Finding Your Way

Chapter 6 – Preparing for Change 1. Taking Stock of Your Life To make any changes in your life, you first need to stop and take stock of your situation. If you do not, you will feel you are not in control of your life. You may feel you are drifting with the winds and do not have a say in where life takes you. You may not even take time to think about how you feel. Day after day goes by until one day, you realize you feel stuck and dissatisfied with life. So ask yourself, Is there anything I want to change in my life? You may have thought about this before, and you may have some vague ideas, but you may not have taken concrete actions to define what you want to change. Here are some questions you can ask yourself. • Do I feel unhappy with many things in my life? • Am I carrying an inexplicable unsettled or fearful feeling? • Am I short-tempered? • Do I rarely burst out laughing? • Do I let the beautiful details of life go by without noticing and being grateful for them? • Do I keep complaining about the same things? • Do I repeatedly seem to encounter the same types of situations or confrontations with others? If you answered yes to any of these questions, do not worry. You can start right now in a different direction; it is never too late to do that. Your awareness and willingness to initiate change will trigger change, and it will start the moment you focus on the positive. You can focus on your positive thoughts and go in a more positive direction by answering the above questions and others you may have and think about the following more-specific topics that can give you an idea of the cause of your negative thoughts. You can write down whatever comes to your mind first. • What do you imagine your life to be like? • Are you in the geographical location you want to be? • Do you enjoy your work or studies? • How are you helping yourself and others? • Who are the people in your life? Do you care for them and love them? Do you feel they care about you? Do you help each other enjoy life? • Do you spend your time the way you want? • Do you fill your life with things that make you feel joyous and fulfilled? • How do you feel when you have moments to yourself? • When you are in bed ready to sleep, how do you feel? • How do you feel and what do you think about when you wake up? Your answers to these questions may give you clues about what you want in your life that you do not have and what you want your life to be from this day forward. Chapter 13 – Choice, Responsibility and Accountability 1. Your Choices Your situation was influenced by the choices you have made. Focusing on the choices you have made can give you useful information about yourself and your circumstances. If you do not like where you are, you can choose how to fill and influence your days to come. That is often easier said than done, but you may be amazed at how focusing on the moment can make a big difference in your life. Choices that come from our minds alone are unbalanced. Balance is achieved when we use mind, body, and heart in unison. A balanced body creates a quiet mind, and a quiet mind hears the heart. We have an infinite number of futures based on our choices. In 1957, Princeton physicist Hugh Everett was the first to propose the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics (Wikipedia: “Many-worlds interpretation and self-prophet.com”). He argued that many possibilities and outcomes are present every moment and are awakened by our choices. He wrote that we collectively respond to any given time in history through all our individual choices. I read another interesting article (on a website that no longer exists— www.selfprophet.com) that talked about how an infinite number of futures exist at all times. The article theorized, “The choices you make and the actions you take determine which future you breathe life into. Once you breathe life into a certain future, all the other potential futures collapse.” Wikipedia’s definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy is “a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.” Sociologist Robert K. Merton is credited with coining the expression self-fulfilling prophecy and formalizing its structure and consequences. The theory holds that if we believe very strongly in a certain outcome, our actions may become so greatly influenced by our belief that the event actually happens. This would naturally work for both positive and negative outcomes. The 2007 movie Premonition starring Sandra Bullock and Julian McMahon comes to mind. If we hold onto an image and perhaps a feeling of a certain event we would like to see happen long enough, by reverse engineering, we can backtrack and determine how we got there. Look at the future you are breathing life into now; is it the future you want? If not, imagine the future you desire and how you got there. You are not to hurt anybody or anything along the way because you want to arrive feeling good knowing you have accomplished all in a positive way. All the positive we can imagine exists. Trusting this, lets us find the key to the door to let all the positive in. It is in fact all about the choices we make. We can choose to be adulterous, drink too much, tell lies, betray a friend’s trust, go back to an abusive spouse, hurt a partner, or say something hurtful to another. On the positive side, we can choose to be loyal partners, treat our children like dear friends, help the elderly and friends in need, be compassionate toward our partners, or cheer someone up.