There is a popular saying I often hear circulating among people who are part of the movement to create a new improved paradigm for living and healing that says “you create your own reality”. For me, a far more interesting question to ask is how do you respond to whatever is happening? I don’t believe that there is some magical formula here.
Rather than asserting you can totally create your own reality, I prefer to say that you can choose how to respond to your reality, which consequently affects your reality. How you choose to respond to any given situation colors your perspective. This in turn influences how you experience your reality. Then, because your subjective experience is different, you can also say that your reality is different. So, depending on the nature of your response, you have changed your reality.
For me, the bottom line question is not whether or not we create our own reality, but what we do when things “out of our control” happen—that is, how we receive and respond to whatever occurs.
When something happens in your life and you transform it into a means for growth—even with particularly painful situations like the death of a loved one, undergoing a chronic illness, a business failure and so on—rather than trying to evaluate whether you have done a good or poor job of “attracting” it—it seems to me the real work is how to hold the stance of accepting, even welcoming, all that happens as food for spiritual/personal growth and development.
I am not saying I think we should rejoice when we feel pain and suffering. However, I am suggesting that when you allow the present moment, whatever it is, to somehow become a contribution to your life, it becomes possible to experience even the greatest pain in a way that doesn’t feel oppressive or make you feel like a victim. By keeping the channels open, you can discover how you might use those obstacles either for information or redirection of your qi.
Vicki Dello Joio, founder of The Way of Joy: A Spiritual Fitness program, is a teacher, speaker and performing artist. Integrating over 40 years of Chi Kung practice with other martial arts as well as her work in Yoga, Feldenkreis, physical fitness and theater, Vicki has developed a dynamic set of tools to increase awareness, transform obstacles into opportunities and enhance creative potential. Book: The Way of Joy: An Evolutionary Process to Awaken Inspiration, Focus Intention and Manifest Fulfillment, CD: Short Meditations for a Busy Life.
Despite encountering many of the mind power techniques out there in the market of self help and inner growth, I admit freely that there are still times I come face to face with my own anxiety, self-doubts, or inner resistance. To be blatantly honest. my first instinct is to open the refrigerator or look on-line for something (preferably shallow) to distract myself from painful feelings. Or maybe I’ll pop in a dvd or watch an online streaming movie to focus on other people’s problems for a change.
These are times I seem to forget how much I love qigong, meditation, stretching, hiking in Nature and other activities that pivot me from inertia to a zest for life. While I was writing my book, The Way of Joy, I realized that, in part, I was creating a manual I could go to when I felt stuck. I wanted a reminder of how to access some of those tried and true, “kitchen-tested” tools that really workto shift me out of an outlook and/or activity that actually drains my energy. One of my favorite themes in my work is I call the uses and misuses of resistance.
In other words how can we Drop Dread and Flow Instead?
What images or memories help you to shift out of feeling stuck or resistant? I’d love to know so comment below!
Vicki Dello Joio, founder of The Way of Joy: A Spiritual Fitness program, is a teacher, speaker and performing artist. Integrating over 40 years of Chi Kung practice with other martial arts as well as her work in Yoga, Feldenkreis, physical fitness and theater, Vicki has developed a dynamic set of tools to increase awareness, transform obstacles into opportunities and enhance creative potential. Book: The Way of Joy: An Evolutionary Process to Awaken Inspiration, Focus Intention and Manifest Fulfillment, CD: Short Meditations for a Busy Life.
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Maybe taking a deep breath isn't such a bad idea...
Do you get annoyed when someone reminds you to breathe? Does it sometimes feel like your stress is the only thing that is keeping you together? Sometimes, I think that our lives are so hectic that we end up panting even when we are not running.
Much has been written about the health benefits of meditation, particularly in the area of stress reduction. I believe that, on an energetic level, any practices that create an internal opening—whether they be sitting meditation or automatic writing, moving Chi Kung, yoga, or prayer—create a sense of space, both in the psychological sense of “taking space” and physically inside of the very cells of our bodies, because as we breathe deeply, we oxygenate our blood. We can then open up the energy bound up in stress and transform it into something that can serve us instead of drain us.
Do you ever find that with a single mindful breath, you find life begins to flow again, regardless of how fast things seem to be going?
Vicki Dello Joio, founder of The Way of Joy: A Spiritual Fitness program, is a teacher, speaker and performing artist. Integrating over 40 years of Chi Kung practice with other martial arts as well as her work in Yoga, Feldenkreis, physical fitness and theater, Vicki has developed a dynamic set of tools to increase awareness, transform obstacles into opportunities and enhance creative potential. Book: The Way of Joy: An Evolutionary Process to Awaken Inspiration, Focus Intention and Manifest Fulfillment, CD: Short Meditations for a Busy Life.
There is a popular saying I often hear circulating among people who are part of the movement to create a new improved paradigm for living and healing that says “you create your own reality”. For me, a far more interesting question to ask is how do you respond to whatever is happening? I don’t believe that there is some magical formula here.
When something happens in your life and you transform it into a means for growth—even with particularly painful situations like the death of a loved one, undergoing a chronic illness, a business failure and so on—rather than trying to evaluate whether you have done a good or poor job of “attracting” it—it seems to me the real work is how to hold the stance of accepting, even welcoming, all that happens as food for spiritual/personal growth and development.
