Mike Dooley’s Notes from the Universe usually brightens my day but day before yesterday, the wording confused me until I had a talk with my lifecoach Patti Lee Thomas . What “The Universe” said was:
If you look closely enough, intent upon understanding those things that cause you great pain and consternation, Charlotte, ultimately, I promise you, you’ll find great joy and illumination.
And if you look closer still, Charlotte, you’ll see all such things as proof of life’s infinite grace.
–the Universe (as channeled by Mike Dooley )
Now I did see that as uplifting, but what I heard from this was “Crawl inside the pain and see what’s there.” That was my negative training, that something is always broken and must be fixed. That there must be some analysis and focus on the pain and consternation. I was willing to see that something that upset me might have a purpose, or it might even have a happy thought hidden in the compost, like a seed for a flower.
It took Patti Lee two emails and a face to face chat to show me where I was tripping up.
I wasn’t looking for the joy. I could be outside the event and look at a wider picture, and look only for the joy and illumination, not for the other stuff that might be there.
Looking for joy does not involve crawling on your hands and knees, groveling or slithering through some emotional or physical crap. It involves LOOKING. With my mind.
Patti Lee calls it “detached compassion.” You can’t have compassion for something you can’t see. So you look at it, without judgment, without assumptions, without emotional baggage. You take yourself out of the situation and see what is going on, as if you are watching it on TV happening to a fictional character.
This is not so hard if you do it after the fact, and it is the memory that needs to be detached anyway. Most of our vibrational damage is done by replaying memories and overlaying them with “That always happens to me” in four-part harmony with subsonic bass in technicolor. We do this because we get another rush of adrenaline laced with self-pity from the memory, and that keeps us from doing anything differently. No matter how much an event happened through no fault of our own, we can choose how we look at it, and how we respond to it. We can change what we believe about it. That is how to find the joy.
Joy is in the release of the old, negative thoughts and habits that we have used for so long that they are now our beliefs.
What Patti Lee finally got through to me, and even that information lightened my vibration, was that being emotionally detached from the issue allows me to SEE what it is. I can look at it without getting upset. When I can do that, I can see what is going on without having emotional reaction. I also don’t get an adrenaline rush that tires me out and takes my energy away from my tasks for the day.
I don’t have to get upset if I think of something that is outside of what I expect. Patti Lee has learned to say, “How curious” rather than offering a value judgment. She has taught herself to believe that she can look for joy in every moment. She has thought a thought of curiosity instead of judgment enough times that she has changed her old belief that it was beneficial for her to judge events. She has changed her belief that a negative reaction was beneficial or even necessary, much less unavoidable.
For example, if traffic is heavy, and I can’t get into the lane to make a turn, I can go a different way even if it is longer. I can be calm and make another plan. And I can do it without having to think about the Universe taking the time to poke me with some kind of karmic “I told you so.” A loving Universe-God(dess)-Inner Being does not do that.
We do that kind of thing to ourselves, but we can stop. We can look for Joy. If we remind ourselves in every moment that joy is our aim and our plan for making our wishes come true, we can come to believe it.
And along the way we become joyous.
Tags:
Add new tag,
detachment,
joy,
judgment,
Patti Lee Thomas,
the Universe
No Comments »