Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal
July 2002
What Am I Creating?
by Julie Robillard
“You get what you concentrate upon. There is no other main rule.” – Seth.
“You create your reality with your perception.”
– Elias
I am sitting here this morning on the swimming pool patio at Mom and Dad’s house. We are visiting them for the weekend. The sun is rising, the birds are singing, and the water is reflecting the colors of the changing sky as I drink my coffee. I’m bathed in beauty. I notice this. I also notice that my stomach is tense and my breathing is shallow. I feel an overall tension in my body. What is the cause of this? What am I creating?
I notice that my thoughts keep taking me back to a scene that happened yesterday with Mom. Her friend Denise, who had been visiting the house all afternoon, mentioned to me that she was feeling shaky with low blood sugar and that she would like to have a piece of chicken that Mom was heating in the oven-leftovers from lunch that we would also have for dinner. I told Denise to go and get a piece of chicken out of the oven. When Denise was in the kitchen doing so, Mom walked in and blew up at Denise. She yelled, “Denise, why are you always picking on the food! Leave that alone! You can wait for dinner with everyone else!” Denise explanations of feeling shaky would not change Mom’s mind. She continued to refuse a chicken leg to Denise, and continued to yell. Denise walked out the back door. She left and went to get a hamburger. When Mom found out that Denise had left, she blew up again, alone with me in the bedroom this time. “She’s crazy!” (Yada yada yada) I gave my own opinion to Mom, that I saw nothing wrong with Denise having chicken early, etc. Mom continued to rant and stomped off to continue serving dinner when she saw that I wasn’t going to take her side.
“I can easily recognize the fears and the limiting beliefs involved in this creation. What I’m particularly interested in is how I’m creating the situation in this now moment.”
What am I creating in this present moment? Yesterday I created or attracted that scene into my experience, and though there are many connected factors (unspoken here) that influence that particular exchange with Mom and Denise, I attracted or created the part yesterday, and it continues to re-create itself within my life now, in this now moment, within my memory and my imagination and my expectations or projections to the future. I created, and am re-creating in my imagination, an experience of Victim. I’m creating a situation in which a person (interchangeably, me, Mom, Denise) is allowing herself to see few or no other choices.
I can easily recognize the fears and the limiting beliefs involved in this creation. What I’m particularly interested in is how I’m creating the situation in this now moment.
How am I creating this? With my thoughts? No, my thoughts are giving me the definitions or labels for where my attention is going. My body is communicating to me about what I’m creating-I’m feeling tight and tense and breathing shallow, closing myself down to other choices as I narrow my attention to that one choice of experience that I do not like. I notice that I’m creating pictures in my head, replaying the scene from yesterday in my mind, seeing the scenes in my imagination, hearing the words, changing parts of it, projecting future scenes-for example, imagining what I will do next time this situation happens with Mom. It has happened over and over in the past-endless variations of the same theme. I notice that I’m imagining what I’ll say to her if she does it to me. I experiment with alternate behaviors that I could use-“loving, enlightened” responses, confrontational responses, etc. Meanwhile, as I’m playing with all of these possibilities, my body continues to feel tense and my breathing continues to feel shallow. When I first noticed the tenseness, I had consciously relaxed and taken some deep breaths. But, as my attention wandered to the scene with my mother, I had tensed up again. Each time I notice the shallow breaths I take a deep one, but then my attention drifts back to the scenario that I’m primarily concentrating on in that moment. My body is communicating to me that I am creating my reality in a very limited way. I limit my breathing as I limit my awareness of my choices. When I narrow my awareness and focus exclusively on a situation that I don’t enjoy, I create more of it–not with my thoughts, but with my Attention and Perception as I imagine and replay the scene over and over in my mind. In short, I have been fascinated with this particular drama. I have been fascinated with the Right and Wrong of it (as I judge it.) I have been fascinated with the psychology of it all. I have wanted to explore all of the internal factors that would cause Mom to behave that way and Denise to accept it and me to have a reaction to it. With all of this attention and fascination focused on this particular drama, I am in this moment re-creating a similar drama in my mind, and I am probably attracting future probabilities of dramas that follow this same theme. My body continues to communicate to me that I don’t enjoy this. It’s the familiar Victim theme that I have been exploring for 35 years. I have a choice about whether I want to continue exploring this theme. I will probably continue to do so until I get bored with it.
I am getting bored with it. I’m becoming curious about what possibilities and discoveries lay beyond the Victim drama. As I begin focusing my attention on that question, I notice that my body feels tingly and light. I feel excited about discovering the possibilities. What would happen if I just let that experience go, without trying to figure out what I’ll do next time it happens? What if I don’t have to figure it out, and what if Mom could still be free to behave that way whenever she wanted to, and I could continue my relationship with her, but I would not attract/perceive that sort of narrow and closed-minded/controlling behavior from her? What if I can just turn my attention away from the Victim/Perpetrator duality, because it is beginning to be very boring for me to explore that drama?
What if I continue to create that drama? It is fine! It is perfectly acceptable for me to explore the any theme until I lose interest. It is not wrong to do so. It is not un-enlightened or un- evolved. It is simply part of my chosen experience as I play the game of life. I can relax and have fun with it, or I can be uptight and stiff and still be fascinated with it. I can be unconscious in it, or I can be conscious and aware of all of my choices in each moment. There is nothing at stake and nothing, ultimately, to be lost. At this point in my personal game of life, I’m exploring what it means to become more conscious of my choices. I’m exploring the broadening of my attention and perception. I’m currently still exploring the Victim paradigm, but I’m developing the consciousness, widening my awareness as Elias puts it, to look at it from Outside the box instead of being enclosed completely within it. The Victim belief system still exists in my reality. I don’t destroy it or make it disappear. I simply choose whether I’ll explore the realities within it, or outside it. It is a choice within each moment.
©2002, Julie Robillard. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal. (Feel free to duplicate this article for personal use – please include this copyright notice and the URL.) http://www.consciouscreation.com