Changing Things
You may have noticed how when are doing something or seeing someone or in a situation that you have not been in in some time, you experience a flood of pictures, thoughts, stories & the meaning — conclusions — you came to the last time you were in that situation.
Moving conjures up past moves, the emotional situations, and conclusions, decisions, assumptions, that you made and embodied the last time you did this.
This phenomenon has never been understood properly, based on all the myriad of articles in various disciplines that I’ve read over the decades.
It’s a universal phenomenon, in all kinds of people and all kinds of situations.
It’s been misidentified and mislabeled as everything from dwelling in the past to stewing over the past, reliving the past, and even qualifying the conclusions as represented by the mischaracterized, “one step forward, two steps back,” meant to convey one is misstepping and/or losing ground, which is not what’s happening at all.
Bodies are incredibly sophisticated, sentient systems of awareness.
They are the original — and much more wondrous — GPS. Your innate Global Positioning System that is your body also places you in in time and space. Think of your body and its awareness operated in 4 dimensions, not just the 3 dimensions we are told we live in.
Bodies are innate sensing systems: think tri-quarter from the original Star Trek. Sensing is one of body’s biggest capacities and jobs. Body’s have at least 33 ways of locating and sensing. (Curious? Read more here.)
One built-in, therefore wise, ways bodies sense and inform us about our world and situation is to read the sensations of a moment, then ask, “Is it like this? Like this? Like this?” — like the childhood game we played — Concentration — with 2 decks of cards (so there were duplicates of each card on the table) laid face-side down, and you turn over a card at a time, looking for matches.
It’s like the phenomenon we hear about where your life “flashes before you,” in situations where you think you’re about to die = the natural phenomenon of body’s intelligence asking, “Is this like that? like that? like that?”
Using the energy signatures — sensations, emotions, pictures, memories — of all the senses collected in the moment, body’s asking if this moment is like a previous moment — to give you the best navigational information for negotiating this moment. Genius!
Packing and moving include a lot of pictures, emotions, sensations, scenes & memories about previous moves, the people, places, and things involved back then. And any unfinished, aka knotted, tight, snagged, walled up, difficulties from past moves get stimulated and brought to mind.
People are usually annoyed by this, but it is a kindness, really.
Old stuff comes up not to drain, or annoy or distract from this moment, but in fact to contribute to the moment, offering a fresh start by transforming the old baggage into a power pack for the next adventure.
Right now, I’m in a kind of in-between state. My things are 15 days late and counting, no confirmation from the movers about where or when I can expect my things to be delivered.
For the first 2 weeks, I had a lot to do with spending time with my sister; an amazing gift in itself. Since then, I’ve been waiting.
Some day’s I’m at ease with getting on to doing things that don’t require my furniture or things I don’t yet have.
But there are moments when I take it all very personally and want to yell at the sales lady at the moving company, because of a story in my head that someone’s taking advantage of me for this or that “reason.”
Those are the moments of most pain, not most power, as I’ve got a story (that get’s lots of social support) that the moving company is in the wrong and I’m in the right and they are bad and I am good, and honey, as soon as you’ve got all that right-wrong-good-bad going on, not only are you in story-land, but you’re the one being tossed about by the tempests of other people’s stories about you and often made up people at that!
The movers are not singling out my things one way or another. There is no plot against me and even if there was a problem with a truck and my things got lost, stolen, or smashed to smithereens, I am going to have stuff again soon — either my things that they picked up in VA. or replacement stuff. Either way, fretting over all that is not the best use of my time and energy today.
Fretting over all that, drawing conclusions about what it means about me, they, others, life, or anything else is not only not a good use of my time, but it also destroys the quality of life I desire and require for my most joy, most creative, most fun living.
I’d rather not kill off the life of my dreams by fretting and making mean meanings about me.
I’d rather live now as the luckiest person on the planet, in this and everything else.
Even if I can’t explain yet how this is the best thing that could be happening, I can rest assured and at ease in the knowing that this IS the best, most magical way for things to be at this moment.
