Are you there?

Yes, we are here.

Today, I want to talk about our tendency as human beings to allow other people to influence the way we feel about our own lives. I realize that this is a very broad topic, but it’s an important one, something that affects almost all of us here on the physical plane. Many people live their entire lives based on what other people say or do and they often have no idea that they’re doing it. It’s like an unconscious addiction. A habit you can’t shake, but one you’re not even aware that you have.

This tendency of which you speak, allowing others to influence the way that you feel about your own life experiences, is, as you may have guessed, not the natural order of things, not the way things ideally function in the Universe. And that is because everything that a human person experiences for themselves on the physical plane is of their own creation. You create it all. No one else. And so if everything that a human person experiences on the physical plane is a self-creation, and it is all done with a focused intention, conscious or unconscious, in order to manifest a very specific experience for a very specific reason, then it makes no logical sense to look outside of yourself as a way of measuring how you are supposed to respond to that experience.

Well, I didn’t say that it made any sense, logical or otherwise. You yourselves have said many times that much of what we create for ourselves is done from an unconscious position, which means that, while we may have a very specific intention behind every experience that we create, we’re often unaware of what that intention might be and what that experience is supposed to mean for us, even down to how it’s supposed to feel, and so we look to others to define the experience for us, tell us what it means, help to guide us toward the proper emotional response. I realize that, at the end of the day, no one can make us happy but ourselves. In fact, it boggles my mind when I think of how much unhappiness arises when we rely on others to make us feel happy, or strong, or peaceful, or excited. And how, when they fail to do so for one reason or another, we expend an incredible amount of time and energy blaming them and judging them and criticizing them for letting us down. “How could you do this to me? Do you have any idea how that makes me feel? I’m miserable and it’s all because of you.” I realize that this is yet another way we humans have of deflecting responsibility for our own experience, but there you are.

Indeed. There you are. But there you need not be. For an integral part of your journey of awakening involves arriving at a place within yourself where you are no longer creating from an “unconscious” position. To put it simply, if you are aware – and here again we stress the importance of awareness – if you are aware that everything that you are experiencing in your life is your own creation, and if you can fully and completely accept that fact, accept it and embrace it, then eventually the time will come when you will no longer need to rely on others or an outside circumstance to bring you the happiness, the joy, the peace, the love that you seek.

And yet, we’re often so insecure about our own value and about our own ability to consciously create what we want for ourselves that we easily fall back into the habit of looking outside of ourselves for satisfaction. It happens to me all the time, especially with sports.

We are well aware of how much you enjoy watching sporting events, especially tennis and football.

It’s true. I do enjoy it. And it’s a recent tennis tournament, one of the biggest, what they call a Grand Slam, that started me thinking about all of this. There are only four Grand Slams in a year, so they’re a very big deal. And in this recent Grand Slam, my favorite tennis player was also the favorite to win the tournament, so there was a lot of expectation on my part that he’d go all the way and lift the trophy at the end. Every Grand Slam is two weeks long and each player must play a total of seven matches to win the title, which means that following your player through all of the matches involves a substantial time commitment as well as a sizable emotional commitment. Eventually, my player made it to the final, but lost to another player who was just a little bit better that day. Now, if my player had won the tournament, I would have been very happy and would have felt that I, too, had won something. I’d feel victorious. That’s not so unusual, of course. That’s why most people watch and enjoy sports. They identify with the players they admire and always hope for victory, not just for the players, but for the way they feel when their players win. But their players don’t always win. They can’t. No individual player or team can win every single match. They must lose sometime. In this case, when my player lost, I felt very sad and disappointed, which again is a pretty common experience when your favorite player or team loses. I didn’t blame him, because he played his best, but I began to realize just how much time I’d spent over the course of those two weeks relying on him to make me feel good, relying on him to make me feel happy and victorious and strong and accomplished, in effect looking outside of myself for some kind of momentary elation. I also began to realize just how often we do this kind of thing, rely on others to make us feel good about ourselves and our lives, in other areas of our lives – our jobs, our relationships, especially our romantic relationships, our teachers, our friends, our neighbors, our artists, our financial institutions, our politicians, even down to our day-to-day interactions with a whole slew of people we barely know. Virtually every experience that we have, that we create for ourselves, holds the potential for swaying our emotions in one direction or another, sometimes so quickly that we’re not even aware of it. Now, however, I’ve reached a point where I no longer want to approach my life in this way. I want to make more conscious decisions about what I am feeling and how I respond to my own life experiences and not look so often to others to do that for me. I want to enjoy the experiences I create for myself, I want to enjoy the game of tennis, for example, to enjoy the athleticism and the excitement of competition, but I no longer want to rely on my favorite tennis player, or anyone else for that matter, to make me feel good.

And this is as it should be, for this is what your life is all about, the physical life that you have chosen for yourself. This is how the process of awakening to who you really are and why you have come works. These experiences that you are talking about – the growing awareness within yourself that something is not quite right, that you rely too often on others to make you feel a certain way, that there is a better way to experience your life, one that springs from your own natural goodness, from your own loving and joyful nature – all of these experiences are designed by you to remind yourself that the joy, the love, the happiness, the peace, the pleasure and excitement that you seek are already an innate part of who you really are. In other words, they are already present, they already exist deep within your own true nature. You do not need to look outside of yourself to experience them. You only need to allow those aspects of your true self to rise to the surface, to find moments for their expression in your everyday life, to allow who you really are to define what you experience and how you experience it, regardless of what anyone else says or does. That even if your favorite player loses, or your lover disappoints you, or the stock market falls, or some out-of-touch politician makes a self-serving decision, even one that you believe might affect you directly, that despite all of these outside influences, you know on a deep level that you have the power to maintain your balance, to hold your alignment with who you really are, with the loving energy of Source, and that in effect, it does not matter what anyone else is creating, for each of you is here to create your own experience, and none of that needs to affect you unless you allow it to do so. We realize that this is a difficult concept for most humans to accept, but that is the way things have been set up, the way the entire physical plane has been designed. And that is what you are beginning to understand. You are also beginning to understand that each time you believe that others are making you feel a certain way, impinging on what you see as YOUR choices, YOUR freedom, YOUR ability to decide what YOU want to feel, it presents an opportunity to remind yourself that each of these experiences have ultimately been created by you for the purpose of awakening to who you really are and why you have come. That they are all designed by you to bring your awareness to what is really going on beneath the surface of your life, the truth that no one can actually MAKE you feel a certain way, that how you feel is ALWAYS your own choice. These experiences shine a light on this truth by forcing you, in a sense, to experience once again, through the use of contrast, that which you are not, so that eventually you reach a point where you can say to yourself, “I no longer want to feel that way. That’s not who I am. I’m tired of letting others affect which emotions I feel, what I expect out of life, how I define myself in the world. I want to choose what I feel.” That is why we always say LOVE WHAT ARISES, for each and every experience that you create for yourself, even those experiences where you feel powerless, where you feel completely influenced by what another says or does, moves you in the direction of remembrance, of awakening. It cannot be otherwise. That is, always was and always will be your intention and the intention of Source. To use your own creations to remind yourself of who you really are and why you have come.

This has been a very enlightening conversation.

We agree. Until next time.

Thank you all.

NEW POSTS APPEAR ON A REGULAR BASIS

SHARE THIS POST: