Author: Susan Minarik

It’s not “official,” but there’s no doubt that summer has arrived in the area—full force! People greet each other in the morning saying, “It’s gonna be a hot one.” And their words prove true.

It was too hot yesterday to do much of anything outdoors, except to savor the sun and the luxurious green, and the constantly changing sky-show overhead. For a while, I found myself drifting back in time to my childhood summers.

Remember how, when you were a kid, you’d stretch out in the grass watching the clouds and see a whole menagerie cavorting across the sky?

Remember how the fire-breathing dragon would morph into a pony or bear?

Oh! The stories that could fill the sky on a summer afternoon!

Funny how it’s always the clouds that catch our gaze, and not the endless blue on which they float, isn’t it? How we’re built to see the figures and not the infinitely deep and mysterious space in which they float?

It’s how we live our lives, fixing our gaze on the thoughts and memories that drift by, on the stories we make up to give shape to the passing events. It’s how we create meaning for ourselves, and from that meaning, how we make our decisions. Imagination is a powerful thing.

But every now and then, it’s good to remember to notice the sky – the deep, formless context in which we live our lives, the space from which all our thoughts and perceptions arise, the infinite consciousness that teams with the invisible life force that powers our very being.

The dragon in the clouds seems so real as we stare at it, imagining its fire-breathing snout, its wide-spread wings, its sharply clawed feet. But moments later, it is no more; it dissolves into the mystery of sky.

Our problems are like that, too. Our interpretations, our plans, our dreams all seem so real. And then they are gone, and new ones come to replace them. But we ourselves remain, because we, at our core, are more sky than cloud. We are the vessels through which the story-clouds, the dream-clouds, are created and experienced and lived. We are the meaning-makers, dancers in the mystery.

May you dance with joy, and spin wondrous clouds as you go.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by giografiche from Pixabay}

“With my luck,” a friend began, “I’d trip and fall and break my leg.”
“Well, you know,” I said teasingly, “our thoughts create our reality. Be careful what you wish for.” We both laughed.

But it’s true. If you go around thinking of yourself as a clumsy fool with terrible luck, life is likely to accommodate you. Remember that phrase I mentioned a while back, “What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.” That’s really how it works. There’s a host of technical reasons why and how it happens. But the bottom line is that it does.

The proofs the Prover brings aren’t always literal, of course—although they can be. I wasn’t suggesting my friend would actually fall and break his leg. It’s more the essence or quality of our thoughts that the Prover proves.

The other day, I heard a guy put it this way, “When you do low vibrational stuff, you get low vibrational people and situations in your life.” I think that says it pretty well. And “low vibrational stuff” includes the thoughts we think, our self-talk, our mental movies.

When you find that you’ve fallen into a pity trap, or get mired in boredom, anger, sadness, or fear, one of the quickest ways out is to check what you were thinking then choose a different line of thought. Ask yourself what’s good about the moment and see what comes up. If you’re really bummed and your brain tries to tell you that nothing is good about the moment, tell it, “Well, besides that, what’s good?” You are, after all, conscious enough to remember to check your thoughts. And that’s a good thing in itself.

Another good thing is that we always have alternative thoughts available. Whole hosts of them! We just have to keep asking what’s good and move in its direction.

One alternative that I find puts things in perspective for me is a little paragraph by author and public speaker David Icke. He says the trick to freeing ourselves from something we’re experiencing is not to identify with it.

“You are not your emotions, or thoughts, or the things your remember, ” he says, “or all the sensations your physical body is registering. You are the one who is feeling the emotions, listening to the thoughts, remembering the memories, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling. Those are the things that you are experiencing. They come and go. Whatever comes and goes is not you. You are a vehicle for all that is, and was, and ever will be to use in its endless explorations.”

If that’s the case, why not choose a different line of thought, different things to say about yourself, a movie that turns course and runs in a more empowering direction?

It takes practice, of course. Some of the ruts we get stuck in are pretty sticky. But every time we choose to look for the good the moment holds, for its opportunities, for its invitations, we get better at it and stronger. We catch ourselves sooner, before we slide all the way into our habitual pits. We start to discover that it’s freeing and fun to be in control, to remember we’re explorers in a universe of possibilities, that we can choose to nudge our paths in new directions, to step into a brighter, truer reality – even if we take only one small step at a time.

Wishing you a lifetime of endless discoveries of the good.

Warmly,
Susan

^{Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay}