It is an ordinary day and yet an extraordinary day because it is the same day and different than any other day I have lived. I have the choice to make it an ordinary day filled with conditioned patterns and automatic thoughts. I also have the choice to make it an extraordinary day by deciding how I want it to be by setting a deliberate intention. The first choice involves reacting to the day’s circumstances. The second involves creating the day’s circumstances. Today, I will choose the second.
In order to do this, I will choose to live today one hour at a time. If my thoughts drift toward the later part of the day, I will refocus them back to the current hour. At the beginning of each hour, I will decide what I am going to focus on and how I want to feel. During this hour, I will focus on writing. I want the writing to flow easily and genuinely accompanied by feelings of contentment, satisfaction and inspiration.
What are the odds that my hour will go the way I intended? Probably pretty good because I have deliberately chosen how I want to experience the hour. That means that if something opposite to my intention happens during this time, I will most likely handle it more constructively because I am already standing in an attitude of “self control.’ Perhaps, I will put off the unforeseen event until the next hour if that is a possibility, but most likely I am going to approach the situation from a place of empowerment. I have found this to be an extremely helpful approach to living my life. Not only does it help me to stay focused and present, but it also helps me decide how I want to choose my response to life. Consequently, I experience more life satisfaction by feeling like I am “writing” my own life story rather than feeling like I am an outsider watching someone else write my story for me. In fact, it has been my experience that feeling disempowered is at the heart of all emotional issues. A person can’t feel disempowered and satisfied at the same time.
In many ways I see this as a global issue. Many people are feeling disempowered and don’t even realize it because they don’t take the time to deliberately create their life circumstances. People are too busy living the life that someone else created for them rather than taking the time to “create their own life story.” This eventually breeds feelings of resentment, hostility and negativity over time, but most of all, a sense of dissatisfaction and a feeling of pointlessness to life. Overall, it creates a resistance to one’s own life path which translates into being at discord with one’s own natural state of well being. This is the very definition of stress…being in a state of resistance to your own life story. This happens, of course, when the circumstances in a person’s life contradict his/her EGO’s preferences. A person’s ego tells them one thing and then something different arises creating a resistance to the arisen situation. Sometimes people go through their whole life resisting the circumstances of it. Mostly, people do this to avoid emotional pain and suffering, when in actuality, it is the resistance to life’s circumstances that causes suffering and pain. For myself, I have found that the only way to manage this discord is to accept “what is.” Acceptance frees you from the bondage of the EGO because it no longer caters to the EGO’s desires. Acceptance is the opposite of resistance and therefore the death of the EGO’s preferences resulting in a sense of freedom for the person practicing it. If the EGO is no longer the dictator of your reality, then you are free to choose how you want your reality to be….Step 1.
Step 2 involves figuring out what makes you feel happy, satisfied or content. This is accomplished by tuning into your emotions. Your emotions are the barometer that measures the distance between your personal truth and what the EGO wants you to believe. If you feel negative emotion, for example, you are listening to your EGO voice. If you feel happy or joyous, you are listening to your higher self. You might ask yourself “How often do I feel happy and joyous?” This would be a measurement of how much you listen to your EGO as compared to your true self.
Step 3 involves noticing when you are feeling negative emotion and deliberately choosing to think thoughts that are more accepting to your current situation. For example, I don’t want to……”fill in the blank” to I’ll just agree or accept to ..…, that’s what I’m doing right now. Once you give up resistance to the “thing” you don’t want, you no longer suffer… instead, you just do the “thing.”
Step 4. Decide how you want to feel when you do the “thing.” I want to feel creative when I……”fill in the blank.” I want to feel relaxed when I..…”fill in the blank” and so on. This empowers you to become a deliberate creator of your own reality. If things don’t go in the direction you’d like, you still get to choose how you want to respond, or better yet, you get to choose how you want to feel about the direction they are going.
This hour went pretty well for me. I feel satisfied with the writing I completed. I feel like I accomplished my intention. The words are, well, “what they are.” I accept them as my truth for right now.
So now I ask you…”How will you create your next hour?”
Elle