Writing a book every year is how I break cycles. They define the end of a cycle for me. Every time I’ve published a new book, it’s started me on a different path immediately after. They delineate a distinct shift in my life. My new book on powerlessness coming in 2024 will be no different.
Why?
Powerlessness has been a cycle that I’ve held onto most of my life. It’s an untrue perception of reality that caused me to sabotage myself a whole bunch. Powerlessness is simply a feeling of being out of control in your own life. One of the things that has been coming up for me and that I’ve been talking about a bunch, is this idea of finding your point of control in a given experience.
I used to repress my feelings. I avoided my feelings like the plague. I hated them because they felt really overwhelming and hard to manage. I’ve stopped doing that.
How?
Not by making myself sit in a bunch of overwhelming feelings. Nope. I did it by getting my mind under control. I allowed myself to feel the feelings without the story of the mind.
You may have heard that I’m starting up a new subscription program called Mastering the Illusion. Moving forward I’ll be centering all of my other work around that program, including this entire blog, Uncovering Your Reality. I wanted to start doing that this week with this blog post.
The first PDF download in Mastering the Illusion is a bit about perception, a bit about pain, and a bit about control. It’s almost like an introduction to Mastering the Illusion. If I were going to describe what Mastering the Illusion is or what I mean when I say Mastering the Illusion, this is what it would look like.
Our perception is screwy. It’s based on a combination of old pain, previous experience, and our beliefs or ideas about how the world works or should work. What that creates is a perfect storm of chaos in your perception.
We all know that screwy perception makes us make crazy choices. I’ve made a million of them. Believe me, if I could go back to my younger self and be like, “What the heck?”, I would!
Often your thoughts are the biggest challenge you have going for you. Life is showing you obstacles and roadblocks all over the place. Your interpretation of those obstacles and how you handle them is what keeps you from getting around them.
I’ve had my share of obstacles and roadblocks. In the last week alone I’ve gone from giving up to trying again multiple times. I’ve been super frustrated and super triggered by the messages from my tarot cards. It’s been a very challenging few days.
But then I caught onto (I think) what they were trying to get me to understand – your work doesn’t have to fit in the box. You’d think I knew that already. My work doesn’t fit in most boxes, but I still try to make the stuff I create fit in the existing boxes. I write books, short reads, offer private coaching and so on. All of those things I put into the standard boxes they fit into. But what if I shift it a bit and shift my writing a bit? What if I don’t need to fit in the box and it’ll make more sense.
One of the things I’m able to see in the people around me, is the cycles they are stuck in. In order for me to see those cycles, I have to be aware of their day-to-day experience to some degree. I have to know at least some of the goings-on. When I do, I quickly spot cycles in their behavior.
Can I just say it’s both a blessing and a bit of a curse?
Being able to see cycles so clearly and combining that with my understanding of self-mastery, gives me the tools to break those cycles very quickly. That’s a blessing.
I can’t live other people’s lives for them. I can’t make people do things. So the curse is the heart-wrenching part where I just get to watch people go around in circles not realizing what they are doing to themselves. The more painful those cycles are, the harder they are to watch play out continuously.
Your job is to work the kinks out of your relationship with yourself.
That means finding the confidence you buried. It means shedding the pain you carry around. It means trusting yourself. It means not beating yourself up. It means taking responsibility for how you show up in the world without making it contingent on what the outside world does.
The more self-reflection you do. The more you understand yourself within the experience. The more you allow your experience to show you what you’re missing without arguing with it. The more you just allow things to be as they are. The more you will learn about yourself and the easier life will get.
Why does life get easier when you learn to live like this?
Your circumstances can make you feel really trapped sometimes. It’s oh so easy for the mind to make up stories about how horrible things are, how much of a victim we are, how trapped we are, and so on. The mind loves a good award-winning drama and this is one of the perfect places to create it.
However, is it really that or is your mind just having a good time? Let’s explore.
For me it was complete insecurity and lack of confidence. As a child, every choice I made was questioned because everybody wanted me to play it safe all the time. I’m not much on playing it safe because I find it boring. I much prefer the scenic route. The result of questioning every choice I made was that I lost confidence in myself.
I’ve gotten to this place in my journey where I’m being offered the ability to choose what I put my power into.
For the first 7 or 8 years of my healing journey most things were acts of blind faith. I was essentially told what to do intuitively and then shown how to interpret what happened as a result of whatever I did.
