Change ~ Gentle or Chaotic?

Each one of us is narrating our lives by crafting stories to help our self understand what is occurring. Most of us believe our stories until something comes along that doesn't fit in with they way we've constructed our personal reality. In the current era, everything is changing at a dramatic and unprecedented rate. Everytime something in the world around you changes, it bumps up against your story.

Your story that spans your entire life. It includes information like your name, the places you've lived, the jobs you've had, the people you've loved, and the things you've learned. It also includes assessments you've made about your self over the years, as well as judgements others have made about you. For example, "I'm motivated and intelligent." or "I'm sloppy and lazy."

In this time of unprecedented change you have many choices. Perhaps the most important choice is whether or not you plan to learn and grow through these changes. If the answer is yes, the next important question is whether you want your changes to feel gentle or chaotic.

I've personally experimented with both throughout my life. In my experience, chaotic change usually has a much higher magnitude. Chaotic change can afford you to change dozens of things about your self all in one fell swoop. This type of change strikes me as very intense. In my younger years I actually enjoyed that intensity. I loved the quantum leap in consciousness which accompanied learning dozens of things about my self all at once. But there's a dark side too. It wasn't that I was always happily improving my self, like picking out new carpeting in a house that has decent flooring already. It is more like having the electricity turned on, looking around at the house and realizing that it's full of rats, mold, and the floor is rotting and falling through! Quite frankly it is both scary and depressing to notice dozens of things about your self that aren't as healthy as you'd like to believe.

Gentle change, on the other hand, is quite subtle and requires patience and perserverence. In gentle change you walk into that fixer-upper with a flash light, you pick one room of the house, and you notice and accept the fact that there are a few rats. Of course it is a much slower process, but it is not nearly as traumatic when you take each little aspect of your self one step at a time.

You always have a choice in how you approach your learning and growth. The trick is noticing that you have been making these choices your whole life! You have already sub-consciously chosen either gentle change or chaotic change, or some blend of both.

Putting off many life lessons over a long period of time is one way to choose chaotic change. By ignoring opportunities to gently edit your story, the queue of lessons can get mighty large and gang up on you all at once. There are some clues and cues to let you know whether you might be cruising toward a very chaotic and painful wake-up call:

1. If something negative happens and you dive into a distraction (food, drinking, sex, games, drugs) rather than processing the emotion, you may be ignoring an opportunity to grow.
2. If some corner of your mind is concerned or worried about any of your choices, habits, or routines, but you distract yourself and work hard to ignore it, you may be ignoring an opportunity to grow.
3. If several people around you are giving you unpleasant feedback and you think they are all full of shit, you may be ignoring an opportunity to grow.

However, if you periodically stop and notice your emotions, and gently probe into the more unpleasant emotions, you will discover that there are little things about your story which could be edited that would produce entirely different results in your daily life.

I recently noticed that one of my daily activities was triggering a small amount of doubt in a corner of my mind and there was even some feedback coming in from a few other people who also shared this doubt about my choice. This morning while I was waking up I stopped to really consider this activity. I decided that while I really gained much good from this activity, there is no benefit to feeling doubt or experiencing others doubt. This morning I made a small edit to how I conduct that activity. I didn't have to nuke the activity, just shifted the components which were creating doubt. Now I feel much better and I may have even avoided manifesting some loud and painful lesson!

I hope you'll consider the story you are writing for your self each day. I hope you will understand that it is not the distraction or activity which is bad. Only our experience of a thing is good or bad. And doubt is a strong signal that some editing would produce an even better story.

In love and light, Tree