…Not necessarily what you get. Perception is a complicated thing. Human perception is quite limited. We only have access to a very limited viewpoint that we filter through our own pain and experience. We can only see what people show us and we don’t have access to the thoughts and feelings that create what we see, no matter what people say to us, it’s still a limited perception. We don’t have access to and we can’t see all the other factors at play in our lives. There are many things happening around us that help to create our experience that we are completely oblivious to. We look through a very limited viewfinder on a daily basis and most of us don’t question that. We don’t question the limitations of our perception. We don’t question what we’re not seeing. We do, however, love to make lots of assumptions and project our pain all over the place based on those assumptions. That is just part of the fun of being human.
The goal of this collection of essays is to put the experience together so that we can gain clarity (master the illusion), recognize our limitations, and still be okay within that. When I offered tarot readings and psychic readings at the beginning of this journey, they were mostly predictive readings. People wanted to know what was going to happen next or what the outcome would be. Why? So that they can make informed choices about what to do next. It allows them to back out if they don’t like the outcome and therein lies the problem. There’s a reason you don’t have the outcome and it’s because if you knew what it was, you’d never go on the adventure.
If somebody had told me that where I am now was the outcome or even a pit stop on the journey, I would never have started. I would have been absolutely terrified. There is no way that I would have seen myself as somebody who would be able to make her own choices, do her own thing, be okay in her own skin, and take control of her own life. Not in a bazillion years! But here I am.
The outcome isn’t helpful to you. Why? Because it’s such a limited perception. It doesn’t offer you all the things you have to learn on the way to the outcome. It doesn’t tell you about all the experiences you’re going to have. It doesn’t show you who you need to become. It’s just one aspect of a much larger journey. Because you’re so prone to focusing on that one aspect and you don’t consider everything that needs to happen for you to get there, the outcome scares you, just as it would have scared me.
I’m clairvoyant. I can intuitively get outcomes - when it’s beneficial to me to have a known outcome. When is that? When knowing the outcome will help me keep going instead of scare me away. There have been many times when the outcome became the carrot that I used to push through an experience. It works quite well. But when you want to use the outcome to figure out whether it’s safe to move forward, you won’t get an outcome. You’ll get what you need so you can move forward, but it may or may not be what actually happens. That’s when people lose faith in their intuition. That’s when the questions start happening.
Why did my intuition lie to me? I have an answer to that question. It didn’t lie to you. It told you what you needed to hear so that you would keep going on the journey. It doesn’t want you to know what the outcome is because it will scare you off. When you need whatever the journey is going to offer you, then the outcome will remain hidden or they’ll tell what you want to hear so that you will move forward anyway.
When this happens your ego gets in there and makes up a story that you can’t trust your intuition. This is why you focus on the journey and not the destination. Your intuition won’t let you avoid the journey based on the outcome that you don’t like. That’s not how it works. You have to be willing to go on the journey, regardless of what the outcome is. When your intuition knows you won’t go on the journey if you don’t like the outcome, it fills in the blanks with something that makes you happy so you’ll keep going. It’s not lying to you. It’s keeping you going in the right direction.
Now your ego says that’s a “bait and switch”. The point is the journey and the lessons along the way, not the outcome. Your need for it to work out the way you think it should keeps you from going on valuable journeys and learning valuable lessons from those journeys. The idea that your intuition needs to tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth is just your ego defending itself. It’s an argument that keeps you stuck.
The job of your intuition is to keep you moving in the right direction. It doesn’t care what the outcome is. It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. What matters is that you get the tools that you need to eventually live the life you want to live. You can’t do that if you get stubborn about your intuition only telling you the truth. Your intuition is not there to appease you. It’s there to guide you and make sure you get what you need. If you need a carrot to do that, it’ll give it to you whether it’s an actual carrot or a lump of coal disguised as a carrot. It matters not. Why? Because the journey and tools you gain along the way are more important than your comfort level.
