What is/What could be
A lot of the troubles we encounter in life are a matter of our perspective and caused by our resistance to what is. We feel miserable because we don’t have enough friends, are not attractive enough, don’t have enough money, are not talented, had a bad day, well…fill in the blank. Its our thoughts and emotional reaction to the situation that makes us miserable. Basically, we don’t accept ourselves and the situations in our lives as they exist. But guess what? Our resistance to them does not make them go away. In fact, it actually makes them more of an obstacle and more real to us. Its sort of like a non-Newtonian fluid. If you go through it gently and accept it, it gives way. But if you try to muscle your way through, its like going up against a brick wall. (A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid whose viscosity is variable based on applied stress. If you punch a non-Newtonian fluid the stress causes the fluid to behave as a solid and your hand will not go through. If you put your hand into the fluid slowly, it will penetrate successfully.)
There are techniques like emotional freedom technique (EFT) which let you come to terms with a situation and reach a place of self love and acceptance irregardless of it. EFT is done by repeating certain self affirming statements while tapping various points on your body, which lets you change your perspective about things on an energetic level. The basic form of the EFT statement is “Even though [state problem], I totally and completely love an accept myself”. And you repeat the process until you no longer feel an emotional reaction to the problem. Letting go of the attached emotion releases the resistance you felt to what is. Once you accept something – you own it. And once you own something you can do what you want with it, including changing it into something else.
Sometimes we have worked through our resistance to what is and want to create a what could be – a new and very specific possible alternate reality. In some cases it may be enough to simply change our perspective of what is and let go of resistance to it, which frees up space for the new situation to come into our lives. But if we have resistance to what could be as well we may need to do some extra work on that. Perhaps it would be helpful to do EFT on a situation that we would like to create. “Even though I am socially successful, I totally and completely love and accept myself’. Our minds can be enigmas and there may be many reasons why we feel resistance to something we ostensibly desire. Maybe we think if we were socially successful it would create envy in others and actually lead to our rejection. Maybe we think we don’t deserve to be socially accepted for some reason. Maybe we think that being socially accepted comes with new responsibilities that could be overwhelming. We might just need to own a possible reality, as well as accepting an existing one, before we can create the change we want in our life.
