LIVIN G & LE ARNING


Are you wearing storm-tinted spectacles?


Are you wearing tinted specs? Rather than wait for a shipwreck or a robbery or financial ruin, let’s do a bit of DIY lens testing right now. Try looking at whatever you see as your reality from a different angle or even totally reversed.


by Jena Griffiths


YOU WILL NEVER know you are wearing shades, unless someone persuades you to take them off, even for just a second.


Why take them off? To see how bright, ordinary-


extraordinary life really is.


And if you don’t? In my sailing days I knew a couple who claimed they always got a storm. And so they always did. On one sea crossing, while the rest of us complained of no wind, they said that had such a huge storm they were knee deep in water


32 JULY 2015


below deck. We used to joke with them about not leaving port on the same day as they did, in order to avoid bad weather at sea. Unfortunately, they were the only couple I knew who disappeared at sea, without a trace during a massive storm. Our thoughts really are that creative.


And here’s the caveat Our thoughts really are that creative


even when we don’t want them to be! Take my mother, for example, who


was a constant worrier. Mum would stay up half the night worrying about her children, about other family members


or staff or friends’ problems, their or her finances or whether the sun would come up tomorrow. I once told her that worrying about me was tantamount to stabbing me in the back. She was horrified and deeply hurt. She thought praying for something bad not to happen was helpful. I just couldn’t convince her that worrying about something you don’t want to happen is like watering the weeds in your garden in the hope that they will stop growing. It was only years later that I figured out why this didn’t make sense to her. My mum saw herself as separate and at the mercy of a divine power rather than as a unique expression of source, even though she was pure love and the kindest person in the world. It’s easy to point fingers at other


people – my mum, my aunt who deeply feared a robbery and then found herself locked in the bathroom while thieves ransacked her house before making off with their loot in her brand new car, or the sailing couple lost at sea in a storm – but if I’m such a master of manifestation how come my life isn’t perfect? How come my husband ran off with another woman when this was never even a twinkling of an idea in my mind’s eye? Our own storm-tinted specs are more difficult to recognise, particularly when the shades are subtle or the lenses utterly reflective.


So how to catch a glimpse of our own lenses? Rather than wait for a shipwreck or a robbery or financial ruin, let’s do a bit of DIY lens testing right now. Try looking at whatever you see as your reality from a different angle or even totally reversed. One way is by using Byron Katie’s


inquiry process – four questions and a turnaround – to investigate whatever you imagine to be reality.


How does this work? Ask yourself these four questions:


• Is the story I am telling myself really true?


• Can I know for sure it is really true? • How do I react as a result? • Who would I be without that thought? Then turn the scenario around to see if that is perhaps even more true.


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