Do you know how many times my intuition has “lied” to me about the outcome? Dozens! Why? To keep me going on the journey. I needed the journey, not the outcome. That means that my intuition would tell me whatever the hell I needed to hear to keep going. It didn’t matter what it was, if it kept me moving that was fine. When I would argue after the fact, it would tell me exactly what I just wrote to you. You needed that lesson more than you needed the outcome you thought you wanted. Just to answer your next question - yes, I trust my intuition completely.
My intuition taught me to make the journey more valuable than the outcome. My intuition taught me to stop worrying about the outcome almost entirely. I still get outcomes sometimes but I don’t ask for them generally because I don’t need them. At this point I’m going on the journey anyway. When I do get an outcome it comes through almost as a side note with all the other things I actually need to know that are far more important than the outcome. Do I still grumble sometimes? Yep. Of course. I’m human. My focus goes back to what I’m going to get from the experience. If the outcome I want contains something I need to get, then I’ll get the outcome I want. If the outcome I want doesn’t serve me at that point, then it doesn’t happen. Either way the journey is more important and that’s my intended focus.
You can gain a lot of clarity from the journey when you learn to interpret what you see a little differently. The first part of that is to remove all the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization; take out all the pain. The second part of that is to get your ego and the need to defend yourself out of the way. The final part of that is to open up to the idea that you’re missing a lot of valuable information because of your limited perception. What you see from other people and the world around you is not the whole story.
First we have to accept the experience as is, that’s what I mean when I tell you to drop the stories. The experience just is. Don’t add any drama or pain. Don’t make it more colorful. Don’t modify it in any way. Just leave the experience alone. Let it be there in all its glory just as it is. Hint: Your judgment of the experience as good or bad, right or wrong begins the story telling process. You’ll know right away you don’t like something because it’ll upset you. But instead of trying to do something about that, just let it be there. Don’t react to your own emotions. Just let it all be there for a moment.
You’ve recognized the emotion and now your job is to figure out where it came from without blaming the experience for it. Leave the experience out of it. What was the trigger? The experience reminded you of something, pushed a button, poked at an old wound, or created a strong judgment call from you. Your job is to figure out what that is and resolve that within yourself. You can’t change the external experience so there’s no point in going there or doing anything with that. Your job is to resolve those emotions within yourself, taking full responsibility for them without blaming the experience for creating them and without changing anything outside of you. It’s a completely internal process.
To do this you have to remove the filters of pain and get your ego out of the way. We do this from outside of the human experience. Remember I talked about that separation? This is where you separate. You get outside of what your human is feeling and thinking so that you can see it more clearly. The human is reacting and that’s totally okay. Stay out of that craziness a little bit though. You can allow it to happen, but you don’t have to get tied up in it or buy into it. Your job is to understand why it’s there. What I always do is question why the experience is making me feel bad. What am I actually reacting to? The experience happens and I drop it almost immediately. My work is on me and my feelings. It has nothing to do with the experience at all.
Sometimes though my emotional reaction to an experience is based on a poor interpretation of the experience. We can have two kinds of seemingly negative experiences. We can have experiences that are just simply awful and then we can have experiences that we make worse than they are through our interpretation of them. It’s the second one we need to be able to catch and do something about. We need to fix our interpretation so that we can feel better.
This comes back to filtering out the stories but it’s also about how we fill in the blanks in relation to other people. What assumptions are you making about the other people involved? How do you know those assumptions are true? The reality is we don’t have a clue, even if they tell you, you still don’t really know for sure. Why? Because they are prone to telling stories about themselves the same way you are. Pain is not the truth of a person. When they show you pain they are lying to you.
Have you ever heard the phrase “actions speak louder than words”? Have you ever considered what this phrase implies? The idea behind it is that we’re supposed to believe what people do over what people say. We’re supposed to believe the actions of others. So when people do the opposite of what they say, the action was true and what they said was a lie. Is that always the case? Have you ever done the opposite of the truth that you had stated? Have you ever broken up with somebody you still loved? Was walking away the truth? Did the walking away mean you didn’t care? Were the actions the truth in that scenario?
