Power of an awareness switch

Hi, this is Jenn, and welcome back to the Remembering to Be Me podcast.

I wanted to drop in today and reconnect with the podcast and just share some random thoughts and they're not even thoughts, they're feelings, observations, insights and what I would put them together as is encouragement

inspiration from bright light shining in a world filled with lots of darkness at the moment and what I want to do is just keep putting this out there because it sure is nice to have that isn't it and where I want to to start was, what do you focus on during your day? And just pick two different days. Pick a day that didn't go well and that was, I'll call it the not so good day because I'm going to use the word bad, where it was filled with challenges and obstacles and things not going the way you thought they were going to go. And then pick another day where everything is in flow. You feel aligned on fire, you're in your groove, all those words work, right? Two different days, same person you. And stop for a moment and consider what happened in each of those two days.

Now a very typical response for us is to go external, isn't it? To look at what happened to us and to say, well, that happened to me. Therefore, I was not happy. Or that person said this, therefore I felt like this or this occurred to me. And we externalise the world happening to us. And then you can say, "Well, they were nice to me, so I had a good day." Or, "I was around people that were friendly, so it was a good day." And that is a really easy way to be in our world, to say, "It's all outside of me." And therefore, we become subject to that, don't we? So my observation today is around how much we externalise our state of being and our happiness and how much we give others or other circumstances the power to affect us.

So what's a typical influence in our day? Social media. You open up your phone and you might even just go to your favourite search engine and you You can't help it. And there's already a trending list of headlines and all of a sudden you'd click one because, oh, I'm curious. And then you start getting all the depressing news, right? Or maybe you just start scrolling and you get stuck in the scrolling and before you know what your head's down and you're not looking around anything in your world or just pausing.

And that's just that. What if you choose certain input sources with a bias towards wanting to know that, or you think of the analogy of you see an accident when people often like will slow down and rubberneck and want to see what's happening and you think, well, gosh, why do we want to all beyond the side of everything falling apart and tragedy and so forth. So I know it's tempting and draws us in and it's very sensationalised and sometimes it's almost just like we can't believe it therefore we want to be drawn into it. But it's all external. And then what about external happy moments. You think about someone who you really enjoy being with, you need that person in your life in order to be happy. And so you aren't happy when they're not around. Is that a dependency? So I'm looking at all these things and going, okay, so how do you actually bring this externalised way of influencing your day back into you. And that's exactly what I was thinking about today. And it starts when you wake up. It starts when you open your eyes in the morning and you choose in that exact moment, what kind of day you're going to have. And you might say, "Oh no, no, no, I woke up and I was really tired." I'm like, "Yes, and you still choose whether you want to react to that tiredness or deal with it and just get on with it." And that's the kind of thing I'm really aware of today. My morning started with a swim. And I'll talk about swimming other time because it's so cool to be slimming again because our my favourite pool reopened.

And I'm trying to fit in my swim to be in a time when it's not too busy. And the other day I went slimming and I unfortunately chose the same exact time as the outdoor whatever Aqua aerobics class with the loud speaker and the cheering the person on. So my whole hour swimming in the swimming pool was distracted by all the noise. And I came away from that day going, "I'm never doing that again. I didn't enjoy that. I felt miserable." And I thought, "Well, wasn't that me choosing to feel miserable about that?" Because there are people enjoying that, and that's their prerogative, and there's a whole day of swimming. I just need to choose my time better. And then there was some problem getting the slim pass and all these things. And I'm like, why did I let that affect me? I didn't need to. And so today I went, all right, I'm going to go slimming. I checked in with my body because I do that. And my body gives me back feedback and says, yes, you need a swim. Otherwise, I would go for a walk, right? So I chose to go for a swim.

And then I chose to be positive about the experience and I chose inside of me to be conscious of the best time to swim so that I would feel most relaxed and enjoy the experience. And so what I did was I looked up the time and I planned my arrival and my swim so that I was before the group started. And it was perfect. It was exactly what I needed this morning. And I did everything in that space, but I kept paying attention to what was going on inside of me.

And I'll give you an example. When I was swimming, there was one person in the lane who didn't care about anybody else in the lane, which can happen, but very, very rarely. And the rest of the people were very considerate. because I was going slow, I let them pass me and they'd say thank you. And this lady would just tap me and bump into me and things like that. And I said, "That's okay." Obviously, it's her kind of day, her kind of personality. On that other day, I might have been really upset by that. Instead, I said to myself, "I'm swimming with a lot of different people who are having different experiences.

I don't need to know what's happening in her world and why she swims like this. But I'll be mindful of it and enjoy the experience no matter what and make my swim work so that I can still enjoy it. And I did and I didn't worry about it. And what I still took away from it was this experience of I'm choosing how I am in this moment, not the moment choosing how I need to feel or the moment telling me how I need to feel.

And I was really aware of that, because I'm always catching myself in that conundrum of letting someone else influence me into my emotional state. And then all of a sudden, I'm aware that I let myself go into that external place. So I'm sharing this also because even though I do all kinds of work on myself and pay attention and focus on personal development and such. And everything you can imagine, even I get messed up around all those things too. And so today was about, are you letting the outside world direct you or you directing your response to that world?

