It is YOUR life and it is YOUR story, so own it. Your life is your most valuable possession and the only thing of real consequence that you do own. Taking ownership of your story is bringing consciousness to your greatest asset, the energy of your life. When this is done with reality based precision, it empowers you to be able to direct and shape the course of your life from this point forward.
As a living being you have the capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction. You have a life force that is animating and shaping the sequence of your physical, emotional, mental and energetic experiences from birth to death. Your life story is the conscious framework that you place around these experiences.
Consciousness has an impact on energy, remember the “observer effect”. This is one of the most underused aspects of free will. How you choose to frame your life influences the shape of your life. Just as a cookie cutter, or molded cake pan will shape the dough, your conscious framing of your life story influences the ultimate form the energy of your life will take.
So how do you consciously exert this influence to choose the shape of your life? First you must connect with the reality, or real form, of your life. You must access the true shape in order to reshape it. Illusions do not hold form or contain energy within reality but they do influence it. When you place your conscious focus on illusory frames they block access to your life force and distort your view of reality. These must be cleared out of the way before you will be empowered to consciously reshape your life.
Begin by viewing the realities of your life and owning everything that is real. Own your experience and all of your sensory awareness. Own your feelings, thoughts and intuitions. Own your reactions to life events as well as your responses. When considering your history, shift your view away from particular details or incidents to look for the cycles and patterns. Pay attention to your growth and the life lessons that you have learned. When you understand your history, your life story, from an objective point of view it provides insight into how you came to be where you find yourself right now. It empowers you to consciously choose the course of your life going forward.
Below you will find three areas of focus for “Clearing out the Illusory Frames in Your Consciousness” that are clouding your view of reality. This is followed by a “General ReFraming Template” to be utilized for accessing an objective view of yourself in the present moment.. These tips and tools will help you to fine tune your path of taking full ownership of your life story.
CLEAR OUT THE ILLUSORY FRAMES IN YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS
1. View your life simply without diminishment or exaggeration.
Stick to the facts and keep it real. A rightsized point of view opens up the height, breadth and depth of your life allowing you to access the resources within. To do so though, you must clear out distortions in your view. A simple approach is to correct areas where you are diminishing or exaggerating aspects of your life.
There is no benefit in viewing yourself as small, it is not an act of humility. Humility comes through being present with the reality of who you are, gifts and challenges. Diminishing by dismissing or denying aspects of your life will leave you feeling powerless. Doing this will also energetically fuel repetition of similar events. Energy is always moving and seeking to return to a balanced state. Imbalanced patterns, cycles and events will perpetually manifest until you transcend the experience and balance is restored. It is only through facing the reality of your life that you can become rightsized in your view.
When you find yourself using absolutes like always or never, you are most likely exaggerating the situation. Always and never are rarely a statement of reality and they establish a hard construct around the focus of the overstatement. The hard construct functions like a railroad switch station directing your energy to default towards these extremes making them self fulfilling prophecies. Ask yourself if your statement is really true 100% of the time. And, as not to block a different experience in the future, a simple correction here is to replace always or never with “up until now”.
Trying to control people, places or things that are out of your control is another form of exaggeration. It is an overamplification of the reach of your freewill. It will often backfire and fuel the very thing you are trying to change and it will leave you feeling powerless. Being empowered comes through the acceptance of what is beyond your control and taking charge of what is within the purview of your freewill and ability to change.
2. Take responsibility for your state of being, choices and actions.
Taking full responsibility for yourself is essential to taking ownership of your life. This means taking responsibility for what you choose and how you act. As well as, what you don’t choose and where you fail to act but ought to. Passivity allows the energy to move by default through the illusory frames within your consciousness. In order to assume responsibility you must release any blame of others or circumstances in your life for your state of being, choices or actions. Others are responsible for themselves, they are not responsible for you. Taking responsibility also requires the release of any victim consciousness that you may be perpetuating.
Blaming others for what you choose and do is destructive, it is like handing your power and lifeforce over to them. It is not only harmful to the recipient of your blame, it is equally harmful to you. Own the full impact of all of your life experiences both positive and negative. Own your reactions and your responses. Reactions are generated by fear, they create a negative or destructive spiral. Responses are generated by facing reality, growing and evolving. These create a positive or creative spiral and progress you on your evolutionary path. It is only when you own your choices that you can choose differently.