People run away from the truth all the time because the truth can be downright scary. Think of that thing you want to do that you’re scared to do. Think of the thing you need to tell somebody that you’re not saying. Think of how hard it is to ask somebody on a date for the first time. Think of how challenging it is to keep your feelings a secret. Think of how hard it is to act against how you feel. Think of the thousands of scenarios that show up in our experience where we do one thing and say another. Think of all the times where you’ve made that okay.
There are so many spots in life where our actions and words are anything but congruent. The second somebody treats us badly we immediately decide that that’s the truth of who they are and how they feel. That’s a defense mechanism. That’s a way for you to block the relationship without taking responsibility for your own actions and words. You see the pain that they project as truth, but it’s not. Then you defend that lie by saying their actions speak louder than their words.
Their actions are often more obvious and more in your face and maybe in real time they do proverbially “speak louder”, but that doesn’t make the action more true it just makes it more obvious. When you decide that actions trump words you’re denying huge parts of yourself and other people. Maybe the words they said were true and maybe they just didn’t have the courage or the strength to act on them. Maybe in that moment it was easier to project the pain. Maybe the pain for them was a self-defense mechanism. Maybe they felt like they couldn’t act on how they felt for one reason or another. Maybe they felt like it wasn’t okay to say what they wanted to say or do what they truly wanted to do.
The benefit to you in recognizing the pain of others without just blindly reacting to it is that it gives you the opportunity to question what you saw. It opens you up to the possibility of compassion. Your need to defend yourself makes you want to just blindly believe what people do because that’s easier. Their action allows you to justify the need to defend yourself. It gives the mind and the ego a story to tell. Your feelings will justify the story. Now you have a reason to separate from the person or block the relationship. Your limited perception of that person and your belief that their actions were true causes you to make choices that you don’t need to make. It causes you to leave relationships that you don’t need to leave. It causes you to feel pain that you don’t need to feel. You create something that isn’t really there because you believe what you see and you don’t question that.
Your human perception is limited and you don’t ever question the limits of that perception. If all you did was accept pain at face value and recognize it as not true, it would free you to understand the people around you better. The questions that come from seeing the pain differently allow you to recognize your own pain more easily as well. You become more open. It frees you to stop defending yourself so much because you realize that people are projecting their pain not attacking you. It’s okay to stop taking other people’s pain personally.
When we respond or react to anything that goes on around us, we’re putting our energy out there. We throw our energy into that situation and that has an effect, whether we intend it to or not. Often we’re not aware of our own energy in the sense that we don’t recognize when we’re throwing our own pain around. We don’t recognize the pain cycle being reflected through our reaction to what happened. We don’t pay attention to how every thought, feeling, word, and action affects the world around us. We do a thing and we wait to see what happens without ever acknowledging that we played a role in that outcome, good or bad. Even without doing anything to directly affect the outcome, how you feel on the path to the outcome matters. Your perception is that life made you feel that way, but that’s not true either.
Learning to see the illusion clearly means understanding that how you feel is probably part of a cycle of pain that you’re caught in. The experience just is, so that means how you feel about it is a choice. Typically though, we believe that life happens to us and we are at the mercy of it. Because we believe we are at the mercy of it, we don’t take control over how we feel about it. That keeps us stuck in cycles of pain that we remain blind to for as long as we focus on the pain we think is being inflicted on us.
I was scared of not having enough money. I was scared of being homeless. I was scared of bill collectors and debt. I was scared of money in general. I was terrified of everything related to money and bills. Because of that fear I created all kinds of wonderful scenarios in my life that were going to make me deal with it. What happened was that I had to sit in the fear of unpaid bills and debt. I got to watch bills bounce and I couldn’t fix them. I was powerless to change what was happening around me. The lesson in that was simple - I could be okay anyway. I didn’t have to be afraid.
I blamed life for what I thought it was doing to me because I was afraid of the outcome and I didn’t want to be in that situation. I didn’t understand what was happening and I didn’t understand how to get control over it. What I learned was that even if I couldn’t control the situation, I could control myself within the situation and that was far more valuable to me than controlling the situation itself ever would have been. I gained a lot of personal power by learning how to let go of things I couldn’t control.
