Life Change: It’s Happening All the Time

The vast majority of people with whom I work talk about life change, as if it was something to be desired, something out of the ordinary, something that only happens when we arrive at major crossroads in our otherwise mundane lives. How little we know about the reality of life! Viewed in its most basic building blocks – cells, molecules, atoms, nuclei, superstrings – you life is in a constant state of change. Indeed, the only thing that is certain about your life is that it is changing all of the time. Today, as you read these words, there is not a single cell in your body that existed seven years ago. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Stanford University has determined that your molecules are in a constant state of vibration and recreation. And, at your most basic level of component, your strings of energy – the stuff of superstring theory – vibrate in and out of existence many thousands of times per second. To put it bluntly, the person who started reading this sentence is not the same person who is finishing it.

If your life is being renewed one moment to the next, how come you seem to be the same? How come ninety-year olds say they still feel the same as when they were eighteen? How come we get stuck in the ruts of life that can meander along for a whole adult lifetime? How come, if there are things about our life that we really want to change, they stay the same, even though we ourselves are in a constant state of flux?

What makes you who you think you are is not your cells, your organs, you skin tone, your body, your eye colour. It is nothing physical. What makes you who you think you are is a complex web of electrical signals firing through the synapses of the brain. What makes you who you think you are is the flow of your own subtle energy and how you use it. I’ve used the word “think” more than once in this paragraph. Our self-image – the stuff that self-confidence and self-esteem are made of, the basis on which we behave and react, the subject matter for personality analyses like Myers-Briggs – if nothing more than a string of thoughts, rather like a long string of pearls that was strung for us during our formative years.

In those early years, when we were young and impressionable, our electronic circuitry was “programmed” through our innate psychological faculty called snapshot learning. We took digital images of people and events that made a major impression on our youthful sponge-like minds, particularly in relation to events that made us feel deeply about ourselves – positively and negatively. Unfortunately, however, as adults, research shows that we tend to devote more of our energy at a subconscious level, to the negative. In other words, we all believe ourselves to be flawed, often the victim of circumstance and, in any case, imperfect. It is this string of pearls that “enables” the constant you in your ever changing daily life. This is the set of programs to which you devote your innermost subconscious thoughts. This subconscious thinking is what maintains you as an individual from one moment to the next, one week, one month and one year to the next.

So, if you’re stuck in a rut, if you want to truly, factually change your life in reality as you perceive it, you’re going to have to break the string of pearls. You’re going to have to stop thinking and start doing. Obviously, your self-image is an illusion – but one with which your subconscious mind is obsessed. You’ve got to break that obsession because, otherwise, you will be permanently subconsciously stuck in a long-gone past and completely miss the only time and place in which you actually, truly exist in real reality – this moment... and this moment... and this moment.

Thought abstracts reality – thought blunts our ability to experience. We use formative-years stored thoughts to make sense of the present moment and, in doing so, make nonsense of it. The real you never experiences the moment (except in rare peak experience moments) – it is always the you that you think you are thinking that it is experiencing what it thinks is going on – many steps removed from reality.

This is not a philosophical debate – this deeply affects your ability to truly live, truly experience and truly, really, change your life into the life that your heart desires. You’ve got to stop thinking and start experiencing the reality of the here and now. This is done by taking thought out of the equation as completely as possible. To do this, you need to relearn your childlike ability to experience with your five senses. In practical terms, by way of retraining yourself, you need to set a few minutes aside as often as possible to see, feel, hear, smell and taste where you are. When you find yourself thinking “that smell reminds me of family Sunday dinners” – you stop the thought by starting all over again to see, feel, hear, smell and taste. When you do this you will realise the one eternal truth – that life is changing, moment to moment, before your very eyes, that you are changing moment to moment and that you can work with this state of flux to change your life and live your dream.