Choosing To Open Up

Being open is not really hard … it just feels that way sometimes … and being open is simply necessary when you choose to live authentically and boldly as yourself.

So why does it seem so hard to open up, particularly when you feel something uncomfortable?

Because when you open up, not only are you choosing to allow others to see inside you but also to let things out … what you really think and feel, what you really want and desire, beyond your fearful ego-mind’s insidious need to protect and defend by withholding your deeper emotional truth.

Opening up to yourself requires a willingness to reveal to yourself who you really are and what’s really going on at any point in time. It is a process of unwrapping the layers of fearful thinking you have used to protect yourself … usually from feeling something you don’t want to feel. Yet when you open up and let yourself go all the way with your truth, everything changes and you will discover that being open is the pathway to inner peace.

When you choose to open up be prepared to feel things that you have been avoiding or suppressing, be prepared to confront fears and longings that you have been denying and be prepared to discover that what you feared would happen when you open up, usually doesn’t!

In fact, when you open up to yourself and others, others will open up to you. And when there is openness in your communication and relationships, genuine connection and responding occur and you and the other both get outcomes you enjoy.

Choosing to open up is like anything else in the paradigm of I Create The Whole Of My Own Reality … a choice you can make moment by moment because you choose to. And when you choose to open up, you have more choices about how to BE and what to DO so you can HAVE what you truly want.

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"Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears
but from getting to know them well."

Pema Chodron

Feelings Are Not Facts

Chances are you learned from an early age to judge your feelings - and yourself - when expressing a feeling others didn’t like.  And without any real education and experience of the value of your feelings, you shut down and began suppressing, repressing and depressing strong emotional reactions and feelings, particularly the ones you judge as not okay, not appropriate, “negative”.

Yet your ability to feel and react emotionally to things is part of being human and, as such, has value and purpose and the power to transform you and your experience of life.

First let go of the old childhood belief: “Some feelings are bad and some feelings are good” and instead adopt the belief: “Feelings are neither bad nor good, they are all just feelings and exist to let me know how I feel about whatever is occurring” .

Then realise your feelings show the stories you make up in your head, the meaning you give to everything that happens, often without checking to see if what you have assumed is actually what is happening. When you decide that what you feel is the truth about whatever is happening, you have just agreed with the story you made up!

You have turned the feeling into a fact - when in fact it is not the truth about the situation or experience, it is simply the truth, the fact of what you are feeling.

Accept that what you are feeling is okay … it has purpose and value and is something you can respond to. Then let yourself acknowledge it fully … which means feel it in your body and let it go … breathe and allow and let it release (Jill Bolte-Taylor says it takes 90 seconds for the energy to move through your body and release). You will discover the freedom that comes from being the cause of your feelings and emotions rather than at their effect.

When you stop turning your feelings into facts, when you stop recycling the old painful movies (and feelings) about your “not good enough" stuff you will free yourself to consciously choose the meaning you put on everything and how you feel.

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"Your feelings exist to be felt, responded to and released …not recycled."

How To Let Go

The first step in letting go of anything is to acknowledge that you are holding on … to the stories and the movies in your head, to the stuff of the past that you bring into your present by feeling today just like you felt yesterday about whatever has occurred. Tell the truth about what you are hanging onto and then you can choose to let go.

Simple … and not easy when unresolved feelings are involved and your wounded internal 3 year old just wants for things to be “made right”.

And here it is … again. The unhealed emotional wounds from past experiences keep you stuck in reliving those experiences in the here and now over and over again … and nothing much changes.

And it won’t as long as you keep recycling those memories and experiences and all the meaning you gave with the hope of working out “why” all this stuff happened to you and how you can get a different outcome. You cannot change the past … but you can change what happens next if you are willing to consider shifting yourself from a context of “victim/persecutor/rescuer” (The Old Paradigm of Fear) to a context of “I Create The Whole Of My Own Reality” (The New Paradigm of Love).

What if nothing really “happens to you” but rather everything “happens for you?”

Being willing to accept that you are powerful, that you are the cause of everything in your reality whether you are aware of causing it or not, frees you to accept that you have created everything for your growth and benefit not for your detriment. Then you are free to choose again.

When you accept everything in your reality as yours, you are free to hang on or let go.

The choice is always…yours.

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"In the process of letting go
you will lose many things from the past
but you will find yourself."

Deepak Chopra

Accept Your Judgements

It’s not possible to stop judging … you judge, I judge, everybody judges.

Getting rid of judgement is not a desirable choice … in fact your ability to judge is part of your humanness … and it’s necessary when faced with life-threatening situations.

Yet most often you use your ability to judge … against yourself. That’s right … not for yourself and your actual survival but rather against yourself in a myriad of conscious and unconscious ways on a daily basis.

Your propensity to judge yourself as wrong/bad/not good enough/not worthy etc. whenever you do something you don’t like, or judge another for the same reasons, is an insidious habit that doesn’t bring you any real satisfaction. And it doesn’t change anything.

Judgements are by their very nature polarising. Every time you judge yourself as not good enough, and then agree that it’s true, you feel defensive and attempt to convince yourself that you are good enough or right or not bad and you become enmeshed in the victim/persecutor/rescuer triangle of fear.

