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Have you ever stopped to consider where your anxiety comes from? Where your impatience comes from? Where your anger comes from? Where your frustration comes from? If you haven't, I recommend the investigation highly. As the truth about where these troubling feelings come from is quite literally something that will set you free.
The problem is most people have been somehow convinced, that their impatience or their anxiety or their frustration or their worry are caused by the circumstances in which they find themselves.
And while it's true circumstances do play a role. The problem with blaming how I feel on my circumstances is that the only strategy I then have to feel better, to feel calm and whole and loved and connected, is to go to war with everybody and everything around me to get them to somehow cooperate with my mind's never-ending agendas and preferences.
It's a battle that is exhausting and, maybe more importantly, unwinnable.
But luckily there's a bigger truth. That my circumstances are not solely responsible for how I feel.
The fact is is that in every moment of every day, your brain and your nervous system are manufacturing your thoughts and your feelings out of the raw materials of your experience. And I use that term very specifically: raw materials. Because a raw material can literally be fashioned into anything.
A block of steel can be fashioned into an assault rifle that could be then used to kill people. But that same block of steel could be fashioned into a plow, which could be used to till the soil, plant some crops, and feed people.
And so it goes with the raw materials of our circumstances, whether that be the traffic jam or the line in the store or the dirty dishes in the sink, or the balance in the bank, or what's happening at work, or what's happening in the relationship.
These raw materials of our circumstance can be fashioned into different kinds of thoughts and feelings.
You see, when I say that your brain and nervous system are manufacturing these thoughts and feelings, it's kind of like a collision between the outside and the inside. The outside experience meets the inside patterning.
And that gives rise to the feelings, and because we can't control the outside very well, and by the way, this is not to say, give up doing your best to control the circumstances you live in. But it is to say don't rely solely upon that, because in case you haven't been paying attention, about 51% of the time, things don't go our way.
So we need another strategy. One that can help us when the outside does not meet the liking of the mind. And that is to create a different inside, to repattern the brain and nervous system, so that they're ever more harmonious with what arises.
So that whether what shows up in the moment is so-called high or so-called low, so-called good or so-called bad, that the brain and the nervous system uses those raw materials of that moment to create ever more positive, uplifting, helpful, and nourishing thoughts and feelings.
And I can tell you from personal experience, and experience with literally thousands of people I've worked with over the past three decades, that it's possible to change this patterning.
But first, you need to recognize that this patterning is part of the equation, and stop going to war perpetually with everybody and everything around you and blaming them for your internal turmoil.
As they say, someone said, I don't know who, but every time you point a finger at someone else, you have three fingers pointing right back at you.
And this is not to assign blame, but it is to awaken us to the real truth of where our thoughts and feelings are coming from. And maybe most importantly, to empower us to change the patterning so that we can get what we want, what we deserve...
And that is a life of ever greater joy and ease and harmony.