Mystic Messages

Dear Ones,

When troubles come into your life, what do you do to deal with them?  Have you established strategies to cope with problems or do you allow them to take over your day, your life?  Have you thought about the coping strategies that you use and examined them for relevance in your current life or are you still doing what you did when you were a child, a teenager, or someone much younger without the experiences and the learnings you have gained over the years?

Think about that.  When your life is upset, by your own internal emotions or responses to external stimuli, or when external events upset your plans, how do you react?  Children learn very early in life to react to stimulus.  They learn to assess their situation and to figure out a way to get what they want or need.  A tiny baby craves attention and food and dry clothing and will do whatever it takes to get what they need in the moment.  A toddler learns to test the boundaries of their world by saying ‘no’ and pushing on the limits set by authority figures.  Older children learn to acquiesce when a tantrum won’t give them their desired outcome.

And some adults have never learned skills beyond what they practiced as teenagers.  Do you have some coping mechanisms in your skill set that are outmoded and inappropriate for your current life?

Look at some situations that you encounter in your daily life and then examine how you react in those situations.  Are you awake, aware, fully conscious of your response or do you act with a ‘knee-jerk reaction’ that might have been appropriate earlier in your life but might not be appropriate today?  Do you take time to pause and consider your response or are you consistently acting from habit not conscious thought?

We would tell you that most adults on Planet Earth are acting unconsciously in the 21st Century.  Most are using strategies that might have worked when they were 10 years old but that are no longer appropriate.  Have you ever seen an adult pout, perhaps in an adult way, when they do not get their way?  Have you ever caught yourself wanting to say something a 7-year-old would say in response to something upsetting?  That automatic pilot that searches your personal unconscious data base might not know that you have grown beyond the age where tantrums were appropriate, and if you are older than 2 and are reading this then tantrums are most likely not appropriate.

The person living a Conscious Life chooses very deliberately how he or she will respond to an upsetting situation.  It is impossible to remove all troubles or concerns from a human life so upsetting situations will occur.  You cannot prevent that.  You can, however, control your response to those situations.

The best strategy for responding to upset is to have considered this before the upset occurs, when you are calmly assessing your life and your responses to stimuli.  Think about situations in your recent past that have been upsetting to you.  Did you respond in the moment the way you would respond today given time to be calm and consciously choose your response?  Or were you on unconscious automatic pilot?  Program into your tool box a new response to that situation so that, if it or something similar occurs again, you can choose a different response.  Think about your overriding values and decide that you will respond to upset in accordance with what you value highly and who you wish to be.

This is especially important in dealing with your family.  You might be a different problem-solver at work than the person who deals with upsetting situations at home.  Examine this honestly for yourself.  Can you bring some of those business skills home with you?  When you are tired do you react to your children’s antics differently from the way you react when you are rested and relaxed?  Do they understand the difference?  Think about your spouse or partner and how you react to things that they say.  Are you choosing a conscious reaction or are you being a recalcitrant child throwing a tantrum?

Be conscious.  Choose your behaviors for you do have control over those.  Plan your response to things that don’t go your way.  You become a Peacemaker when you are not the one throwing a childish tantrum!  Live a Conscious Life and you will be teaching others how to be a Peacemaker, too.

And so it is.