Changing default position
DID YOU THINK SOMETHING WAS WRONG ON YOUR PC WHEN YOU SAW THE ABOVE PIC?! Haha, isn’t it funny that we’re like computers? We come set with defaults and even though we don’t like it, we never think to change the default.
A couple of days before Christmas was my birthday. I woke up and cried. Despite the many messages of love I’d received, even at 5am, I hadn’t received one, as yet, from a person I’d hoped.
I decided to go for a run in the Botanical Gardens and as I ran a thought popped into my head “At some point, Lisa, you may want to choose to stop focusing on all the ways in which you’re not loved and start looking at and appreciating the ways in which you are”. I stopped to laugh because even though I’ve been working with myself a long time, I realised it’s all a choice. Everything comes with choice. I laughed because I realised there wasn’t even a need to ‘work’ on myself; just to make different choices.
Later that day in a discussion with one of my dearest friends (one who has loved me through infinitely many moments when I could not love myself), it suddenly dawned on me that my default position was looking at the lack of love and trying to change that instead of appreciating the love already there. I’m skilled in working with changing patterns and yet it doesn’ make working with my own that much easier. What I realised then however is, that once you’ve faced the trauma of the past, you must forgive. Failure to forgive will mean that the trauma remains in the present. That is what it means to forgive and forget. It doesn’t mean ignore what’s past; no, it means embrace it, face and then make the choice to let go.
So many of us are like this; we feel pain associated with the past and think ourselves as servers of justice in persisting with self punishment without stopping to think that it’s a choice.
Imagine waking up with your default as “I’m loved. I love. I’m loving. I am perfect”. Just maybe it’d put a stop to our endless search for perfection?
Well then what would we do? Nothing to cry about. No wounds to feel saddend about. No-one to blame. Just a whole bunch of choices to change. A little more of this and less of that. What then?
Have fun? Enjoy our lives? Dear God could it be that we’re allowed such freedom. The truth is we are and I write this to you in a plea to change your default. The more of us who change our default to love and being absolutely okay in who we are, the more we change the status quo!
Lots of love to all of you
Lisa
