What we have found in our office and in offices around the world is that it is how I respond to life, when it doesn’t go expected, that can be the key to a healthy, happy life. We have our clients review the day before going to sleep at night. Ferret out instances where I or others did or didn’t do or say something as I would have. What did I resist, who did I resist? Resistance is any negative thought, word, deed, or even tension in my body. I could be on the giving or receiving end of the distress. The key to remember is that if it is in my life there is some lesson I can lean from it. Typically what I judge in another is an aspect of myself that I have not fully accepted, loved, learned & lived from. The situations you may initially look for may be serious physical attacks, traumas, or as innocuous as a snide remark. The key is if I have a repeated thought about myself, others, life, etc. The mind is suck and needs to be readjusted.
For each incident there is a five step process: write it out!
- Forgive the other person for what they did or didn’t do.
- Give the other person permission to forgive me for what I did or didn’t do or would like to do in retaliation, or fix them, or prove to them, or change them.
- Forgive myself for what I’ve been doing and not doing to myself: the false beliefs, the endless story of victimhood, the sabotaging, self-betrayal, self-deception and justification that keeps me stuck in a never ending rut of suffering and symptoms.
- See the good and learn the lesson. As I write out these steps a theme will become clear, a virtue will show up, to be practiced and grateful for. All virtues like love, joy, patience, forgiveness, peace, start with an internal picture and feeling that manifests to an action.
- Wish them well. Be grateful for the struggles, challenges, traumas and dramas, for it is in these experiences, these great teachers, that I begin to look inward for the grace and strength, returning to discover who I really am and manifest this externally.
In Health & Service,
Dr. Roland Phillips BA, BS, D.C.