(This week guest author, success coach and author Isobel Phillips joins us with wit and wisdom!)

I started writing just now and my baby cat Lexi, the cutest EVER born of course! – started to pace backwards and forwards on my desk and over my keyboard, to get my attention. Subtle, she’s not. I got irritated very quickly, because I was ready to write and she was “in my way”. Then I remembered what I intended to write about and had to inwardly smile, while outwardly still being stern cat mama.

The general topic of this series – trying to understand how all our suffering, irritation and frustration comes from our thoughts, not from anything outside us. Yes, I get the irony.

So I stopped trying to type and scratched her under her chin until she started purring. She’s now happily perched on a corner of my desk, looking out of the window – and I’m free to type in peace.

Living Inside-Out

I’ve always liked the common sense and insights shared by Michael Neill (Supercoach). A while ago I realised that his latest books – The Inside-Out Revolution and The Space Within – weren’t quite saying what I thought they were. I think it started with Nicola Bird, who mentioned she was working with Michael when her whole business philosophy changed, who started it for me. Then Grace Kelly. They were seeing something in his books that I hadn’t grasped, so I went back and read them again, listened to his weekly radio show on Hay House Radio – and still didn’t get it!

I was stuck in the paradigm that “we create our reality through our thoughts“, which was all well and good and he was saying the same thing. And that’s all I could see. But my philosophy went on to say “so if you don’t like your reality, change your thoughts“, which seemed like the next logical step to me and what I’d been doing for the last 15 years or so. It had worked pretty well, I thought smugly.

But Michael wasn’t saying “change your thoughts“, he was saying – as I read it – “ignore your thoughts, they’ll pass“. What??? No chance of THAT! My thoughts? My precious thoughts? Ignore them??? Noooo, surely I have to CHANGE them, so my reality changes to match my new, thought-led vibration? This is what I DO, after all!

Michael’s writing style is very fluid, easy-going, conversational, almost hypnotic. It’s kind of easy to miss the huge insights because they’re not sign-posted “here is a BIG insight! Take it seriously!” He just throws them out there casually and you either pick them up, or you don’t.

Clearly, I hadn’t.

So I tried another writer on the same topic, Clare Dimond. She’s much more in your face, more direct, she signals the major points clearly.
A bit like Pratchett’s Death:
YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS. Ok, I get that, I can change my thoughts.
YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL. Huh? Yes I am, I control my reality by controlling my thoughts.
YOU ARE NOT YOURSELF – assuming that wasn’t a reference to my mental state at the time, then who the fuck am I?
YOU ARE AN IDEA OF SELF.

At which point I hid under the covers and pretended to be asleep.

But Michael Neill believes this, writes about this, coaches on this. And he doesn’t sound like Death (to be fair, Clare is an excellent, funny and exceptionally clear writer – I just wasn’t ready for her at the time, but I’ve gone back and re-read her books with a lot more understanding since my first attempt).

So I need to understand this, somehow.

The Three Principles

I get the basics (I think):
Thought creates the content of our reality, or experience. We don’t experience anything without having some kind of thought of about it. So everything is filtered through our thoughts – and every experience is actually CREATED BY our thoughts. Check.

Consciousness is our awareness that we’re having an experience, that we’re not our thoughts. There are Thoughts and there is a Thinker and there is the Observer who is aware of the Thoughts AND the Thinker. At the point when you stop day-dreaming and come back to the present moment, you experience Consciousness. Check.

Mind is Universal Intelligence/Source/God/the Universe – the non-human Prime Mover behind everything. It’s our innate knowing, the still, small voice of wisdom. Check.

Living in a Movie

Michael has a great movie metaphor in which Thought is the content of the movie, Consciousness is the screen that allows us to see the movie, and Mind is the projector that makes it all possible.

And when you watch a movie, at least if it’s any good, you’re THERE, experiencing it in present time as if it’s really happening. You hold your breath when the heroine goes into the dark forest where the music tells you Something Bad is about to happen, you jump and your heart races when the Something Bad leaps out of the bushes and grabs her. You may even shed real tears when the cute dog dies trying to save her.

And then someone near you coughs, and you wake up.

But all the time, you knew in some part of your mind that you were watching a movie and it wasn’t “really” happening, so you were free to enjoy it. You were also free to wake up from it, to “come back to reality”, whenever you wanted.

All this made perfect sense to me. I couldn’t see what was so ground-breaking about it.

Except for this idea that we don’t need to DO anything in order to change what’s happening. We just accept it’s a movie. We don’t try to change the movie; even if we don’t like the ending, we accept that’s what the director chose. We don’t feel we have to control the experience so we feel better. It’s just a movie.

Then Michael said “you’re suffering from forgetting that you’re in a movie – nothing else.”

OHHHHH ….

No. Wait.

Waking Up

If it’s all a movie and I don’t need to control the experience, does that mean everything is already decided?
That I have no free will, no ability to affect anything, no CHOICE?
I just put up with whatever comes along?
I can’t change anything?

That can’t be right.

When I wake up from the movie, what do I wake up TO? To Consciousness, to the awareness that it was all a movie. I look around the cinema .. I see the screen, I’m aware of the movie playing on it, but now I’m not IN the movie. The spell has been broken.

So where am I?
No …
WHO am I?

To be continued …

With love – always
Isobel Phillips xx

Coming up: Part 2 – More than a feeling