How Are Your Perceptions Limiting Your Life?
I’ve been thinking a lot about perceptions and how we perceive things and I just wanted to come on in a kind of unscripted way and touch base with you all about how we’re looking at things. You know, there’s a thing in art called forced perspective, which artists use in order to direct our eyes to something or to look at something in a certain way, and that’s a brilliant tool. But I feel like there’s so much going on in the world right now and there’s so many distractions that our attention is being forced and flipped and tumbled and mixed up and jumbled and it’s not easy.
I really feel you, I keep hearing it with my clients, with the people around me, and this doom scrolling and the world is in tumult. It’s a tricky time. So I just wanted again to touch base with you guys and just invite you to take a deep breath with me and, as you release, just relax your shoulders and know that you don’t need to force yourself to do anything. But what you can do is mindfully choose to focus your energy and, when you’re perceiving something some way, invite yourself with curiosity to look at it in another way.
What else might be true sometimes? What’s true to us in the moment, via our perceptions, becomes this sort of storified if that’s a word truth, and we start living with these, by these stories in our heads, based on a perception of something. But what if we were to break down perceptions and think differently? What would be different in our lives? Think about it. It can be as simple as waking up in the morning and saying I have so much to do. I’m not saying that you don’t have a lot to do, but that is not the only point of view that you have to take. What else is true? What else is true is that you are getting out of your bed and that another day has come and that you can stand up and that you can even feel you’re alive. Another perception is that you get to eat, that you get to breathe. It’s important to not be distracted and then led. It’s important to not be distracted by scrolling and images and stories of other people’s lives.
It’s important to not be led by those or to perceive those and reflect back on yourself, to project things on them. It is so important, you guys, just to slow down, take a breath and ask yourself what’s really true, what are my options? What’s a different way of looking at this, I want to leave you today with a little parable that I read from the Buddhist texts, and I just want to leave you with it. See if it resonates. I’m getting this from being peace from tic-nut Han, but it is a parable from Buddha.
A young widower who loved his five-year-old son very much was away on business and bandits came, burned down his whole village and took his son away. When the man returned, he saw the ruins and panicked. He took the charred corpse of an infant to be his own child and he began to pull his hair and beat his chest, crying uncontrollably. He organized a cremation ceremony, collected the ashes and put them in a very beautiful velvet bag. Working, sleeping, eating, he always carried the bag of ashes with him. One day his real son escaped from the robbers and found his way home. He arrived at his father’s new cottage at midnight and knocked on the door. Well, you can imagine, at that time the young father was still carrying the bag of ashes and crying. He asked who is there? The child answered it’s me, papa. Open the door. It’s your son. In his agitated state of mind, the father thought that some mischievous boy was making fun of him and he shouted at the child to go away and he continued to cry. The boy knocked again and again, but the father refused to let him in. Some time passed and finally the child left. From that time on, father and son never saw one another.
After telling the story, the Buddha says some time, somewhere, you take something to be the truth, and if you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it.
Guys, there’s way more than what you think there is. Do not stop. Open your eyes and behold all that is available to you. I promise you you will not be sorry.
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