Change is a theme of this blog. Change is a theme of recovery. We look for change in recovery because one or more life circumstances is causing us any degree of discomfort; from mild annoyance to limited ability…to pain.
Inevitably, from a life of balance comes change. From that change comes imbalance. That imbalance can be something trivial or an endless poisoning of spiritual, mental and physical states until we the afflicted find a valid enough reason to change it.
Avoidance of change and lumbering into and around imbalance leads to embeddedness in that imbalance. It creates a platform to stack up more imbalances, which go higher and higher until the stack is unsustainable. When we’re embedded into something, change becomes difficult. When we’re embedded in a stack of things, change becomes nearly impossible.
If that sounds extreme, it’s because our human behavior is like hiding under the covers from the monsters in the closet and under the bed. There’s wishing and hoping and praying that those monsters won’t team up with other monsters. There’s fear that they’ll show themselves. Somehow, by hiding ourselves from the monsters, they will magically disappear and Poof! life will return to some kind of normal. It’s fantasy.
Waiting around for change is leaving change to the winds. Maybe change will result and maybe that result will be a poorer future. Leaving it to the ‘fates’, so to speak, is akin to loaning your most prized possessions to strangers, and then expecting them to be returned as given, if they are returned at all. Your most prized possession is your life. You may not see it that way and others may not either, but what else could possibly be true? If stripped of all your earthly material possessions, what would be left? If that happened, would you accept change then, or just walk around naked and afraid for the rest of your days?
The two greatest elements of positive change are thought processes and action towards what you want. Your thoughts, originating in your imagination, produce wants (not needs) that become intention. When that intention is acted towards, the things you want become attracted to you. You become attractive to things by changing elements of your thought process and how you react toward your environment. Being attractive gives greater opportunity for things you want to come into your life. It’s easier to become that image of yourself, the image you imagined, if you think, walk and talk the path that makes that image possible. If you continue down the negative path, commit to sketchy action, and engage in thoughts that are contrary to the image you want, that is what you become.
Everything you see around you is a product of human imagination. Yes, there are greater origins in creation like the planet we live on, but your own image of things, whether natural, material or ethereal, is a production in your imagination based on what input and data arrive from your senses. Your mind is an image creating machine. The images a person creates in their mind have the potential to become reality. With intention, focus of thought and action, the imagination becomes reality.
Think of a chair. You’re not the first person to think of a chair. The first person that thought of a chair was likely tired of sitting on a rock or hauling a heavy tree stump around. That person imagined a lighter, less uncomfortable and functional apparatus that they could form using the materials and tools they had available. Later on, another person saw that idea and formed a newer and better chair in their imagination, then built it. Along the way someone thought about making the chair wide enough so 2 people could sit next to one another intimately. Another made the chair rock back and forth in a comforting way. Over many thousands of years an innumerable number of chair variations have been produced based on an original thought modified over and over again. From the outset, rock, stump and ground had to be moved out of the way mentally and physically. Yes, those were still valid forms of resting one’s backside, but the more convenient and comfortable method was a chair. People left behind the idea of having to find a rock, or roll a stump into place, or sit on the dirty ground in favor of a new thing that worked better.
Think about how comfortable the rocks in your life are to sit on? How convenient is it to keep dragging that burdensome tree stump around? While everyone around you is sitting comfortably, why are you groveling in the dirt?
Obviously, these are metaphors, but the message is still the same. What are the things in your life that could be let go of in favor of new imaginations, intentions, actions and creation? I mean, when you think about it, isn’t life a series of dissatisfactions that we want to become satisfactory? If I’m lonely, I want companionship. If I’m broke, I want some means of income. If I’m bored, I want stimulation. If I’m feeling pain, I want relief. This goes on and on. I have yet to meet the person that was fully satisfied with their life and didn’t have imbalance instantly thrust on them. Human existence is almost entirely based on adapting to and overcoming new challenges.
We all go through fluctuations of carrying burdens around. Balance becoming imbalance, or satisfaction changing to dissatisfaction is a constant fluctuation. Sometimes we see the necessity for change and act on it reasonably. Other times it’s thrust upon us out of nowhere. Whatever the case, the preferable and natural method of moving away from burdensome discomfort, stagnation and unsatisfactory living is to abandon that which is the cause and move toward an imagined, better form of life. There are attachments involved with that. Those attachments aren’t going to just allow you to let go. There’s effort in letting go just like there’s effort in moving forward. The process is imagining then creating a new self that leaves behind some older things to free up space to engage with newer and better things.
It’s necessary for the unusable parts of yourself to be extricated in order for you to bring a new reality into useful places of your life.
If we approach that idea from the standpoint of recovery, the initial step in all recovery is recognizing what change we want to build from. I call this a transition point. It is the point where a desired life change takes effect, and a determination is made towards a new set of life circumstances. This is a difficult point to reach because it involves recognizing what you want to remove (the unsatisfactory), and what you would like your life to become (the satisfactory). What happens with most people is they are so attached to the unsatisfactory that no matter how much the desire exists for the satisfactory, they keep returning back to known elements of their lives.
There is fear involved here. It is on the edge of impossible for a person to move in any direction if they are frozen with fear. The undesirable or damaging elements of a person’s life become the known entities in their life. The void that would be created from leaving those things behind generates a fear of the unknown versus the comfort of the known. The known takes them back into its folds over and over again.
I talked in a previous post about tethers. We become emotionally and spiritually tethered to life-establishments. We embed ourselves into ways of living, good or bad, that become very hard to escape from. We hold on to abusive interaction because what would life be like without the abuser?
Stopping, disengaging or escaping that which limits or destroys us is only the initial point of transformation and change. It’s what happens next that determines sustainability. How recovery works is that we move past the present-day circumstances and move forward in practice, action and growth with a vision of a new form of self. That self will ultimately be a person that no longer needs the things that were escaped from. And that leads back to where we started in this post.
Moving forward in recovery demands a change in thought patterns. By doing this, we use our imagination to fill the void created when we released those things which were tethering us. We speak to ourselves as a friend, a best friend. We speak to ourselves as God would speak to us if we allowed God to. We speak to ourselves as the creator would because we are absolutely creating a version of ourselves that is sustainable and beneficial to our life now and forever. We imagine our better self without those things that prevented us from seeing ourselves that way. We keep those thoughts building toward intention of form and purpose. Then we take action towards that intention while gathering knowledge, tools and relationships to increase the power and capacity of our imaginative thoughts and determined actions.
If you can find a self-help book (including the Bible) that doesn’t use these fundamental principles, I would be shocked.
If it needs to be simpler, then consider this: turn down the volume on the static while turning the volume up on the music. Invite new friends to listen with you. Share in their tastes in music. Dance, sing and enjoy the things you have to offer one another. Along the way, imagine new variations of music. Create those and perform them with a wider audience. Encourage the creations of others. Generate an evolutionary cycle upward in your own life as well as those you love. This is the path that leads to satisfaction and happiness. This is the pathway toward heaven.
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