Lesson 3

Today we begin.

Make sure to complete your four everyday exercises along with today's class about owning your own "shit" and challenging your beliefs. 

No One Is In Your Way:

If we could only stand outside of ourselves to hear the stories of how we’ve been wronged by someone, what a different side we would see. No one ever tells a story about how someone hurt them and in their story, they were the bad guy. No one is ever the bad guy in their version. You take an incident that happens between two people and then let those two go tell the story and you can rest assured they were both the victim in their version. How can they both be the victim and neither one the perpetrator?      

  

One of the hardest things we ever face in life is a mirror. We do not want to see our own flaws. If we see our flaws then we have to do something about them. If we pretend that the wrong turns our lives take are the fault of someone else, then we don’t have to look in the mirror where the truth cannot be hid.

If something is going wrong in your life right now, no matter who or what seems to be the cause, tag, you are it. Decisions made by you on a daily basis take you down every road you go. I bet you are pissed just reading that and you have a lot of “yeah buts” just swirling around in your mind. It’s the “yeah buts” of life that keep you there, where it’s comfortable sitting on your good guy throne, while someone else gets to be the bad guy.

If you want to be happy in life you’ve got to take responsibility.

You are sitting king/queen of a universe that no one else can enter and you blame the folks that cannot even enter your world for the demise of it.

Close your eyes. Imagine your life and all that you think about life and imagine it as room you are in with no windows and doors. Imagine how you’ve been happy, you’ve been a victim, you’ve been loving, you’ve been spiteful, you’ve been beautiful and you’ve been ugly. All of those things are in there in your room; no windows, no doors. No one can see inside that room and you cannot see out. No one has any power to shape how things transpire in that room; no windows, no doors. You are the master of the room. When you are born that room is a blank slate but if you start to examine it later in life you will start to see that old hand me down lesson your mother taught you over in the corner. If you had a door you could throw it out once you figure out that it was wrong but you can't so you will have to ignore it or write the final chapter on it by deciding it was incorrect. You can also look around and see all the ways that you feel like a disappointment or the ways you wowed a room when you entered it. It is your storage container for all the files written about by your own ideas gained through living life. Like all files, you can take out the ones you don't need and put them in separate storage. That is what we want to do here.

This room is your universe. This room is your mind. Everyone has their own universe. Everyone has their own mind. They are controlling their own mind and living in their own universe. You are controlling your own mind and living in your own universe. They don’t know how you see the world because your vision of the world is your own and that vision cannot be seen by anyone but you. You don’t know how they see the world because their vision of the world is their own and that vision cannot be seen by anyone but them. What we hope to do with this course is go back as close as we can get to that blank room and then try to rewrite the story of us. We won't rewrite it from any preconceived ideas about what we should be. We are going to rewrite it based on who we are and our uniqueness. We are going to begin to write a story where comparing ourselves to others is a character that we are writing out of the story of us. We are going to be fully ourselves and learn to feel good about it.

Now back to our victim story. Just because we get to be fully ourselves, it doesn't mean that we get to pass off blame for what we've been up till now onto someone else. You are not always the good guy. In fact the only power you have in the whole world is to open your eyes wide and try to see your part in any given situation. You get to decide what goes in your room. Your whole life is based solely on what you decide. You decide. Even in the worst that the universe decides to throw at you, you can still decide what goes in your room. You have to examine every belief you have and decide. You can be a victim or a warrior. You can sit still and be swallowed up or move forward. You decide. You decide. You decide. You decide. You decide. You decide. You decide. You decide. You decide.

Repeat after me, I DECIDE. I DECIDE. I DECIDE. I DECIDE. I DECIDE.

I could write an exercise for this lesson but I think somoene already did work on this subject that I'm not going to be able to improve on. So, now I want to point you to this blog post from Lissa Rankin MD. Please go to the link and read the post and actively do the work she talks about from Byron Katie here:    Lissa Rankin Can You Let Go of Your Victim Story?

While you are at Lissa's site look around and check our her books. Her work is amazing and very enlightening.

Go forth in your day and shine.