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How Do Our Experiences Influence Our Choices?

4/29/2015

How do our experiences influence our choices? Many of our choices are made because we tend to choose what is familiar rather than meet a new challenge. Sometimes our experiences, such as growing up in an alcoholic family, can push us to make choices that will take us as far away from that experience as we can get. Sometimes we tried to meet a challenge, and we were unsuccessful. Consequently, we are afraid to take that path again.

Sometimes we make choices in order to re-experience the past. This can be good or bad, depending on the type of experience. For instance, drugs can be an experience that was temporarily enjoyable, but it is not necessarily a wise decision to go back there. Sometimes we have experiences that affirm our talents and abilities, and we make choices to continue along that path.

Whether we like it or not, our past experiences do influence our choices. So, do we just go along with the program or do we choose to be Conscious Creators of our lives? That is everyone’s personal choice. It is your journey. You have to be aware of WHY you’re making the choices you are.

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How About The Crazies in Your Life?

4/22/2015

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Is there someone in your life driving you crazy? Someone who makes you cringe at the sight of them? You might even visualize all the bad things you would like to see happen to them. You just thought of someone – didn't you? So what do you do about this?

The way I see it, you can wait for them to change - which might mean waiting until hell freezes over - or you can change the way you think about them. I believe your best odds lie in changing the way you think about them. Do you agree?

I want to share a story with you that a lady told me. She was at war with an office full of people she described as mean, back-stabbing, lying, tattle-tales (and some other words that I can't say here). The atmosphere was keeping her awake at night, and she was barely able to force herself to go to work.

Out of desperation and self-preservation, she made a decision that she was no longer going to participate in the pettiness. When she looked into their eyes, she refused to see them as their nasty traits, but instead, she chose to see them for who she believed they really were under all that anger and pettiness. She also decided to be helpful to others in spite of the fact that she received no thanks. Gradually things changed. People in her office started smiling at each other. The lines drawn between responsibilities began to disappear, and lo and behold, they started helping each other! She told me that the office was transformed in just four months.

Let me ask you — what was the biggest change that happened—the one she valued the most? You got it! The change that had happened in her. She said, "I now know that the power I have to change our world starts with my willingness to change what is going on in me." In spite of it all, she figured out that she could enjoy her life. We all can.

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Who Is Speaking Now?

4/12/2015

You are never alone because the power to live a better, more prosperous life is staring back at you from a mirror. It’s true that you live in one body, but you have attitudes within that are in a constant battle to speak through your mouth. To add more interest to the mix, they each have their own idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. This is why if you find yourself emotionally reacting to what someone else says, before you speak, make sure you know which attitude is trying to speak through your mouth.

Anger Is A Thief

4/8/2015

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Anger needs energy just like any negative feeling. It has helped me to realize that any time I give myself over to anger, I feed it. It does not need a well-thought-out reason to go into action. Why? Because it seems like the right way to feel at the time. It is always good to remember that anger is a learned emotion, and life is all about unlearning the bad side of feelings so that the good waiting in the wings can take their place. It is also good to remember that anger knows what it needs to protect its existence.

The problem is that anger blocks from us our intelligence. It steals from us the time and energy we have to make intelligent and meaningful choices. People carry anger in their emotional nature, and this anger looks for reasons to express itself. Consequently, circumstances can be an excuse for anger to be fed.

Anger is more of a habit, which is why it does not need well-thought-out reasons to ignite it. Anger is a borrowed emotional habit that is fed every time we give ourselves over to it. This idea is one that few, if any, are willing to consider. In other words, anger works with negative feelings to avoid the one thing we came to this earth to do—learn from our mistakes. We came here to learn how to utilize our God-given wisdom to choose how we are going to feel instead of being a mindless robot, subject to the forces of habit.

This learned emotion called anger steals from us the one thing that should have the most value—the awareness necessary to see the power we have to create our lives and not be its victims.

