The Key To Making Lasting Inner Change
I wrote this in response to a comment from Brian to the last post on living and coping with regret. However with going away on holiday, the kids being off school and already busy with extra work I didn’t get the time to edit and post it. So sorry for the delay in posting, but here it is…
Last week I was noticing that in many respects I was waiting. Waiting for something to happen that I would take as my cue, for me to act or make a change. And I realised that my particular situations were much like other people I was interacting with, where I could clearly see that it was them who needed to make the change first.
And as Michael Jackson’s song, Man In The Mirror, seems to be always playing somewhere in a day at the moment, the message struck home to remind me that we have to always start with the Man in the Mirror.
photo credit: newtype2011
So I’d decided to write about this and then when I got back to my computer I saw Brian’s comment;
“Shift your focus to where they are at. Lose any concern for anything, except that to want the best for them. Not what you think will be the best for them. But that they are happy”.
This is my biggest challenge with regard to my ex wife, as her happiness also involves the one she’s with – a previous friend. There’s so much hurt there, along with my regrets. I can imagine any person of greatness, Buddha, Christ, etc., would do just what you suggest. I am on the fence myself. Your words sit in front of me like a fork in the road and there is great emotion about taking either path.
“Soon you will have great relationships with each of them as Individuals and they will love you and want to be around you”.
This is the part, I suspect, where faith takes over for someone in my place. It certainly connects to how I’ve always wanted to be. Thanks Rob.
I believe there is a huge misunderstanding commonly held about greatness. People generally believe that genuises are born not made. That some people are naturally greater and more capable than others.
And so all our stories of legendary figures, from Robin Hood to Leonardo Da Vinci to David Beckham make them seem destined to triumph. Especially when it comes to religious icons like Jesus, Buddha and so on the tales become more and more supernatural.
Religion has been accused of many, many crimes. It has motivated wars, slaughtered non-believers and so on. But the worst, by far, has been the instances where it has led people to believe that they are not equal to and so capable of the same potential as anyone else living or dead.
There is nothing stopping you or I being as great as Buddha, or Jesus, or any other individual.
It is just the mythology that surrounds those who achieve greatness that makes them seem removed from the same struggles that we face. As if the greatness they eventually achieved was inevitable before birth.
I don’t think that is true and I think it demeans their achievement.
If you try to piece together accounts of the man, rather than the legend, you will find instances where they struggled to accept what they knew was their path. Of course, we know that they arrived there in the end, but we have the abbreviated version. We missed out on the doubt and insecurity they felt while they got up to speed with what they knew must be done.
We are all physical and so we all face physical limitations. The distinction is that some people understand and accept that while they are physical beings, their sense of consciousness isn’t. And so they do not limit it to their body, they allow it to fly unrestrained. Therefore they were able to burst far beyond the limitations of their physical senses and explore a greater universe of thought.
In other words, they literally transcended their circumstances, found a better way of looking at it and returned to the physical world with such an enlarged view of the world that they caused it to grow towards their level of consciousness.
As Brian says, there are at least two paths open to him (and to you). One will lead to you seeming to achieve greatness and the other can range from good to awful.
It often is too scary to take the road to greatness because it feels like too big a leap to make from where you are. It involves more unknowns than you are comfortable with. Which means that the choice feels like walking across a high tightrope without any certainty that there is a beam to walk across.
Yet everyone who has ever performed a heroic deed, has ever forgiven another, found a breakthrough innovation or has ever overcome a problem has followed this same process.
The Way To Making Lasting Inner Change
Any comfortable change begins internally. If the outside world changes before your inner landscape is ready for it, you will feel upset and/or uneasy with the changes.
And so the path to greatness or even to just avoiding pain begins when you are able to become more flexible.
People get depressed when they see no way out, which is another way of saying that they are trapped in their current perspective.
People feel bored and in a rut, not because there isn’t, or couldn’t be, anything exciting in their life, but because they lack the ability to look at their life with a fresh perspective.
The happiest people are those who have the most flexibility of thought. If the way they look at a situation feels bad, they are able to find new perspectives until they improve the way that they feel. Sometimes this can be pollyannaish and lead to a skittish and shallow happiness. This is because the person is afraid of the negative perspectives and so avoids noticing them. But the deepest levels of happiness and awareness comes from being able to see from every possible vantage point, both light and dark as in the diagram above.
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