Creating valuable experiences

When we're thinking, we have no sense of creating valuable experiences. What shows up simply happens to us. We don't control how we take it in. It's a fact to face and a reality to deal with. We are hard wired to our circumstances. If things are good, we feel good. If things aren't so good, then we're not so good. We think we cannot change the facts. There's no way to have a positive experience of a negative situation without becoming delusional, unrealistic and subject to scorn.

We get a sense of being able to create our experiences when we begin to reflect on what happens. We get inspirations for other ways to see what is obvious. We get questions we had no considered about what something means to us in particular. We notice how we block out most things and dwell on what troubles us. We realize how there's more than one way to see the facts and let in the situation.

When we become powerful creators of our experience, we suspend our thinking. We reverse several assumptions that legitimize thinking:

1. We were thinking we are not delusional or kidding ourselves when we face the facts. We now realize we really are delusional when we are realistic.
2. We were thinking we have no choice but to react to how good or bad things are. We now realize that choices abound once we stop thinking.
3. We were thinking we know what to make of what appears. We now realize we are making ourselves miserable by what we know and switch to being innocent about what appears.

Once it appears we know nothing about what has appeared, we are free to create a valuable experience. We can make of it what we will and enjoy the fruits of our labors. We can turn the seemingly bad thing into any of a list of options:

• a lesson we are ready to learn
• a change from the same old routine
• a different diagnosis of what the real problem is
• a revelation of what's been overlooked or forgotten
• a sign of a need for more communication and reciprocation
• a gift of freedom from what felt like an impossible burden
• a turnaround from what was being dreaded or avoided
• an answer to a lingering question about what to say "no" to
• a reminder to reconsider our position that was totally in favor or against
• an inspiration to revise our goals or plans
• a better way to consider the big picture that ties everything together
• a disclosure of the opposing point of view and underlying motivations
• a display of the missing half of the whole deal
• a wake up call to develop a more inclusive solution

With so many options for how a bad thing can be good,(and there's many many more) thinking would crash from the overload. The only way to process these options is to go within. The regular use of reflective practice brings clarity to overwhelming options like these. Whichever choice we make, that is our created experience of the moment.