Archive for Perceptions influences life
What perceptual lens is creating your life – PART II
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In life you interpret your experiences by processing events in order to give them meaning. Do your cookies of interpretation belong to you or someone else?
Our perceptions flow from the way we choose to feel about any life event, which means that our perceptions and feelings become one and the same.
Scenario: You’re all alone in your house. It’s late at night and you hear a creak on the stairs as you lay in bed. The sound instantly fills you with a feeling of dread and anxiety. A feeling attributed to the memory of the three-year-old you when your brother snuck up the stairs late at night and jumped out of the darkness to scare you as you lay helpless in your cot.
A key point to remember is that your current interpretation (perception) of what something (in this instance, a creak on the stairs) means which flows from sensory stimulation (feeling) is primarily based on a memory of that experience.
Put simply, your memories are memories of memories of memories. In the example of the creaking stairs, you’ve isolated in time a feeling of being scared witless, and wrapped it around the experience of your brother jumping out of the darkness.
You have, in other words, chosen to forget or delete all the surrounding circumstances of that experience; like your mother comforting you and making the world feel safe again or your brother being scolded and sent off to bed and the fact that you got cookies and he didn’t.
Perception is the process of translating the senses (sight, touch, feel, taste and smell) into comprehensible experience. And because you don’t witness the process of translating your senses into perception, your interpretations can never be confirmed or denied.
Validating or falsifying the perceptions you hold isn’t particularly important. What is relevant is the awareness that any and all of the perceptual filters you use – based on your unique interpretation of the meaning of events – is only one way to look at life experiences.
Ask yourself: Do the perception(s) I hold about myself and others help me live the life I want to create?
If the answer to that question is NO then you need to shift the perception(s) which prevent you from fully engaging in the creative flow of your unique and meaningful life.
Your perceptions construct the world and your life as you know it. Change your perceptions and your change your life!
When you hold a perception about the way the world works, you tend to gather information which supports your viewpoint.
Your perception, therefore, acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Your perceptions underpin the stories you tell yourself about who you are but mostly who you are not. They are the foundation of how you believe life should be lived.
Question: Is there anything that you perceived/perceive as real that became real but didn’t give you the life you wanted?
I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts about the content of this blog. Until we meet again, have a extraordinary life!
This is a continuation of the previous excerpt from my book Pack Light & Move Towards Your Ideal Life! You can order the book on: http://www.manifestingyourabundance.com/blog/store/
Your life at this moment – a cookie thief lens
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Events tend to turn out as we thought they would. Not because of our great ability for insight but because our behaviour supports the achievement of the perceptions and views we hold.
Imagine the scene. A travel-weary woman sits just after midnight, in the grey dreariness of a busy airport, waiting for her delayed flight home.
Getting up she aimlessly meanders into the sterile atmosphere of the airport shop looking for something to distract her from the long night ahead. Finding nothing she grabs a bag of cookies and saunters back to her seat and picks up where she left off in her book.
She passes the time reading, munching, watching the clock and getting exceedingly agitated by the man sitting next to her who is, unashamedly, extracting and consuming the cookies from her bag.
He continues doing so until there is only one cookie left, which he lifts from its cellophane confines, breaks it in half, and offers her one half while he pops the other into his mouth.
She is too dumbfounded to speak. How could anyone be so blatant in their ignorance? Why he never even said thank you for eating over half of her midnight snack.
Thankfully, her flight is called just as the man wipes the remaining cookie crumbs from his face. With as much aplomb as she can muster she sweeps to her feet without a backward glance or acknowledging his parting ”safe journey”.
Still fuming the woman sinks into her airplane seat and begins to extract the, now almost finished, book from her bag.
Confusion immediately washes across her mind and face. There in the recesses of her bag lay an unopened bag of cookies. Disbelief swiftly follows her confusion.
If her bag of cookies are still unopened then who’s had she eaten?
Oh God, it finally dawns on her.
She’d been eating the man’s cookies all along. And he’d been gracious enough to share his cookies without seeing one ounce of gratitude from her. It had been she not he who had been the ignorant, ungracious one. Based on The CookieThief by Valerie Cox
What lens is creating your life?
This is an excerpt from Pack Light and Move Towards Your Ideal Life available at: http://www.manifestingyourabundance.com/blog/store/
In the next blog we’ll continue looking at this theme. Until then have a brilliant time!