Victim consciousness is equally damaging and disempowering. When it comes to real victimization this can be intensely challenging to eliminate. But reframing your reality in a way that releases victim consciousness is essential for healing. It is not about denying the experience of victimization or implying one chose to be victimized. It is about taking your power back in the present and not perpetuating the negative impacts of your victimization. To state “I was the victim of bullying” is not an expression of victim consciousness, it is simply stating the reality of your past experience. But to say “Nobody likes me and everybody is always mean to me” is making a statement of victim consciousness. It is giving your power away and perpetuating the negative impact of your wounding. (see the Reality Based Reframing example on bullying below for an empowered way to frame this experience)
3. Accept everything as it is and has been.
Life can be formidable in ways that make acceptance feel like a tall order, but it is well worth the effort to achieve this state of being. Two fundamental mechanisms that inhibit acceptance are judgments and unresolved grief. Judgement in this instance is not referencing having good judgment, we all want that but rather judgmentalness and prejudices. These will keep you in a fight with the natural flow of forward movement. Life is temporary and in a state of constant change. This makes loss an inevitable part of life and the ability to grieve a fundamental life skill. It is essential to living a full and rich life. Otherwise you will be fraught with a borage of the illusory frames of the ghosts of past experiences.
Judgments and prejudices are destroying the human race. This type of illusory frame is having a broad scale destructive influence within humanity. At the root of any judgmental or prejudicial thought, feeling or action you will find something within yourself that you are not accepting. The path to a reality based view comes through opening to the life lesson that is being stimulated. If it is an injustice that you find offensive, take a look at your responsibility and what is within your power to do about it. Take appropriate action where you are able. Accept and release the rest. It is self indulgent and a waste of your precious lifeforce to give the situation any time, energy or focus beyond this.
Grief comes in many forms. We typically think of grief in terms of a major loss such as the death of a loved one or the loss of a fundamental building block, like a home or career, that leaves significant void. A loss of this nature will initiate a powerful cycle through the stages of grief; denial, bargaining, anger, sadness and finally acceptance. But there are innumerable other smaller losses that you will experience with each passing day. Every connection and experience in life is temporary and must be grieved. Some things in life are easier to release and accept than others. But, holding onto the past will inhibit your ability to be fully present, it will cloud your view of reality and it will prevent you from taking ownership of your life. My motto in life is “Connect deeply and love with full abandon but never attach as you hold gently the passing of each moment.”
REALITY BASED REFRAMING
Working from an objective holistic perspective, reframe your life and your story based simply in reality. Utilize the following “General Reframing Template” to begin to transform the illusory frames within your consciousness and gain a clear view of the reality of any given situation. This will help you to determine where you are right now and the origins of what you are experiencing. Employ the observer part of yourself to get to the facts of the situation. Simply state the set of circumstances (the who, what, when and where), what happened, how you have handled it up until now and where you are at this point on your journey.
GENERAL REFRAMING TEMPLATE:
(When) I was in (What) environment
(Who or What) did or said (This)
The impact this has had on me is (Wounding, Developmental Arrestment, Feelings, Conditioned Limitations…)
My reaction to this has been (Negative Feelings, Thoughts, Behaviors, Negative Spirals)
My response to this has been (Positive Feelings, Thoughts, Behaviors, Positive Spirals).
The impact this is still having on me today is (Any of the previous three reframes).
I think about change as a shift from Point A to Point B. Doing this exercise will establish what your state of being is right now and how you got here, this is Point A. It identifies the residual impact of past events and provides you with an empowered view to be able to transform it. It is essential to objectively perceive the reality of where you are and accept this before change can occur. The next step is to identify what Point B (a healthier more balanced state) looks like and make a plan of action to shift to Point B.
Example of reframing an experience of bullying:
When I was a child in school other children bullied me, saying mean things and making fun of the way I looked and talked.
The impact this had on me – I was isolated and I turned to food to cope with the pain.
My reaction to this has been a negative spiral of weight gain and loss for four decades until I got really sick and finally got help. Then I responded by stabilizing my eating and weight.
My reaction to this has also been a pattern of berating myself, feeling depressed and hopeless. As I got help I learned to respond and interrupt the self condemnation which improved my depression.
The impact this is still having on me today is I get down on myself with negative self talk sometimes and I struggle to put myself out to connect with others because I am afraid of being hurt.
This establishes your Point A, where you are right now. The next step is to identify Point B. In this instance, your desired Point B might be a state of being with more self esteem and healthy connections with others. You would then make a plan of action for interrupting your negative messaging and overcoming your fear of taking healthy risks to connect with others.
Reality based reframing is a powerful tool for taking ownership of your life story. By simply viewing the reality of the situation you are clearing out illusory frames to be able to see the real form of your life. This empowers you to be able to shape the future that you desire.