Oneness And Strength

We are often so busy believing that people are out to get us, that we forget they are human and trying their best, just like we are.

When you’re experiencing emotional pain of any kind, you find it impossible to see the best in anything or anyone. You can’t access the loving and gentle part of you and instead see everyone as being against you in some way. This is why it’s never good to make any decisions in this state. If you do…you will always end up regretting it.

In section 4, I spoke about hurt people hurting people. If someone is acting in an unkind manner, you’ll know immediately that they are hurting inside because you understand they don’t act this way when they feel happy and secure.

I am not excusing poor behaviour, I am giving you the peace of letting go. You now know that, holding onto feelings of being wronged, only hurts you, whilst the other person will continue feeling grumpy with no empathy for you, until they allow their innate peaceful state to return.

When you can hold, at the forefront of your mind, that you live your life from that place of love, not only will you have a far improved experience of life, but others will feel safe to shed their unpleasant feelings far more quickly…and equilibrium will be yours again.

This may not always feel available to you, especially at the beginning, but patience will bring very great rewards.

I like the following analogy for this:

Imagine an inflatable beach ball, floating happily on the surface of a pool. Pushing it down under the water is hard work and the longer you hold it there, and the deeper you push it, the more tiring it is for you. As soon as you let go, though, the ball will simply bob right back up to the surface again and you will very quickly recover from your exertion.

Always be as you as you can be

You don’t need to change yourself to be good enough, you are good enough; you are perfect exactly as you are. How could you be anything else? All you ever need to do is remember there is only love. Ever. All judgement, all imperfection is construed in a fearful part of yourself so cannot be trusted.

You really don’t need to change a thing…except maybe how accepting of, and kind to yourself, you are.

In fact, if you pretend to be something you are not, just to make yourself more appealing to someone, you will spend your whole life living up to the expectation you built yourself, or else slip back into the real you, and no longer be accepted by those who bought into the false you, that you created to impress them. If you turn up as the authentic you, you’re encouraging others to do the same. You want to know who people really are, right?

All people are perfect…just a little grumpy sometimes.

If you can keep yourself in a loving place, despite this, you will see how much more quickly they feel safe and come back to okayness too. This naturalness is exactly how you want it…you surely don’t want anyone to have such low self-esteem that they pretend to be what you seem to want…this will not make them feel good and is exhausting for them. Everyone deserves to be real…and to be happy in their own skin.

Living in kindness is natural…passive. Projecting a better image of yourself is active and hard work. Being peaceful is how you are before you let your stories crowd in on you.

Now I hope you see that no one is against you. When you’re unhappy, you just unwittingly put yourself into victim mode…and become a victim. Happily, when you see this, it stops happening.

I strongly believe there is a kindness behind life, that a far greater power than us, has our backs. Whatever you believe, please know that you are held and you are safe.

What happens, happens for you, not to you.

None of us like the feeling of being offended, resentful, jealous, defensive, hurt, trapped or any other fearful emotion, yet most people feel them quite a lot of the time…just as you did. They don’t know there’s a choice, and when they’re told there is, they don’t believe it. How could it be true, after all? Obviously if someone or something is unfair or just unmistakably wrong, you’re going to be cross, right? If people aren’t as attentive as you think they should be, you’re going to feel hurt. It’s as plain as the nose on your face!

You know by now, that whilst there is a lot of compelling evidence to support the idea that the outside world can affect you, and it’s only natural to experience downs as well as ups….life just doesn’t work that way.

I have always been very lucky; I was brought up by a nice family in a lovely house in a beautiful part of the country. I passed my exams, was promoted into good jobs, got onto the property ladder early. I married a successful man and had two wonderful children. We had lots of holidays and went to great parties; I had a charmed life.

Yet I still managed to feel hurt very often, still managed to be anxious, still managed to be depressed, still managed to want to end my life….because what was outside me, couldn’t affect how I felt.

All the opportunities and luxuries in the world cannot make you feel good…and all the discomfort and nastiness cannot make you feel bad…unless you let it.

I put up with all the horrible feelings for a very many years, accepting them as unavoidable. It wasn’t until my second marriage started fraying around the seams, that I finally saw I needed to do something new if I wanted something new….I started to accept responsibility.

I didn’t actually notice the full amount of stress I had been experiencing until it was all over. One day, after I’d started feeling okay, something pushed my buttons, and all the old feelings came rushing back, temporarily. I realised that, for decades, I had lived in near constant fight or flight response.

You probably recognise this because most of us live continually with low, or even high levels of anxiety and/or depression.

You wouldn’t have realised how much time, stress, anxiety and depression took up. You would have thought you were coping pretty well, despite them, but see now, that decisions took forever because you couldn’t trust yourself, and that you weren’t completing tasks efficiently or effectively; stress is paralysing.

You probably felt indignant, angry or resentful most of the time, often sulking and grumbling…and missing all the joy that was available to you.

I want to assure you that understanding your thoughts aren’t real, won’t stop you being human…won’t stop you being empathetic. You will still feel the whole gamut of emotions but you will no longer be a slave to them, you won’t need to attach to them, won’t give them any energy if you don’t want to. You will know you have a choice and don’t need to believe them or act upon them; you won’t need to endow them with any more value than you do a fictional book or

film.

