What you look for you will find. Wonderfully and unfortunately, we look for what we know.
Unfortunately, if what we’ve known has hurt us and left us for dead, then looking for the same can harm us – emotionally, spiritually, physically, and psychologically. Wonderfully because it can keep us safe if what we have known has been healthy and beneficial.
We look for the familiar. Whether we know it or not we seek it out. As the mind looks for patterns it can relate to and understand it may discard the new and possible. It may even overlook something good and healthy because it is not registering for us as reachable or real. Even in our own thoughts and feelings. Feeling good and thinking positively can feel awful. We don’t trust it because we don’t know it.
If what is familiar to us is love, family, and relationships that involve abuse, manipulation, deceit, and pain, then we’ll come to expect that as a part of the deal. As a part of life. We’ll dismiss it and let it keep happening. We may even believe it is our fault. That we have bad luck or that we are doomed.
We box ourselves in.
Our brain capacity, the mind’s eye, is limited by what it knows. We can’t look for what we can’t perceive of. What we don’t know. What we don’t believe exists. But there is a way to stop the cycle. This is where a warning is necessary…
It may not feel good. I can almost guarantee that it is not going to feel comfortable. It is going to be “scary” and everything in you will tell you to turn around. To go back. To stop. BUT, don’t be deceived. Keep pressing on through the unknown. Look for what’s possible – not the impossible. Look for something new and different. Let the imbalance adjust your perspective. Let yourself embrace reality so you can see clearly and make different decisions about what you want, where to look, and how to find it.
This week instead of looking for the familiar and what you know. Look for what’s possible. Think the best. Believe there is another side to the story. Don’t believe everything that pops into your head. Don’t allow yourself to be negative. Instead of looking for the next shoe to drop and expecting to feel bad, to get a bad break, to have more loss, or more pain. Look for when you are ok. Look for the good in people. Don’t accept bad treatment – let it go and move on.
This week why not take the limits off, or at least recognize where they exist so you can begin to break free. Notice when those little scripts come up in your mind and stop them. Like the saying goes “don’t believe everything you think”.
Take a break from reacting. This week take the whole week off and simply observe. Take in each moment as it comes without judging or engaging. To learn where you can make the changes that you want to make in how you think, feel, and do things. Be committed to making discoveries about yourself and finding something new that is life affirming and satisfying to YOU. Take it one day at a time and see what you find.
If nothing else you’ve only lost a week and then you can go back to being frustrated, depressed, worried, and angry [smile]. It will all be there when next Monday rolls around. Then you can choose which week is better. You may even want to keep experimenting and researching for another week… then another… then another. By the end of the year who knows what is possible?
Unbox yourself.
Unwrap the possible.
Take off the limits.
You can do it.
You got this!