you the door to understanding. The key to opening that door is to ask for understanding and guidance about why fear is showing up at this time in your life. Ask to be told what you need to know. Ask to be shown the gift of this fear.
 
For me, fear manifested recently as my husband attended a convention in Wichita for five days. I’ve shared before that his leaving has often triggered old abandonment fears in me. I know these are old fears and yet somehow the inner dialog comes up with current reasons to feel anxious. Reasons that are quite compelling. Be that as it may, I support myself, using the tools, nurturing myself, and I get through it. Some times better than others.
 
This time I chose to do that and add in a different approach. I asked for support from my Spiritual Support Team. I asked to be told what I needed to know. I asked to be shown the gift of understanding behind this door of fear. Here's what I learned.
 
Fear is created by wounded thinking. Wounded thinking is created by negative interpretations of past experiences.
 
Fear makes mountains out of molehills.
 
When you are anxious everything looks worse than it is. Yet, understanding the fear, accepting the fear, feeling compassion for that part of yourself that is afraid, shines the light of love upon the fear and shrinks that mountain back down into a molehill.
 
Seeing your fear as a gift reorients your thinking. Your perspective shifts from fear to love. You feel yourself relaxing about your fear and letting it be what it is. You say to yourself, “There I go again. Oh well. I wonder where the gift is?”

The gift my fear brought me was to remind me that shining the light of God upon the darkness of abandonment dispels it.  I am never abandoned or alone. I am companioned and supported in Spirit.  Love dissolves fear. 

When you shine the light of love upon fear, fear no longer has power over you. It has fulfilled its purpose and dissolves away.
 
Now that’s a gift.

Photo by Plush Design Studio on Unsplash
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 “It is not about me, my self. It is about God, my Self.”
-Unknown
 
“Be in the world but not of the world.' The words are from Jesus. But I have not the slightest idea how to accomplish that or even if it's possible. The world will always poke you in the chest with its index finger.”
― Francisco X. Stork, Marcelo in the Real World
 
             
A few years back, I asked God for help in maintaining my inward focus at rehearsals for a women’s singing group I was a member of. There was a reason I needed this help.
 
Although I loved the singing and enjoyed being with the other women, my tendency was to focus my attention outward. I attended to all the people in the room, looking about, conversing, scattering my energies about the room attempting to control what I could not control. My ego self inevitably jumped in and started judging and criticizing myself. This all left me feeling off-center and out of kilter. I came home from rehearsals feeling tired and out of sorts.    
 
The morning I asked for help, I had the thought to bring my knitting to rehearsal, as I had seen some other women do. I did not knit while we sang, only during breaks. It was enough. It was the answer to my prayer.
 
As I focused my attention on knitting, I was delighted to find that it kept me focused inwardly. It helped me to relax, stay centered, breathe and think, “God.” I found that even as I carried on conversations with others the knitting held my attention and kept me feeling balanced.
 
When I was knitting my eyes were focused on the work in my lap. I could hold a conversation, I could look up and attend to who I was talking to, I could be generally aware of what is going on in the room, yet, my eyes were always pulled back to the knitting, my attention stayed focused. I was not scattering my energy, I was focusing it.
 
When I knit, and this was the important part for me, I was not trying to control what was going on in the room. Instead, I was controlling what was going on inside me. That was the only thing I truly had control over. Anything else was a waste of energy.
 
Knitting held just enough of my attention so that I was able to stay slightly apart, in a good way, a healthy way.
 
That was true then, and it is still true now. It is all about attention. Where your attention is, is where your energy flows. Spiritual development is learning how to selectively attend to your God Self within.
 
God is within each of us. When we feel centered, our focus is from our God Self. It is as if we are looking out at the world from our heart center. It can be almost a physical sensation in the area of the heart chakra. We feel deep compassion.
 
You may experience a slight feeling of separation from all that surrounds you, as if you are not wholly a part of it. And indeed you are not, for just as when I was knitting, much of your attention is focused elsewhere, experiencing from within. It is as if you are inwardly knitting.
 
In time perhaps, we can all learn to knit from within no matter whether we are knitters or not, but for now, knitting on the outside works just fine.
 
Photo by Rebecca Grant on Unsplash