Reality - Perception - Your Life
There's a well-known adage that perception is reality. How we see something becomes our truth, which can sometimes be self-limiting. I want to shift this perspective to EMPOWERING AND HEALING memories, ideas, traumas and thoughts. There is the Law of Attraction; however, here I am encouraging you to lean into a shift from negative to positive. Be it with your phones, your Internet use, the substances you consume, your relationships and ultimately your personal overall mental health.
One of the best ways to start thinking differently is to modify your perspective and look at things from an altered point of view. Listed below are my top three tips for changing your perspective so that you can see the most growth and healing in your mind, body, emotions, and spirit; allow space for new values, behaviors and start to allow new actions in. And the first thing is you need to stand in your power!
1. Own your power. Let’s face it. It is really simple to get in a rut of thinking where we point the blame to someone else or some situation outside of ourselves. For example, it is easy for people to feel like someone else has more than them (Fear of Missing Out, FOMO), so they can never have the success that they deserve. But if I change your perspective and look at things from a positive viewpoint, you can see that you have a clear path of improvement in front of you. You may never have the SAME accomplishments as that other person, but you can develop your own sense of self by interacting in your own way with your wants and power. Even if that feels foreign and uncomfortable at first, you have a chance to live in your power and create your own success based on your present skills and at the same time accept that you have the power to cultivate healthier skills.
How can you take back your power? Is there something in your life that you need to own and look for another perspective? If you take that thing and focus on what is in your power to change, you will find that you feel better about yourself and that your perspective begins to change.
2. Change your routine. Take that morning walk the opposite way you normally do. Simply change your eating routine. Or better yet, go out the front door and take a pause and find yourself present in the current temperature.
*Stop reading – Do you feel the temperature?
As you take a different route, make a different routine, you are going to see different things; and you will see the same things from a different perspective, a different angle. When that happens, you see more dimensions and begin to understand on a deeper level what something actually is.
The rest of your life is going to benefit from making a small change like this. Making these kinds of modifications takes awareness to your perspective that there is more to the story than simply the picture you have developed. Once you have that awareness, you can begin to look for the rest of the story; the rest of the pieces. Those pieces may be just what you need to solve a problem, change a thought pattern, or simply just learn something new.
Today spit in your soup. Challenge yourself to do something different. Yeah, shake the snow globe. How does it feel?
3. Visualize. Practice visualizing the behavior, thought or emotion from different perspectives. This allows you to create space in the mind for a NEW reality. For example, with the newness of coming back in the world publically many of us are seeing something as simple as going to the grocery store as a grateful experience.
Look around you now. What do you see? The necessity of having that specific food, or the abundant gratitude of all the people it took to get it into your cart. Now your immediate surroundings; they are no longer tiny, indistinct things. They are full of detail and life. You see things you couldn’t possibly see from the perspective you once had.
If you look at life’s experience in this same way, by visualizing yourself up close as well as far away from the experience, you can begin to see new things. You can see the details in a new way. You may find that things aren’t, as they seem right now. Or you may find just the exact detail you need for your next step. You begin to open the mind to new details and new paths and perspectives.
I encourage you to take one or two of these and test them out. See if your perspective starts to shift. See if you don’t find your mind more open to new things and yourself more willing to entertain new ideas.
Dr. Ryan Westrum is a clinical psychologist and therapist who specializes in psychedelic integration, addiction, and recovery of all kinds. You can reach him at ryanwestrum@gmail.com or visit healingsoulsllc.com to sign up for an appointment.
