Do you let things happen to you or take responsibility?
Are you powerless or in control?
This is one of the most important lessons I have learned.
I did it the hard way. Read this and maybe you won’t have to.
I have dabbled with this personal power/creating what you want stuff, on and off, for many years. I probably first read Think and Grow Rich about 30 years ago. I would get all excited for a while and then drift back into mediocrity.
It took a major trauma to knock me out of that cycle. I won’t bore you with the details but I found myself off work with depression.
For a few months I was quite dysfunctional and very solidly in the victim mode. Why have THEY done this to me? Why don’t they understand my situation? They are out to get me.
Soon though, I reached the point where I started to think, “this is no good. What can I do to get myself out of this state?” As I often do, I ended up in a book shop.
Although I later bought one good book about getting out of depression, what first got my attention was the mind, body, spirit section. Two of the early books I read were, A New Earth and The Celestine Prophecy, both big at the time.
I also began to search the internet and it was almost as if I was led from one thing to the next. I can’t remember the exact journey I followed because that whole period is still a bit of blur to me.
Suffice it to say that I have read, listened to and watched a whole lot of stuff since then and I have tried out different technological solutions to try to help me along the path to enlightenment. One of the things I want do here is write about my impressions of some of them.
My thoughts are necessarily subjective but it might help if you are considering them.
The real point is that I spent a long time feeling that this illness was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Now, I would tell you the exact opposite. Going through this experience helped to get me solidly onto the path of personal development.
I am not a dabbler anymore. I am taking it seriously and I am in it for the long haul. I intend to make it work. This truly was an adversity that carried within it, the seed of a greater benefit.
I had another revelation when I was just about ready to get back to work. A really weird thing happened. I had a meeting with somebody from the Occupational Health department of the company I work for. It was to discuss starting back on a part time basis to get into the swing of things.
Now, I had always thought that while I was not working, I was a problem and they had to deal with me. Once I was back, I would be forgotten.
It turned out that I was exactly right about that, but that is not the point. With that in mind, I told her that going back to work didn’t mean that everything was OK, because it wasn’t.
And then it happened!
A voice in my right ear. It said, “it’s only not OK because you say it’s not”. It was my voice, like a little me sitting on my right shoulder.
And I instantly knew that it was right! Emotions are just our reactions to situations and we have the ability to choose how to react. If I continued to be, not OK, it would be because I was choosing to.
It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.
I was trying to stop a big smile from breaking out on my face and I was sure it must be obvious. I had to get out of there as quickly as possible and think about this.
When I did, everything was very clear to me. I had blamed the company for putting me into a bad situation. They said that it was my decision. I believed that they didn’t take into account the stress I was under when I made the decision.
But none of that mattered. Who cares whose ‘fault’ it was. What was important was that I take responsibility for me.
While I was blaming ‘THEM’, I was giving away my power. I was accepting that stuff just happens and you have to live with it.
If I didn’t accept that I had created that situation, I wouldn’t be able to create my future either. And now I have every intention of creating my future and in the way I want it. This whole project is about proving that it is possible.
P.S.
I did wonder if I was a little bit manic at that time.
There was a period of several weeks when my little voice was with me. If the thought even hinted at crossing my mind that I was bored or tired or frustrated or angry, it would jump in and ask me why I was doing that to myself.
It reached the point where it didn’t have to speak, I knew what it was going to say.
Eventually, the whole process was short circuited. In the same way that hitting your thumb with a hammer causes pain, any negative thought would trigger a smile.
And I did feel genuinely good. This period didn’t last long though before I settled back to ‘normal’.
WOW!
Looking back at what I’ve written makes me realize I must still have been pretty much out there when I started back to work. It didn’t stop me from learning an amazing lesson though.
There is a saying that with great power comes great responsibility. I would reverse that and say that with responsibility comes power.