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Feelings Influence Every Aspect Of Our Lives

4/7/2015

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What are feelings? Feelings are emotions that define our reactions to and expectations of ourselves and the world. Negative feelings are usually borrowed so they have no real foundation, but we tend to trust in them nonetheless because they are familiar. Feelings (emotions) are necessary for manifestation. Therefore, what we feel, coupled with what we think is the determinant for our experiences.

When we have feelings, we need to take the time to determine if the feeling matches the experience. In other words, is my feeling a reaction to circumstances that don’t actually exist, or am I actually using my intellect to make a decision about how I am going to feel? It is often difficult to accomplish this on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis because we are creatures of habit. In order to move forward, however, we have to break this mindless chain of reaction.

The bottom line is that feelings influence every aspect of our lives – how we deal with ourselves and how we deal with others.

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Recognizing My Unique Path

4/5/2015

What I overlooked for so long was that I always had the key that opened the door to the sweet spot, but It was like my nose—so close that I looked right past it. I kept listening to how other people found theirs. Selling their experiences may have made them rich, but it only led to disappointment for me. The way they thought and felt was unique and special to them. All the training and education in the world could not create their sweet spot in me! You are different than I am. You have unique mental and physical processes that are unique to you. Each of us is different, and so the method that is designed to make you or me successful requires our own uniqueness to make it work. We have to go through our own process, our own discipline, to find our sweet spot. Perhaps the greatest pipe dream is thinking we can use someone else’s mental and emotional work to show us the path to success. It sounds great until we try to put it into practice.

It almost sounds like I’m saying that listening to what others say about spiritual growth is a waste of time, but I’m not. I am simply saying that attempts at self-improvement must be filtered through your own thoughts and feelings in order to establish the harmony that reaches for your highest good.

Finding the sweet spot within yourself is the key to better relationships and experiences in your life. Whatever your relationship with yourself, it is the cloth from which the pattern of your life is cut. Your life will mirror back to you the relationship you have with yourself. If you believe yourself to be inferior, you will draw to you people and experiences to support this. This is true for every attitude you have toward yourself. So, if you want to experience Life’s Sweet Spot, that place that gives you joy each and every day as you wake and go about your business, start by finding that sweet spot, that place of harmony, within yourself.

Creating Balance Within

4/1/2015

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So why is it so hard to create this balance within ourselves, this sweet spot? For one thing, we fail to recognize the consequences of mimicking others and embracing their attitudes as our own. We fail to see the buffers that come into being because we don’t want to see how absolutely ridiculous some of our beliefs about ourselves and the world are. We fail to see that we have turned over the control of our experiences to all those “false personalities” within us that we’ve created for dealing with different situations in our lives so that we feel more comfortable.

Until we accept that the experiences we have—the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly—are all there for a purpose, we will never be able to hold onto this sweet spot within ourselves. Being born onto this earth is not about having a place to live. Earth is a giant classroom. The teachers are not flesh and blood. The teachers are experiences.

We can tell how well we are learning the lessons by the discomfort we feel and how often we return to the same experiences time after time. I never liked the idea that anything less than success was my own fault and that it was a waste of time to blame life, other people or my past experiences. However, accepting the responsibility for your own experiences is a condition you have to face if you are interested in personal change. It takes an extremely brave soul to say, ”I am responsible for the conditions in which I live.” It’s much easier to play the “blame game.”

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Surfing The Rift

Learning to heal rifts or disagreements that pepper relationships of all kinds, including the one with yourself, that can make it difficult to move forward.

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John Dean Williamsen teaches about psychological balance and how to use your life experiences to achieve balance.

Surfing The Rift Blog by John Dean Williamsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How Do Our Experiences Influence Our Choices?

How About The Crazies in Your Life?

Who Is Speaking Now?

Anger Is A Thief

Feelings Influence Every Aspect Of Our Lives

Recognizing My Unique Path

Creating Balance Within

Surfing The Rift

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