Dictating Change

Dictating Change

The other morning I had a very interesting experience. Upon awakening, as I often do, I enjoyed a few minutes of just floating off into that wonderful warm space between dreaming and waking up, where I can think about my dreams, or about reviewing the possibilities of the day coming up, or just floating off into that wonderful, delicious hypnogogic state.

As I lay there contemplating the day ahead, I realized that I had no obligations. I didn’t have to go to work. I didn’t have to see anybody. I didn’t have to do any work on the computer. It was a Day Off!

What happened next is, to a very great degree, due to Kris’s continual admonitions to us to be aware of our internal dialogue. Paying attention to what we are saying to ourselves inside our own head is a basic part of the noticing that we need to do in order to understand what we’re creating in our reality. [Inner dialogue is particularly revealing when you get two different voices arguing about something.]

That morning I observed myself saying, “Oh good, I don’t have to do anything today!” Another common variation on this feeling in the past has been, “Oh good, I don’t have to BE anybody today!”

As I heard myself say this, there were accompanying feelings and expressions of release and relaxation. I stretched out luxuriously on the bed and sighed a great, heartfelt sigh from deep in my belly as I contemplated a day where I didn’t have to do ANYthing or BE anybody.

The part of me that was observing these proceedings noted immediately that this was not a SMART suggestion. A SMART suggestion is never about not doing something. The ‘T’ in SMART means “Towards”.

“I don’t have to do anything today!” is pointed away from having to do things. A SMARTer suggestion would be “I can do anything I want today!”

This may seem a subtle difference but the second version is pointed towards what we can do, as opposed to away from what we don’t have to do. This is immensely important because it influences our attitude and the choices we offer ourselves.

I bring this up not simply to highlight the ideas of listening to internal dialogue, and editing our suggestions to ourselves to make them SMARTer, but because it synchronizes with the fact that I have not been happy with how I’m conducting my own personal lifestyle.

My ‘personal lifestyle’ is the things I do when I’m home alone, and I have no obligations, can put off showering until noon, and usually sit around in underwear or less, and just generally do nothing. I usually end up eating bad food and watching bad television and spending a lot of time cruising, no surfing on the Internet.

[btw - this dictation software is fantastic!]

While this lifestyle has not been unrewarding in the past, as a release from, and expression of opposition to, earlier perceptions of my relationship with Official Reality, my feelings lately are that this attitude does not honor and value appropriately my potential to actually do and create the realities that I want.

- – - – -

Just in the matter of taking a shower, for instance, I have recently changed my strategy in this area of my personal life. I have recently invested in ‘mid-range’ skin creams and switched from Ivory – a mainstay for decades because it was the cheapest – to Dove’s ‘age defying beauty bar’ which I researched on the Internet as very highly regarded in popular skin care circles.

And may I just say, without feeling I am in an infomercial, that being present to my physical body consciousness has been a constant delight ever since that first shower with Dove the other morning. [Never mind seven days, I was feeling it on the very first try!]

- – - – -

I recall ‘days off’ as a student at the University of Toronto, when I took my wonderful ‘alfresco’ watercolor kit down to Queens Park to sketch the equestrian statue of Edward VII. What a delicious feeling to sit there and ‘hold up your thumb’ at an historic statue, in the midst of a noonday municipal park, meanwhile realizing that you are undoubtedly intersecting at multiple subconscious layers with other resonant experiences you are enjoying in these ancient and familiar landmarks and well-trod pathways of consciousness.

In later years I took long car trips with friends through the back roads around Owen Sound. We would drink beer and in later years smoke pot, and meanwhile talk and laugh and enjoy ourselves for hours. What wonderful feelings recalling these times evoke in me, even now.

When I compare and contrast this kind of ‘free time’ activity with what I have been doing lately with my days off from official reality, it becomes starkly obvious that my current strategies need to be rethought. The reason is because I’m just not getting the same kind of fulfillment out of sitting around in my underwear – or less – in front of the TV eating Cheetos – my current expression of the glory of just being me, and having a ‘Day Off’ from outer obligations.

So, recasting the possibilities of such a situation in terms of my ‘unimpaired ability’ to do the things that I want, seems much more harmonious with my present understanding of my potential, and indeed the potential of each of us. We can engineer our lives such that we rarely, if ever feel the kinds of feelings that Abraham describes as below middle ‘C’ on the piano. We can have an entirely positive and fulfilling life experience if we are willing to allow our own natural processes which are always striving towards larger and broader and more expansive understandings of ourselves.

I don’t think the influence of our attitudes around all this can be overstated. By attitude I mean something surprisingly similar actually to the aeronautical term ‘attitude’ which describes the position and orientation of an object in flight.

To give ourselves an idea of the impact of attitude, let’s think about walking across a 2 x 4 stretched between two chairs in your living room. That would be attitude “1″. Now think about walking between the rooftops of two adjacent buildings on that exact same 2 x 4. That would be attitude “2″, and the difference in our attitude in these two situations would have much to do with the outcomes we are to experience, would it not?

When I look at my spare time as a space within which I am able to express, and do, and feel, and be, and fulfill what I am, the kind of choices I offer myself are very different than the ones I offer myself on a day when “I don’t have to do or be anything”. Not doing what you don’t want is very different from doing what you want.

—–

Procedural note: In the process of ‘writing’ this article I devised a method whereby I can stand with a headset in the middle of my living room, maybe ten or twelve feet from my computer, and dictate into my journaling software in perfect view of what I am recording.

I discovered that I am able to write, to dictate into the computer, from the middle of the room – walking around – without having to sit in front of a keyboard and a mouse. Lovely!

Tags: 1 - Commentary, change, dictation, dictation software, doing what you want vs not doing what you don't want, evolution, long car trips, Owen Sound, University of Toronto
Posted under: 1 - Commentary>