And so then I took it to another level because I love to take everything to another level. It's just me. And I just thought of the connectedness of myself in the world around me. And it felt really beautiful when I stopped at the end of my swim and just lay there and floated in the water and looked up at the sky and looked up at the surroundings and just felt the, I guess the only word is thankfulness for all that I had in that moment of being able to slim in this place, in a peaceful place, in a safe place, with all kinds of different people for all kinds of different reasons, slimming. It felt amazing. And then the friendliness of the people I encountered a side from the lady that was having a bad day maybe or maybe every day is a bad day for her who knows and I just loved it and I thought I want to just keep remembering that feeling.

So how do we do that? How do we choose a response of the inner self rather than the the external overreaction or emotional one. That's the million dollar question, isn't it? Because that's how our world is run right now. It feels like we are in a reactionary world that needs and is begging for a grounded and considered and even fun may dare say a spiritual connected response instead. religious response, a spiritual one. When we are actually feeling our connectedness to our fellow human beings without labels, without all the troubles of a description provided by somebody who wanted to sensationalise the situation. And by no means am I ignoring the realities of this world. I read the paper, I read the news, I'm paying attention to it all, but I'm not in it, I'm not trying to be in it and drag down by it.

I want to be aware of it and know how I can be in this world still. And that's what I was paying attention to today. There's so many things I could have looked at differently and I didn't. I chose to see the world from a thankful place, from a connected place, from a kindness place even. There were just the smile, the little chat with the person in the lane next to me, the way you can see a face light up because they got to the swimming pool and now they're going swimming, a shared experience of that. And then the other thing is just simply there's so many different types of people who enjoy this public swimming pool. And that's really cool too because you go, here's a subsection of society and we're all there with the same desire to swim or be in a a swimming pool for therapy or whatever it is they're doing. And that commonality crosses over cultural divides, it crosses over physical differences, it crosses over everything, age differences.

And that's what I was noticing as well is that I felt part of a community, even though I didn't know any of these people. And so how do you take that feeling and replicate that whenever you go anywhere? How do you sit on a bus, for example, and have that same internal response as opposed to an external reaction that comes from an over-emotional state? How do you keep shifting back into that? And I believe it's coming back to our awareness, our conscious choice, and our own spiritual connection.

So if I think of my morning again, I didn't leave my space in my room until I'd done my meditation, because that sets my day up for me. That's just me. Someone else might do different things, they might get up and do exercises or something else. For me, it was, I'm up and I'm conscious of this day and I'm choosing to be in it. And I also, the first thing I was doing was saying thank you. and I go, "Wow, I get another day. What am I going to do with this day?" It was that feeling of lightness and I chose that. So it's not in your head, it's in your heart, how you feel, how you are, how you connect, and it's a day-to-day normal practice. There's no fancy thing here. This isn't a I just did the alarm me taking care of me, then hopefully I will share that centered place with others and impact them in a positive way as opposed to sharing the uncentered place.

So you're still sitting here probably thinking, well, this just sounds so good, but it's not reality and I get that because I'm certainly going to sit around and have a chat about something. I'm not happy about just as much as the next person, you know, and you can sit and read an article and then want to have an opinion about it because you go, wow, can't believe that's happened. That's just us being normal human beings part of society, right? But when that takes over who you are, When your whole self becomes obsessed only about something that's going to set you off every time you pay attention to it, then again, you're not in you, you're living outside of you.

And the expression I have shared before, which I really like is the one of, I am in this world, not of this world. And that's a very spiritual perspective because it's saying, "I am more than what is happening. I am more than this body. I am more. I am so much more." And when I say more, it's light, it's love, it's connection, it's so much more than we can possibly imagine. And that is the heart I'm nurturing here. So that when you just go through your normal day, you can have a smile in your face and no one needs to know why you're smiling.

You just happen to be happy about it all. And then when you encounter a thing that throws you, you have a much better chance of responding and having resilience around it. And then when you hear information or news that can upset you, you can process that better than if you were already triggered in an emotional state.

And that's another benefit of this commitment to self-centering and responding rather than reacting to the triggers of our day to day world around us, because they're always going to be there no matter what we do. The people, the situations, the news, the emotions, the moments they're there. We cannot stop that. What we can is our way we actually choose to respond to them. But that was my insight for today.

It was about being in this world, but not of it, and choosing to respond rather than react to the litany of things that come at us, and being very conscious about that, and mindful of our presence in this place that we live in and exist in. And then from there choosing to see the world with a very positive slant, I'd say, and seeing the people. And that was just my day. So I'm just leaving you with that insight that I wanted to share dropping in with that.

I'll come in with some other observations because I'm having one of those weeks, I think we're noticing things and you're like sharing that. So checking with yourself,

notice when you're pulled out of yourself into drama, gossip, things that are around you, sensationalism and when you get over excited about something and go, why is this happening? Then recenter yourself back within yourself and then approach the same exact situation from a different perspective and see what happens. You have that power, you have that choice, and you can see things in two different ways. Choose the one that is both helpful to you and helpful to others. So let me know how you go. If you have any experiences you want to share, visit my website and send me a note. Let me know. I'd love to hear. Otherwise, I wish you well with your reflections, your journey and being who you really are in everything that you're doing. So have a great day. Thanks.