This exercise is the first thing I did that sort of woke me up to how much I had begun to identify with my sickness.
It reminded me of who I used to be before I got sick, and made me realize how far I had fallen since.
Before I was sick, I was this very self-assured overconfident type person who thought I had all the answers to life.
The longer I spent in the sickness, the more I allowed myself to identify as this person who had all these limitations and who had all these excuses for why he couldn’t do things, I had began to identify with all these rationalizations for why my life was no longer going in the direction I had originally planned.
This exercise snapped me out of all that.
The idea behind this exercise is that the reason we’re living the life we’re living is because of the story we continue to tell ourselves and others about who we are. The more we identify with this particular story, the more we perpetuate its reality in our lives. The idea is that we will first figure out what this story is that we’re telling ourselves, then we will re-write the story to how we would rather see ourselves, which for me, had a profound effect.
The first step is to get a pad and pen (it is better with pen to paper, there is some sort of power in it that is not present on a keyboard and computer screen) and write out your current story.
Make it as long as you feel you need to.
There will be two parts.
First, write out all the problems you have in your life. All the things you hate, all the things that make life difficult for you, include your rationalizations for why you can’t do a certain thing or why if only this thing didn’t exist in your life, things would be so much better.
Write about your job, family, friends or lack or friends, the government, the news, your finances, relationships, just get it all out there. Every reason for why life is completely miserable, if it is creating an obstacle for you, put it on the page.
Just make sure to be honest.
You will be the only one to see it so no need to hold back on anything.
This first step alone was sort of mind-blowing for me. After I finished and sat there and looked at it. I was shocked at how I was rationalizing myself away as a total victim of life. I had completely identified with the sickness and everything about it that held me back from living the life I wanted to live. I even remember sort of smacking myself for how dumb I felt that I let myself fall so far because this person was so weak compared to who I was prior.
Once that step is complete, now write on a new page how you would speak to others and what you would think about yourself if you didn't have all these limitations.
Just look at each sentence you wrote, then re-write it new in a way that you no longer have that limitation.
Just turn the negative into a positive.
How would this new life look if all those problems on the first page just went away?
But don’t write them in such a way like, “oh it’d be really great if one day I had this” or “if one day I finally heal my disease I can do this or that”. To write in this way is not empowering. It’s actually sort of reaffirming the first page in that these things are so far away and you can’t even imagine that new reality. Because as I’ve said a bunch of times on this blog. What we believe to be true, reality tends to show us.
So, can you make yourself believe you don’t have all these page one problems right now?
Very unlikely, but the key step is to begin focusing on disidentifying yourself with that first page. That you’re now moving onto this new life, that you aren’t any longer going to think about yourself with all these limitations and negative thought patterns.
Things don’t just turn around overnight, but they can’t ever begin to shift unless you start somewhere.
At this point, look at this list of positive things you want your new life to include, and begin narrowing it down to its key elements. What does this life look like if it were summed up in less than 10 thoughts?
Once finished, either below or on the back of that page, the next thing is, write 50 things you can be grateful for.
Gratitude is something that I dismissed for most of my life, I always offered it when I knew it was proper to do so, but generally didn’t think about it much outside of that.
I listed an article on the previous post called "Scientific evidence for Spirituality" about the science of gratitude and how we can use it to enable healing and improve health. It definitely deserves it’s own post in the future.
This is important, don’t just skip this over. I know it sounded ridiculous to me the first time I did it, but what I know now, I try to find things to be grateful for every day.
If it's hard to believe, try either or both of these two links that discuss the scientific evidence pointing to the healing powers of gratitude and forgiveness. Link1 Link2.
This list, try to make it all the way to 50. It will be harder at first but once you get to 7 or 8 things you’ll start to get on a roll and it’ll be easier.
If you can’t think of anything to be grateful for... can you be grateful for air to breathe?
How about an internet connection?
A roof over your head?
I’m sure you can find something.
First get this list of 50 things, as many as you can.
Then begin making more of an effort in your daily life to frequently look for anything you can to be grateful for. Even if you can find little to be grateful for, just find something.
Do you have running water? Be grateful for it.
How about a meal to eat? Be grateful for that.
How about something lousy happens, like say, we get a flat tire? I know it sounds ridiculous, but just be grateful for it!
The way this works, when we show we appreciate what we have, we get more good things we can also appreciate. Even if what we are getting is something lousy it doesn't matter. Just be grateful for it.
This can take like a week to turn around so don't just give up if it doesn't work for a couple of days. If someone is currently in this state of negative mindset, it's like a train that is headed down the tracks in the wrong direction. The train has to slow down to stop before heading in the right direction. Just stick with it for at least a week before assuming it didn't work.
I will leave you with this about gratitude.
In the previous post on health, I was discussing how to find fulfillment, it only comes from within. This is because, if you look to the things you have to define yourself, you end up always coming from this place of lack. When you focus on what other people have that you don’t, or you focus on what you wish you had, the problem becomes that no matter how many things or how much money you have, there’s always going to be someone out there who has more. When only focused on this, it leaves us in a place of insecurity, it gives us this mentality of always lacking, never having enough.
Reality brings us whatever with which we are an energetic match. So, when we believe this about ourselves, that we need more and we are jealous of somebody else who has these things that we don’t. We are basically shouting to the universe, I feel I am lacking this thing. So when we tell it we're lacking it, we place ourselves in energetic opposition to whatever that thing is. We repel it.
This quote from the Bible, which is probably the most widely misunderstood book in the world (the Bible is a spiritual book, not a religious one), makes quite a bit of sense. I am paraphrasing here as I don't know the exact quote, but it goes something like, “to he who has everything , everything is given and more, and to he who lacks, all will be taken from him, and nothing spared.”
Hopefully it's beginning to make some sense why gratitude is so important.
It helps to begin shifting our perspective away from lack and moves us closer towards cultivating a mentality of abundance.
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