The power of "so what"

     I saw a ghost for the first time when I was five years old. I was in the hospital recovering from a head injury. I don’t remember knowing that what I saw was a ghost. I called them the invisible people. I did somehow know that not everyone could see them. At night I’d ask the nurses to leave the door to my room open so I could watch them. Sometimes they’d come into my room and smile at me.

    The invisible people didn’t scare me. I liked them. I felt like I’d been let in on a secret: as though some corner of the Universe had peeled back and I got to look inside.

     Five months into an experiment I’ve been doing with myself, I have the same sense of amazement and being let in on a secret. Living as gypsy has opened to me to new clarity about my own thought patterns. For the first I can both see and feel what giving my power away to worry, lack and circumstances does to me.

     In January I experienced some serious financial issues. I felt as though my life was controlled by lack of money. I didn’t like that feeling. In the world I see money misused as means of power and control so often. I realized all the time and energy I gave to focusing on my lack of money was recreating the same money = power and control scenario over and over in my life.

     I began the experiment by asking myself how I could meet my money worries in way that short circuited them. I tried getting busy with something every time I caught myself back in the money worry rut. That didn’t work very well. Now I understand why. Getting busy was a way to temporarily distract myself, but did nothing to change my thought pattern. I tried a couple other things with limited success.

    One night as I was falling asleep the idea of meeting the money worry with gratitude dropped in. So I started a new gratitude practice. Each time I caught myself back in the worry rut; I stopped and thanked the Universe for something. Grabbing the easy stuff like “I’m grateful to be alive” doesn’t work.

    I have to find something that engages me in the moment…and it works. It’s a very simple practice. I’m stunned at how powerful it is. My mind found its way right back the money worry rut at first. For a few weeks I found myself stopping to express gratitude a dozen times a day.

     As the weeks flowed into months the money worry began to fade. It became more a part of the ongoing stream of things that run through my head during the day rather than the thing that repeatedly held my attention hostage. My practice has the wonderful side effect of bringing me more fully into the present moment. That also impacted my worry rut. Worry is an exercise in projection. The more present I was, the more I aware I was that right now everything is okay.

   I started to see other places in my life where my focus on lack and circumstances was reinforcing and recreating that for me. So I expanded my gratitude practice into those places.

   It took a few months for me to how deeply my practice was changing me. I didn’t start the experiment with the intention to change my personal reality. I hadn’t thought of it as stepping into a new level of responsibility for creating my reality. I actually didn’t pick that piece up until I talked to friend who pointed out that in my relationship to circumstances I was moving from victim to creator.

    For years I’ve heard that thing about “you create your own reality.” Most of the sources for that information seemed to be focused on affecting the external physical world by manifesting money or a dream job or changing situations and circumstances. I’ve questioned this because it sounds a lot like “here’s a way to be in control of your life and have anything your personality wants.” Control is an illusion. I’ve had numerous experiences where not getting what my personality wanted served me better than getting what I wanted.

    Now I get it. I’ve used phrases like “that’s the physical reality of the situation” as an excuse not to be conscious of what goes in my personal reality. Crap happens. The crap that happens involves external things over which I have no control. I can’t change that. But….here’s the secret…I can change my relationship to what happens.

     Shifting circumstances and lack of money are external things; part of “objective’ physical reality. I used the quotes because scientists are still debating whether objective physical reality exists. Regardless, that objective reality is not where I live.

     I live in my personal reality. Personal reality is my container of beliefs, experiences and wounding that creates my relationship to the external world. I create my personal reality moment to moment. If I don’t like it, I can create something else.

     I’m a curious person. I like to know how things work. As I’m watching this ongoing change in me I wanted to what was s happening and how this was working. This week I listened to a Sounds True podcast, The Creative Observer. In the podcast, Lynne McTaggart talks about the quantum physics behind creating your own reality.

     I like quantum physics. It’s an amazing confluence of energy, spirit and science. Lynne McTaggart talked about creating your own reality being an action of the observer effect. The observer effect is a quantum physics principle that states the act of observing something changes it. That I already knew…but there’s more.

    From a quantum perspective reality isn’t fixed. It’s unfinished, existing in a state where all possibilities are present. The act of observing these possibilities fixes reality by making one of the possibilities into tangible experience. So the act of observing doesn’t just change reality, it creates it. Attention = creation.

     My ongoing experiment hasn’t caused a million dollars to magically appear on my pillow. It’s give me something much more valuable, a way to actively consciously change and create my personal reality. It also showed me the power of “so what.”  I don’t have as much money as I’d like to. So what. Who am I going to be in relation to that? 

     I set myself up to be controlled by circumstance when I allow the circumstances to control my personal reality. Right now I feel pretty done with that.