My limited human perception was that I was powerless to change things and that the outcome was something I needed to be afraid of. What I learned was that the outcome was something I could handle, it wasn’t scary, and that my power was within me so I didn’t have to wait for the outside world to grant it to me. I didn’t need to get control over the external reality to find my point of control and power within myself.
As I got more and more okay within myself, my perspective continued to broaden. I saw other places in my life where similar things were playing out. The cycle of fear was present in almost every aspect of my life in one way or another. All I had to be willing to do was to go find those spots and challenge them. One by one, I began to challenge everything that appeared in front of me. The more I challenged the fear, the more I understood how the fear was playing out in my life, where it was affecting me, and how to use my power to change it in a way that didn’t create more chaos.
The problem for me was that I liked to set bombs off when I got frustrated with my life. Instead of fixing individual things or even fixing myself, I would just wipe the slate clean and start again. I ran away a lot because I didn’t understand how to use my power to shift things and I was scared of what would happen if I did try to shift them. What I learned was that all I had to do was shift my reaction or response to what was happening and that would change things by itself. I didn’t have to engage in the argument or make anybody do anything. My reaction created the change for me. My power was truly inside of me. All I had to do to find my power was shift my focus away from the problems I saw around me and the fear I felt because of those problems.
My limited perception made me believe that I had to solve problems in order to be okay. My limited perception made me believe that I had to make people change and that I had to force them into allowing me to make my own choices. My limited perception made me believe that I was powerless in my own life. My limited perception made me believe that I was a victim of my own life. My limited perception made me believe that everything people did “to” me was because they were out to get me. My limited perception made me believe that it was everybody else’s fault. My limited perception didn’t allow me to see how my own actions, thoughts, words, and feelings were creating much of the pain I was experiencing.
Your focus on the problems keeps you focused on the problems or makes you run away entirely. You get an idea, you make the choice to move forward but in that choice you also severely limit yourself because you decide how the path should look. The problem with that is that the path won’t look the way you think it should. Then when a problem shows up and it tries to throw you off course a little bit, you object and run away screaming. The problems offer you the ability to course correct. You move a little left or a little right. You back up a couple of steps, change direction a little bit, and then move forward again. What you don’t see is how those problems are helping you. All you see is the problems themselves and that the path doesn’t look the way you think it should.
When you accept that the problems are part of the journey and you accept that the journey is there to give you the tools you need to be successful, then you can learn to use the problems and the journey to your advantage. Now you’re no longer focusing on the idea that there is a problem, you’re focusing on what you’re meant to get from the experience. That slight shift in your perception and focus is life-changing. It keeps you focused on getting what you need from the journey and the result is that you keep moving forward. The problems no longer scare you off because you accept they are there for a reason and you’re happy to go figure out what that reason is.
Your perception matters all the time. When a problem appears and you just see it as a problem and another thing to solve, not only is that draining, but you miss the point of the experience. Your focus is on having another thing to deal with instead of understanding the inherent value in the experience itself, regardless of how it appears on the surface. You have to control your thinking to be able to look at a problem and not just see it as another annoying thing to deal with. You have to be willing to manage yourself within the experience to shift your perception of what’s happening around you.
The truth is that your reality is not as you perceive it to be. My reality was not as I perceived it either. I had to do a lot of healing work on myself to accept that I had in fact created my own pain. I had created a reality in which everybody was stopping me and was out to get me. That reality was not true. That reality was reflecting the pain that I was feeling back to me through my perception of events. As I was able to shift my perception of past events and current experience, the pain faded. I took the pain out of my perception and it changed how I saw my life.
Do you want to know what really healed me? Clarity. Not shadow work. Not deep-healing. Not crying it out. Clarity allowed me to put the pain aside, see my life differently, and create a new reality that didn’t include all the pain. I didn’t change my life. I changed how I saw my life. That changed everything. It also stopped the pain.
Life is not how you see it. That filter of pain you have doesn’t allow you to find the clarity that’s being offered to you. I promise, that life is not as you think it is. But until you’re willing to look at your life a little differently, you’ll never know the truth. You can’t have it because you’re too tied up in the pain. It’s all about your focus and your perception. Shift those and life changes. Believe me, I’ve done it. You can too.
