Change the Focus
“My
self-healing lies in praying for those who have harmed me...We can
always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what's
wrong in your life, or you can focus on what's right.”
Marianne
Williamson
We were talking in the
Spirituality Group about why it is that we humans tend to focus on
the negative, and simply overlook the positive. One man said he
thought it might be a hold-over from our primitive cave days—when
we had to be ever wary of all the things that might want to eat us.
In other words, an over-developed sympathetic nervous system that's
always on alert. It's also a matter of training. When you think about
it, all our drama, whether in books, television, theater or films,
requires a driver; an action that drives the plot and story line.
Usually that driver is an act of sabotage, murder, or some version of
imminent or past dastardly action. Think Shakespeare, here. In many
of his plays, almost everyone in the cast is dead by the end. We
seems inherently more interested in the possibility of diabolical
outcomes than we are in happy endings. We've come to see the constant gut-wrenching turmoil as normal.
So when it's suggested
that our personal healing lies in forgiveness, in praying for the
one(s) who harmed us, it simply goes against the grain. We want
resolution, and that resolution involves reciprocity of suffering. We
call it closure, but it rarely closes anything. In considering all of
this, it's important to remember that our feelings belong to us—are
generated by us, from within us. We own those feelings, so we are the
only one's who can tinker with them. We can choose to see negative
actions as paramount, or we can decide to balance them with all that is positive in our lives. It's a matter of changing focus, just as
we do when we look at something in the distance, and then, look at
something close up. Our focus also belongs to us. It is neither the
purview of anyone else, nor is it dependent upon our circumstances.
Every day, we choose. Moment-to-moment, we choose. Do we want to
heal? If so, perception is everything.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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