One thing you will love most about gaining the understanding I am sharing with you, is that life will keep getting better and better as your understanding deepens. Occasionally you will still feel a little offended or cross but it’ll only last moments.

You will come to be delighted with these occasional undesirable feelings because they will help you gain an even greater insight into your mind and will give you the chance to weed out another thought that you have been believing unnecessarily.

Every single thing that provokes in you a reaction, teaches you about you. The more you recognise and accept that these, now smaller, feelings of anger, hurt, jealousy or whatever you’re experiencing, are not coming from situations and people around you, the more hugely you will move forward.

Whenever you allow yourself to believe the resentment isn’t to do with you, you will continue to look in that wrong direction and block yourself from learning and releasing the pain.

Before you enrolled on this program, you were holding on tightly to your suffering…you didn’t know there was an option other than to accept an invitation to the pity party, and this took you deeper and deeper into misery and further and further away from freedom and bliss.

Now you are taking control of your own happiness and learning to let go (quit holding on), you’ll be finding it’s so much simpler than you imagined!

You now have a new perspective, and instead of dreading any unpleasant feeling, you can use it as a learning tool.

This is why I say that resentment is your new best friend…it is a moment of discomfort followed by a lifetime of joy. What’s not to love?

Make a list of all the resentments you hold as they come up, and see how many you can accept as teaching you to let go. Also note which ones still look real….like you are correct to feel angry about them.

Review this list as you move forward, you’ll find it a really good gauge for how far you’ve come.

If I had said this to you a few weeks ago, you would have looked at me incredulously, angry that I could find this so easy and that I had presumed this was a possible task for you. Yet, now, you know that you can always choose whether to see the ‘negative’ or the ‘positive’ in any situation…and that this choice will get easier and easier. Every day may not be as you’d have chosen but you can still decide to react in a calm and rational way, whatever happens.

People who wrestle most with their sensitivities, will have experienced difficulties with mood swings and being deeply affected by people and situations their whole lives; they will have thought this was just the way life works. It isn’t until life becomes insufferable, that they reach out to me for help. I absolutely love and am humbled that I can help them recapture the joy, in every single area of their lives, they feared was gone forever.

You will already be experiencing the difference in how you perceive the people and events in your life, and how much simpler everything is. The only time you’ll be fearful now, is when you forget you’re okay.

The more this understanding becomes a way of life for you, the more you’ll see how uncomplicated and effortless it is. The concepts are incredibly simple…the only challenge is tweaking your mindset.

As you see more and more amazing changes in your life, you are likely to want to tell your loved ones. You will find, though, that your vocabulary just won’t be adequate to describe the formless, intangible, non-physical concepts. As I drop further into my knowledge, I find there are no more words to explain that I now experience it even more deeply. There are no difference in the words you’ll say now, and in a few more weeks time – “My life is better, more gentle and more fulfilling than it has ever been and I am always happy and grateful”, yet it will feel very different to you. I therefore use various analogies and ways of explaining so that you can see what I see.

I loved coming up with the following explanation of how perfectly and gloriously simple, life can be.

The only 4 choices you’ll ever have to make

It really is this straightforward; I wonder now, how we could not have known this all our lives!

1 Stay in your situation and be okay with that
2 Leave your situation and be okay with that
3 Stay in your situation and don’t be okay with that
4 Leave your situation and don’t be okay with that

For situation you can, of course, read, job, relationship, house or anything else that is relevant to you.

The reason you enrolled on my program was because you were struggling so badly with your life; this was a consequence of you continually choosing one of the latter two options. This is not, of course, because you were actively choosing to be unhappy, but because you hadn’t realised there was another way.

May we agree before I go on any further that you will never want to choose options 3 or 4? It is your choice but I’d always recommend 1 or 2!

In section 4 you learned about why arguing with what is will never have a positive outcome for you.

When things don’t go as you planned, the easiest thing to do is feel disgruntled. Having this type of feeling, is very unpleasant…usually much more unpleasant than getting on with doing the thing you didn’t choose. What this program does, is make the choice to decide to be okay with how things are going, much easier.

So, having accepted that you’re only ever going to choose numbers one or two, to be okay whichever way you go, the only thing left is to decide where you are going to be…in or out…knowing that you will be perfectly okay either way.

If a situation is not serving you well, not what makes your soul sing, not healthy in any way, then take a step away from it. The decision whether to stick with a situation is as much your choice as to be okay with whatever your decision is, without overthinking it or wondering if you made the right call.

I’ll leave you to ponder on the beautiful and wise Serenity Prayer.

God
Grant me the
serenity to
accept the things
I cannot change…
courage to change
those things I can
and wisdom
to know the
difference

I challenge you, for the rest of the day, to love every moment as if you chose it; to focus on all the good things in your life. Whether you rise to that challenge or not, however well it goes for you, try it again tomorrow…and the next day….and the next day….and watch your life improve.

Go boldly into your life and love and live every single second, even the bits that maybe you wouldn’t usually have chosen.

What have you got to lose?

A lot less than you have to gain, I can assure you.