It’s Personal To me!

For many of us, our childhood brings back heartwarming memories. When we reminisce about our youth and the memories we shared with our parents and our siblings, our bodies become filled with a warm, loving feeling. We often laugh and smile about how carefree we once were and all the silly fun things that we did as a child. Those were the good ol’ days, we often say! Then we realize that we are now adults, having adult responsibilities, and our days are ever so seemly filled with stress and emotions. Now, we often ask ourselves, what has happened to me? Why has life become so challenging? The simple answer is life became personal.

In last month’s blog, Connection, we deliberated on how our childhood sets us up for all the emotional challenges we face as adults. Whereby the unhealthy side of our ego creates a victim and survivor mindset, often leading to pain and suffering because we associate our adult experiences with childhood or past experiences that caused us agony. This mindset puts us in a constant state of stress and emotionally charged reactions. Sadly, we are so used to being in this fight or flight mode that we live every day, believing this is our norm. Typically when we are in a constant state of fight or flight and victimization, everything we experience becomes personal to us. Every conversation, every interaction, and every time things don’t go our way leads us to become emotionally reactive, let’s take everything personally.

Taking our experiences personally means that we feel we are without, and we are the victim to all of life’s unpleasant struggles. Whatever the past has taught us, it allowed us to grow into a person that is always trying to get something. Even our society has created this false idea that if you do not have, then you are without! We have become short-sighted about who we are and our ideals in life. Fortunately, we can reverse all these unrealistic thought processes if we shift our perspective. Only then will we realize that we are much more than we often understand.

One might ask, how does shifting my perspective about my current situations create a less reactive mind that no longer takes things personally? Simple, we must realize that taking life personally is in our mind. Many of us believe that we are being punished. That some strange universal force is out to get us, punishing us for no reason. Every time we experience something unpleasant, we scream, “this always happens to me!” “This is so unfair!” Always reinforcing that the involvement we just had was on a personal level.

We must understand that life is not out to get us and that there is no cosmic force picking on us. Karma isn’t out to get you. Our experiences should help us grow and evolve into emotionally profound human beings. That these experiences are here to teach us to expand our awareness and move past the limitations of our minds so that we can have a full understanding of who we are. With this understanding and shift of perspective, we then begin to realize how strong we are and that we were making our experiences much more extensive than they are. Now we no longer need to take our experiences personally! We are free to live our lives in confidence, knowing that our experiences are not good and bad, that are here to make us whole.