How I Got Lost In Thought

Those of us who teach the “3P’s” as they’ve come to be known are often asked if we ever get caught up in our thinking. The answer is: ‘Of course we do!” The point of understanding the inside-out nature of life is not to be happy all the time, but to understand where your experience is coming from so you can navigate your life. I talked about this in the free webinar of Work-Life Balance that I gave before the series began. I used the metaphor of a pilot flying a plane. For the majority of the time that a pilot flies s/he is off course, but knows how to read the controls to constantly bring him/herself back on track. This is what the 3p’s give us – the awareness that it’s our thoughts creating our feelings in every moment. Feelings are to people what the controls on a plane are to a pilot – our navigational system that gives us indicators about the quality of our thinking moment-by-moment as we move through life. When your thinking is off-track, you’ll know it by the way you feel, and know that it’s not the time to do anything important if you can help it – anything that requires thinking you can trust.

So this is another story about falling asleep to Thought, and then awakening from it once more – this time, its about me!

I mentioned in last week’s ezine that in putting together the “Finding work-Life Balance” webinar series I completely lost my own balance. I had a very full schedule, what with going to San Francisco on a consulting job in June and then leaving right after to go to Europe for 3 weeks; setting up seminars here and abroad, and having some large family commitments. I am also a single parent. I decided to schedule the webinar series, as I will not be able to do another one until next Fall at the earliest. Then my VA (virtual assistant), who set up the webinars and did all my virtual admin. work, became unavailable, as did my billing person. I had already committed to the webinar series, and so began trying to learn how to set and execute everything to do with it myself, as well as create it, advertise it and deliver it.

I began pushing myself through my days, but there was too much for me to accomplish no matter how hard I worked. My mind-set became like the little engine that could, chug chug chugging along until that rhythm of do, do do took over and started drowning out everything else. I started to feel stressed and overwhelmed.

In the last ezine, I talked about how it’s often a mystery what awakens you from getting lost in the dream of your own thinking. In that story, the client I was working with came out of her dream when I mentioned that she hadn’t been listening to me for the entire session. In my case, it was talking with a client that triggered my awakening from the dream I had fallen into.

This was a new client who was concerned about her anger. She said she was tense all day long, and it would spill out as anger with the people she felt closest to. I said: “You know it’s only your thoughts that are creating that tension. That’s the only place it can come from.” My client’s face got that look that people get when they’re beginning to realize something. Then she grinned. I could see her mental landscape begin to shift before my eyes.

At the same time what I said to her began to awaken me from my own dream. The words I spoke to my client echoed in my mind. ‘It’s my thoughts – not anything on my to-do list- that are creating my tension – that’s the only place it can come from!’ I felt a subtle shift right away – like an opening in my consciousness to another world – the world of presence, wisdom, feeling, insight. I saw my thinking creating the tension in that moment, and it began easing up. Soon, I had shifted out of the frenzied mental state I had been in for several days, just in time to deliver the “Finding Work-Life Balance” series! My mind relaxed again, I regained my perspective, and, as always, learned something. Should I re-enter that mental state again, the likelihood is that I’ll catch it sooner, and not get lost in that particular illusion for as long as I did this time.

This is the evolutionary nature of understanding the 3 Principles, and the inside-out nature of life. We all get lost sometimes, and then re-awaken, and grow from it. Each time you re-awaken like this, it seems to build your consciousness around your understanding of the true nature of life. To paraphrase something I learned from Sydney Banks: ‘Every time you touch your soul you get a little bit of it back’. Here’s to your growth in consciousness!