Developing Clarity

In the first chapter you worked through exploring the landscape of your wants in different areas of your life. If you haven’t done that yet, go back and do that exercise.

This chapter is about the next step: develop Clarity. Clarity is an absolutely critical quality to develop. It will change everything if you can cultivate clarity, and apply it in your life.

This is a longer chapter which explains why Clarity is important, how we’re normally operating without it, and what changes when we develop it. If you don’t have time to read please just jump straight to the exercise at the end! You can come back to the explanation later. Practice is everything!

Why is Clarity so important?

Much of the time we are operating in a fog. We are on auto-pilot, we are creating our lives based on whatever choices we have made in the past, and are repeating those, not necessarily because it’s what we want now, but it’s what we wanted then, and we haven’t updated what we’re focusing on. This is what I call past-present orientation.

Understanding Past-Present Orientation

It can be astonishing, when one listens and pays attention, how much time us humans spend recreating the past and bringing it again and again into the present. One morning in the coffee shop I overheard a random normal conversation between a customer and the barista, where they spoke about the weather: “do you remember how this year it was not sunny”, “do you remember how this year it has been cold almost all the time, how it was hardly sunny at all?” Over and over the conversation went, recalling past events. During the exchange that morning I could literally feel my brain reaching into that magical space of creation, that place where our thoughts take shape, form into vibrations that ripple into physical form. This was not a memory being pulled back from a storage device, in the traditional interpretation of how we work, I could feel that this was an act of creation. A new thought of a cold summer was being formed, linked in resonance with the vibrations of the barista’s words.

When we do this, we are not actually remembering these events, we are (re)inventing them.

This is past-present orientation. We are doing this all the time. When we wake up, we remember who we are, we remember we are single or in relationship, we have such and such a job. But really we are recreating it! Technically there is nothing to stop us making new choices and just not going to that job today. But, we have the orientation that it is critically important to show up to that job, remain in relationship with this person and so on, and so we recreate that reality again today.

There is no judgement here – this is pretty normal human behavior. It helps form connections between people, builds a sense of safety. If someone wishes to stay in the same version of their world as before, then there’s nothing to do, just keep doing what you want, you are in alignment. But if you want to change something, then re-creating the past in the current over and over is what we have to stop doing. We have to switch to a future-present orientation. To do this, we need clarity in what we want now.

A past-present orientation keeps us trapped when we want to change. This was something I did for many years for example during and after a decade-long depression. After I began to feel much much better, and I began to feel feelings again, in particular feelings like joy and happiness, it took me quite some time to stop recreating the experiences I used to have when I was depressed. Meaning, when I was outside somewhere enjoying myself, for a long time I would not let myself trust these feelings, and I kept my internal label of depression for a long time. Eventually I noticed that I was doing this – even though I was happy, I was keeping the labels “depression”, and “I have depression” for myself. I recognized that I was doing this, and wanted to stop, but felt that I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. Eventually I gave myself fully into the process of letting go, I learned to live in the now, and stop re-creating the past in the current, and that’s when things started to change extremely rapidly.

Conscious vs Unconscious Creation

The reality we see around us is actually an echo of a previous now. In some moment in the past we thought thoughts, and took actions, that resulted in the things, places, people that are around us right now. If we choose to recreate our past experiences, and make them current again, then our reality will continue to be shaped around them. But we do have a choice, in every moment, to be different, which will ultimately result in a new reality coming into being based on this new now.

Even when we have this Past-Present Orientation, we are still constantly creating, we are just not typically aware that we are. We made choices in the past, and now we continue habitually making those choices. The choices are often made as a result of unconscious beliefs about ourself, typically unhealthy ones. Because we become so habituated to doing this, we develop a mindset after a while that we aren’t making these choices ourselves, that we are victims of this process. “I *have* to go to work even thought I hate it. I don’t have time to go to the gym. And so on.

This is unconscious creation. We are not aware that we are making choices all the time, that we are creating our own reality.

Future-Present Orientation

Conscious Creation happens when we develop Clarity about what we want, and we actively engage with the process of creating it. Stick with me as we explore and dive in, and that’s what you will learn how to do! This will shift you from unconscious, past-present orientation, to conscious future-present orientation, where you are creating a new future by changing what you focus on in the present.

Develop Clarity in What You Want

In the previous exercise you looked around the landscape of your life, in seven areas, to see what you didn’t want, and what you wanted instead.

The good news is that you probably want a lot of the things you are already creating! Maybe your home, or your relationship and so on, many things may already be in alignment with what you want. But in the areas where you want something different, that’s where you can learn and actively engage with Conscious Creation. And that’s what we’re talking about here.

Or maybe you want a whole lot of change, and you like very little about your life. I’m sorry if that’s your experience, because you probably don’t feel very good. That’s exactly how I used to feel when I started learning this too.

Either way it’s the same process, you just might need a bit more patience if you have a lot of things you want to change. But in fact in some ways it can be easier if that’s your story, because you might have a lot more drive to change than someone who just wants to change something small.

EXERCISE

Step 1: Complete your list of wants

Take a look at the list of things that you want from the previous exercise. First feel into this and see is this complete, or is there anything deeper that has come up since you did this that needs to be on the list.

Step 2: Reorganize into Feelings and Forms

Now we’re going to start to refine the list. First off reorganize the list based on whether these things are feelings or “forms” (things). We’re going to put it into two levels: feelings and forms. A form is the form a feeling takes, like a car, a house, a specific job, a weight-loss goal and so on. For example - you want a new car. What you really want is the feeling of adventure. So the car is one form of adventure. Or, you want to lose 30 lbs of weight. What you really want is to feel more comfortable being intimate with someone and you feel your weight is in the way of that. So the 30 lb weight loss is the form of intimacy. So, examine each “form” you have on the list, and reflect on what is the deeper feeling behind that? Assign each form to a feeling (or maybe to multiple feelings).

Step 3: Keep Going

Keep going and be loving to yourself! Developing clarity is an inherently messy process. It will likely feel uncomfortable. You’ve avoided this clarity so far for some pretty deep reasons. It might not feel safe to let these feelings out. Bring a lot of loving-kindness to yourself as you go through this process, be patient, and allow yourself to move through it.

Step 4: Feel Into Truth

Now you should have a smaller list of feelings that you want to feel. We could say these are also ways of being that you want. Take a deep look at this list and see if that feels true. Allow yourself to breathe into these things and feel the power in them. Feel if they resonate deeply with your heart. If they don’t go back and reflect some more. If they do, then just relax and feel into the recognition of clarity.

What’s Next?

Take a pause and allow the clarity around what you want, who you want to be, to soak in. The next step is Choice. We’ll cover that in the next chapter.