The most powerful, loving and responsible thing you can do is accept that you are judging and remember … your judgements are not the truth about you (or anyone or anything else). They simply let you know that you are judging and that’s because you are feeling something you probably don’t want to feel. When you accept that you are judging yourself (and/or others) and accept the feelings associated with your judgements then let yourself feel them … the energy will release and the judgement and the feelings will pass.

Accepting your judgements is simple … tell the truth, acknowledge your feelings, resist the temptation to agree with your feelings and your judgements … and peace will be restored.

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"It is difficult to live without judging others. If you have to judge, then judge with love."

Debasish Mridha

Tell Me What You Mean

Communication literally means to share - thoughts, feelings, facts, information etc. Yet it is not sufficient or effective to share only the surface stuff without being explicit and clear about what you actually mean.

Before you communicate anything, you need to look beneath the surface of the stuff you want to say to get clear about what you want the other to understand before you start communicating. There is a huge difference in the efficacy of your communication when you clearly and explicitly communicate context before blahing out all your content.

The meaning of your communication IS the response you get …which means that whatever comes back in response explicitly shows you what the other actually understood … what they actually thought you meant … which may be quite different to what you expected them to understand.

As I have said before, being “misunderstood” is a myth … what’s really going on is a failure on your part to effectively communicate what you mean before you communicate anything else.

Whenever you feel misunderstood, rather than simply reacting and ending up in the fruitless blame game of the A<>B conversation, stop … take a breath and ask yourself:

“What did I want this person to understand from my communication? How is that different to what they actually understood? What didn’t I say, that once said, would have this person understand me the way I intended?"

Then communicate what you mean - openly, honestly, clearly, directly and completely and keep communicating until they get what you mean and you get they got it.

When you tell me what you mean, I have a context within which to truly understand what you mean to say rather than making up what I think you mean.

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"Tell me what you mean before you tell me what you want to tell me."

The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth

You are probably familiar with this statement. It has been part of our modern legal process and seems to indicate that when agreed to, that’s what will happen.

Not so.

In my world (and paradigm of unlimited cause), everybody lies and there is no such thing as absolute truth. Yet we persist in lying to ourselves about what truth is and how it “should” be told. And when my “truth” is not the same as your “truth” we argue, fight and go to war.

You have your own unique set of filters through which you view yourself and everyone and everything in your world. Your filters inform the meaning you give to everything and thus inform your “truth” at any given moment. So insisting that your “truth” is the “real truth” is a lie … unless everyone shares your exact same filters …and the truth is, they don’t. Not now, not ever.

Your truth is whatever you believe is true and so is mine. Your truth is whatever you think, feel and know and so is mine and when they are not the same, it doesn’t mean you are lying or that I am … it just means we have different filters, different ways of seeing the world and different ways of making meaning about what is happening.

You are probably taught that it is “good” to be honest and that lying is “wrong” yet telling the truth is not as simple as just saying what you know is true. Telling the whole truth requires a willingness to acknowledge the whole of what is so for you. It includes what you think AND what you feel, viscerally and emotionally, about what you perceive is going on. It also requires a willingness to listen to and accept the feedback you receive, (particularly when it is not the same as what you perceive it is), as part of the whole truth. When you are willing to be responsible for the whole of what you give and what you get, your truth can become the whole truth.

Telling the truth is powerful and liberating … when you tell the whole truth - what you give and what you get as feedback - the energy shifts and you will feel it. And when it doesn’t … you have more truth to tell. So keep opening up, speaking up, acknowledging the whole and the shift will occur.

And that’s the truth!

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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

George Orwell

You Always Have a Choice

Ever feel like you don’t have a choice?

And there is the rub ... feeling like you don’t have a choice doesn’t mean it’s true that you don’t have a choice. What’s true is you FEEL you don’t have choice ... it’s a feeling not a fact.

Feeling like you don’t have a choice often means you are not aware of the myriad of choices actually available to you in any given moment.  There is always another choice (or two or three or a dozen) you could choose ... so when you feel like you have only one choice ... stop ... take a few deep breaths and ask yourself: “What other choices could I make right now?” and see what shows up. Chances are, the other choices will trigger a feeling that you either like or don’t like. And when you reject other choices it’s usually because you don’t like how you feel when you consider those choices.

So the next thing that happens is you choose the ONLY choice you feel ok about ... even if it’s not really what you want or need.

Often you say you don’t have a choice because you want to avoid conflict, or confrontation or feeling vulnerable or uncomfortable etc. - not because you really don’t have a choice. It’s how you don’t want to feel that’s informing the choice ... not the whole of what’s going on. And the only sustainable way to create what you consciously want is to first tell the truth about the whole of whatever is going on right now ... including how you feel ... then choose again ...

Choose to remember that you can choose anything and that you do choose everything ... and when you make a choice, something shows up ... either what you chose or something else. When you accept that whatever shows up shows you the choice you made and what you need to respond to in order to manifest what you want ... the process unfolds with ease and you get what you want.

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You always have a choice ...
Just because you don’t like the other options
doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice.