Choosing the Life You Were Born to Live
How Changing Your Thoughts Will Change Your LifeBy Christine SopaBalboa Press
Copyright © 2012 Christine Sopa
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4525-5691-8Contents
Preface....................................................xvChapter 1: Have You Found Joy?.............................1Chapter 2: The Battle for Your Mind........................5Chapter 3: Overcoming Limiting Beliefs.....................17Chapter 4: The Power of Choice.............................33Chapter 5: Believe in Yourself.............................37Chapter 6: Believe in Your Path............................53Chapter 7: Listening to Clues..............................79Chapter 8: Your Hidden Gifts...............................89Chapter 9: Mastering Your Emotions.........................97Chapter 10: You Are Not Alone..............................109Chapter 11: Action Steps to Joy............................117Epilogue...................................................133Acknowledgments............................................137
Chapter One
HAVE YOU FOUND JOY?
"Just in case you ever feel its absence ... .know happiness always returns."
Something's wrong ... we feel it ... we know it ... we're not happy ... we're not fulfilled—or perhaps we think we're happy, but our body, through sickness, tells us something else.
Most of us know when we are unhappy, most of us know that we're not fulfilled; maybe we have some comforts—a family, a career—and yet we sense that's not enough, there must be more.
The Ancient Egyptians believed that when we die and are at the gates of heaven, we are asked two questions:
1. Have you found joy in your life?
2. Has your life brought joy to others?
I have noticed that the majority of people immediately know the answer to the first question. This, of course, depends on the ease in which they have lived their life thus far. The second question tends to be a little more challenging. How do we know if we have brought joy to someone else? Is it based on whether or not they like us? Is it based on whether we made them smile? Would we have had to change their lives in some positive way by something profound we said or did? Many of us then start to question our own state of joy at this point. Have I really found joy? Is joy the same as happiness? Then the ultimate question comes: Is joy what God is looking for us to experience?
Although this may sound fairly simple, many people have a very hard time finding joy in their lives. We get caught up in work, family, and household responsibilities, caring for aging parents, financial obligations, and the list goes on and on. Before we know it, our lives are running us and we are just along for the ride. We start feeling as a prisoner in our own lives. A life in which we consciously created every step of the way with things we swore we wanted. Fears get in the way and we begin to allow those fears, not our dreams, to dictate the direction of our lives. It is through the experiences we have in our lives which we learn our greatest lessons.
As adults, we learn in three principal ways:
• Impact moments, which are events that happen outside of us that jolt us into a specific realization that changes our lives somehow. September 11th was an impact moment for many of us—whether we experienced this event by actually physically being there, watching it on television, or knowing someone who was directly impacted by this event. This event sticks out in memory because it triggered a deep emotional cord in many people that caused them to change their thinking and possibly their behaviors about our country, the people who live here, and most importantly, their individual personal life stories. Many have never been the same since this impact moment occurred.
• Discovery moments, which I jokingly call "V8 moments" (imagine yourself hitting the palm of your hand on your forehead) which are self-discovery moments that happen for no apparent reason and just seem to hit you out of the blue. A friend of mine, who suffered with alcoholism his whole life, one day woke up, drank his usual bottle of liquor for breakfast and as he went to get dressed and tie his shoes, his distended liver kept getting in the way and preventing him from bending over; it hit him then that he was going to die soon if he did not change his behaviors. He immediately made a phone call and was in an AA meeting that afternoon.
• Spaced Repetition is the one over which we have the most control. Here's how the human brain works: If we hear, see, or experience something over and over again, it gets recorded due to that repetition. Our brain says, "Hey, this must be important because it keeps coming up! I better remember it!" The brain does this regardless of whether the experience is good or bad. We are all very familiar with this one because this is how all of us learned our times tables and it is the main reason why most of us over 40 can recite by heart what is on a Big Mac! Affirmations are a form of spaced repetition. Telling your mind over and over again what you choose for it to believe will eventually (with the fuel of truly feeling and believing it) reframe that belief. Choosing what runs through our minds is one of the most powerful tools we have for transformation. In order to do this, we need to have a basic understanding of how the mind works.
Chapter Two
THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND
"Whatever thoughts, beliefs, opinions, theories, or dogmas you write, engrave, or impress on your subconscious mind, you will experience them as the objective manifestation of circumstances, conditions and events. What you write on the inside, you will experience on the outside." ~Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
YOUR CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS MIND
The mind is powerful. Depending on your experiences, you can choose to overuse your mind, ignore it completely, or learn to find a delicate balance of using your mind as a tool as your heart leads the way. We have only just recently tapped into approximately 10 percent of how the mind actually works. That means we don't know about 90 percent of the functions of our mind! The mind is basically divided into sections. For the purposes of our discussion here, we are going to discuss two of them: the conscious and the subconscious.
Your conscious mind is your filter. It is your center of choice. It is that part of your brain that has the ability to choose whether to accept or reject any bit of information that enters your awareness. Let's say I gave you a compliment and you choose to reject this compliment, mentally saying to yourself, "I know that is not true, she is just saying that to be nice." That choice (or thought) then travels to the subconscious mind. Now here is the rub: The subconscious mind can only ACCEPT the information it gets from the conscious mind. It does NOT have the ability to choose! It assumes that what you choose in your conscious mind is what you want. Your subconscious mind cannot decipher between what you want or don't want, what is good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, positive or negative, etc. It assumes that what enters from your conscious mind is the truth. So now, this thought of rejection has entered the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind expresses itself mainly through your behaviors. Over 90 percent of your behaviors come directly from this part of the mind! (Scary thought for some of us!) How does this rejection thought then express itself? Every thought that we have generates a feeling, and as we will discuss in much detail later, everything in life, every choice, and everything we choose to do or not do is based on how we feel. This feeling then drives an action. The thought of, "She is just saying that to be nice" (or truly what this person is saying is, "I am not good enough,") generates any one of the following feelings; disappointment, doubt, worry, blame, discouragement, anger, jealousy, insecurity, unworthiness, fear ... is this sounding familiar? Now how you act on any one of these feelings is up to you and your past behavior patterns. Some will eat, some will take their anger out on a family member or friend, some will sleep, some will zone out with a meaningless activity that sucks their life away (such as watching hours upon hours of TV to take them out of their own reality so they don't have to deal with their lives), and others will push the feeling down until it needs to find a way to release itself and it turns into something physical, such as a migraine, IBS, or back pain. All of this stemming from a thought.
THOUGHTS BECOME THINGS
"We can only do what we think we can do. We can only be what we think we can be. We can only have what we think we can have. What we do, what we are, what we have, all depend on what we think." ~Robert Collier
Once you realize that what you hold in your mind you eventually hold in your hand, experiencing joy in your life will become something you create everyday of your life. Most of us let whatever thoughts show up in our minds take over us like a blanket covering us on a cool night. We remain on autopilot allowing life to throw us around like a ball in a pinball machine. We need to learn to choose our thoughts just as we choose the clothes we are going to wear every day. Which ones fit? Which ones make us feel good about ourselves? Which ones bring out our best qualities? Your thoughts are your choice! Anything that you see in the outside world was once a thought before it became a thing. Before you make a thing in your body, you must make it in your mind first. If you hold a thought about something long enough, you draw it into your life. The problem is, most of us do not hold the thoughts of what we want long enough for them to manifest before we allow thoughts of worry and fear to creep in. Your thoughts need to change if you want your world to change.
THE VEIL AND THE LIES
We all walk around with a "veil" of sorts that masks our true reality and who we really are. Many people are having more and more awarenesses about their lives than they have ever had before. This is truly a remarkable time in history to transform yourself into the person you want to be!
The other part of the "veil" is your own personal one that is created by all of the conditioning and "lies" we have told ourselves throughout our lives. Some of these "lies" sit in your subconscious mind and you are unaware of them as of yet. You only become aware of them by observing your behaviors.
A client of mine, who has been divorced for many years and has had a run of bad luck dating abusive men, recently had a breakthrough during one of our coaching sessions. As we began to dig into why she kept attracting abusive men into her life, I asked her the question, "If you knew, in this moment, you were worthy of unconditional love, what would you do differently?" After much discussion, she realized that her definition of love equaled being "used and abused" and that she felt in order to be loved she had to "earn her worthiness" by "doing what the other person wanted" (let them borrow money, have sex, sacrifice her time, etc.) or they would "go away" ... much like her mother "went away" emotionally, due to mental illness, when my client was a child. Although, logically, thought patterns such as these make no sense and you know consciously that what they are saying is not true, our experiences tell us differently. The veil masks the truth and the pattern then lies to us, thus affecting our choices and our behaviors. This client had also been sexually abused by her father at a very young age which is why her pattern concluded: "If I am not being abused then I am not being loved." By re-defining love as something that did not need to be "earned" but something she was worthy of by just being her true authentic self, she was able to change the energy around the type of people she attracted into her life. This affected all of her relationships in a positive way, from the type of men she attracted into her life all the way to how she interacted with her clients.
