Not long ago I was in graduate school, working to get a Ph.D. in order to get a teaching job that I no longer cared about. My stipend paid me a $9,000 annually (and that’s before taxes). Monthly living expenses for my dilapidated apartment ran around $600. My car had just been hit on the street and totaled.
My credit card bill was at over $5,000. The fat envelope from the IRS informed me that they’d appreciate it if I could drop them a check for another $800 (like, yesterday). Every time I saw my mother, she was showing more signs of dementia. My father’s health was a growing concern. I was lonely, desperate for companionship. And to top it all off, literally, I was wearing someone else’s hair glued on my head.
Reality kinda sucked.
At the same time, I had this spark of interest for a new profession called personal coaching. Back then when I would tell folks of my newfound passion, they’d do their best to pretend they understood the concept, nod politely, and then quickly change the subject. I didn’t blame them. Yet, all that really mattered was that I knew where I wanted to go. I could always see it. And so that’s where I kept my focus.
Yesterday my two brothers and I took my mother for her semi-annual visit to the neurologist. Privately, the doctor informed us that there was a 95% chance that my mom had early onset of Alzheimer’s. We had pretty much figured that. Then he dropped the bomb.
He told us that her condition might be hereditary. If so, our chances are 1 in 4 of developing the disease. With DNA testing of our mother’s and our blood, he could determine whether we carried the gene. If we carried it, he said there was a 50/50 chance we would get the disease.
As his words registered in my brain, an invisible man slugged me right in the gut. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me…” was my first thought. There are five kids in our family. You do the math. I was angry at him for even suggesting such a thing, for even giving a voice to the possibility, for making the thought enter my mind.
Now, the doctor treats my mother with great compassion. He’s also a highly published researcher and well respected in his field. At this moment, I was upset with him because I was allowing him to create my reality. After all, his authoritative words were the TRUTH, right? And in my mind, he’d just proclaimed another horrible sentence on at least one of us.
Momentarily, I had fallen back on the default response, the one we were taught as children that tells us that we must “face reality,” even when it feels really bad to us. Often, this default belief becomes our dominant response, trumping our natural inclination to be happy and seek joy.
Recently, I was at an attraction seminar that illustrated this point very clearly. The speaker asked the following questions:
Given the choice between the two, what do you choose?
1. Truth versus Untruth?
2. Feeling Good versus Feeling Bad?
3. Truth versus Feeling Good?
The first two are rather easy, yes? It’s on Question 3 where people tend to hem and haw. After a few moments, most folks reluctantly choose the Truth, because that’s what they were taught was right.
Please understand that I’m not talking about deluding yourself here or neglecting your current situation. On the contrary, I’m referring to being hyper-aware as to where you put your energy and how that makes you feel in the present moment. If the reality of the situation makes you feel bad (e.g., you feel unattractive, broke, or sad) does remaining stuck in that place help in any way?
Instead, I’m suggesting that in order to create the reality of what you really want, you must go beyond the reality of what currently IS. For if you are able to only see what is, you will only be able to attract more of what is. If you live with a clear, emotional view of reality, you will be forever rooted in that reality. However, if you create a clear, joyful vision of what you really want, you’ve initiated the attraction process.
Keep this point in mind: Reality is not the circumstances or situations you find yourself in. Reality is how you feel at any given moment in time within those situations.
The Law of Attraction states that like attracts like. The emotional vibrations we send out to the universe (positive or negative emotions) are reflected back to us in kind. When you choose “the truth” and it makes you feel unhappy, you only attract more of what makes you feel unhappy. When we choose what makes you feel good, you attract more things that make you feel good.
The reason I’m no longer in a dank apartment and many more thousands of dollars in debt is because I could see and feel where I really wanted to go. Was my vision based in reality? Hell no. And yet did I create what I really wanted? Yes, I did.
The same holds for the situation at hand. Will I get tested for this Alzheimer’s gene? I doubt it. Let’s say I test positive for the gene, and there’s a 50/50 chance for me to develop the disease. If I accept the “reality” of this situation, I will spend years of my life worrying about what is to come, making life decisions from a place of fear, fulfilling a prophecy told in the fall of 2002. In other words, I will co-create exactly what I do not want.
The “truth” of the whole situation does not make me feel good. And because how we feel determines what we attract and experience in this life, I will choose to focus my energy on the things that make me happy instead. After all, being happy is the point of life, isn’t it?
Somewhere in all of our lives, there are experiences in our realities that we do not want. The challenge is to understand that we hold the power (and the responsibility) to create the vision of the kind of life that we really DO want and keep our attention in that place.
The only reality we need to concern ourselves with is that one that says life is and always will be whatever we make it.