As you see with the example of my client, many of these "lies" we tell ourselves have come from experiences we had in our childhood. Remember how I said that the conscious mind is your "filter." Well, the conscious mind is not fully developed until around the age of seven years old. If that is the case, I want you to think about all of the events you saw, heard, and experienced before you were seven years old. Now think about all of the things you probably experienced that you don't remember before you were seven years old! All of these things bypassed the conscious mind (because it was not completely formed yet) and went directly to your subconscious mind. You had no say in it whatsoever. Some of those things your subconscious mind thinks are "truths" are actually "lies" and your behaviors and attitudes are living them out on a daily basis. Better yet, your subconscious mind interpreted those "things" from the mind of a child, and when it comes to those things in your life today, it still thinks and acts like a child.
Then there are the "lies" you are aware of and yet choose to continue to live them out. Why do we do this? The reason is fear, which takes many different forms: not knowing what you want, afraid of making the wrong choice, worried about being "selfish" or what someone else may think, etc. The key to changing your life is to bring to your awareness as many things that are getting in your way of becoming the person you want to be; you can then make a different choice. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Being aware of something in your life is harder than you may think. Once you are aware of something, you are then personally accountable and responsible for whether or not you change it AND for your behaviors and their consequences up to this point in your life. That is a jagged pill for many of us to swallow! It is so much easier to play the victim role and blame someone else for our shortcomings in life. It is their fault I can't do what I want to do, it is their fault I have no money, it is their fault I am in this awful relationship! And as long as they're not doing anything to change your situation, you continue to live out your lie, getting all the attention you want and need to feed your ego and keep you right where you are: the very place you do NOT want to be anymore! Every time you talk about, think about, and, most importantly, feel with a passion these victim and blame thoughts, your subconscious mind goes, "got it!" and starts to act on what it thinks you want—which is to be a victim. Because, of course, that is what you just told it you wanted. That is your truth.
Until you become aware that the pain in your life is solely due to YOU, change will not occur.
LAYERS OF AWARENESS
Awareness has many layers—and like an onion you sometimes have to peel them back. One awareness usually leads to another, than another, than another. Sometimes there is a certain lesson we have to learn first before something comes to our awareness, a sequence that sets us up to be able to make the highest choice possible for our own good. Something does not come to your awareness until you are ready to change. Of course, change is always your choice. Remember that the Divine does not give you anything you cannot handle; so if you become aware of something, you can definitely handle whatever choice you have to make to change it.
Phase 1
The first phase of awareness is what I like to call the "If I ignore it, it may go away" awareness. This is when you become aware of something and you are just not quite ready to take the steps needed to make any changes yet. Fear runs you at this point and you are living from a place of "what ifs?": What if it doesn't work? What if I lose everything? What if he/she leaves and I am alone? What if no one agrees with me?
Did you ever wonder why every time we think "what if?" we assume the absolute worst? Why can't we for once say, "What if".... and have it end with something magnificent? In this phase, the awareness is sitting in the back of our minds, constantly reminding us that we need to change this thing in our lives. Not only does it sit in our minds, but the Universe lends a helping hand as well: Other people start talking about this "thing"; you see it on Oprah; you read it in a book you are reading at the moment; you pass a billboard on the highway that is talking about it; and your mother brings it up in conversation. Any awareness is a sign from the Divine that it is now time to change this "thing." How long you stay in this phase is up to you, but I will tell you that you are not meant to stay in this phase for very long, nor are you allowed to without some serious consequences.
About nine years ago when I was in the corporate world, I became chronically ill. Now, at the time, I was convinced it had to do with stress, but now I know it was the Divine calling me. Nine years ago was when I became seriously ill, but the universe had really started to call me 20 years ago (some of us are slow learners). Although this process started 20 years ago, it did not reach my awareness until I was in the corporate world.
Here was my life in a nutshell: I was working 50+ hours a week, traveling every month, raising 2 daughters, trying to maintain a marriage, volunteering for every organization under the sun, and getting my Master's degree full-time in the evening—and I am sure there are many other things I have left out. My plate could affectionately be called "a platter." And as we all know, when a platter becomes too full, what happens to the platter? It cracks right down the middle. At this time in my life, I was miserable. I was in a job I hated, on the road way too much, not happy in my marriage and scared to do anything about it, eating a horrible diet and never getting any exercise, and mentally believing that everyone was watching my every move and I had to be "perfect"—a sure recipe for disaster. I knew I was miserable ... I was at least aware of that.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Choosing the Life You Were Born to Liveby Christine Sopa Copyright © 2012 by Christine Sopa. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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