What Determines Your Experience of Life?

In our society we are really good at talking about things like the weather or about being fine or how busy we are or about the news or the kids, etc. Here at the Mastering Life Institute I wanted to create a different kind of place where people can come to talk about the deeper and often hidden aspects of life with the goal of first creating a more grounded sense of self and on that foundation a high performance life - however you define that for yourself.

For example, do you have an experience of life that's an expression in the realm of "is this it?" Like maybe you reach middle age and you wonder "is this it?" Maybe you just graduated from college, got a "real" job and you're wondering "is this it?". Maybe you've lived a party life and you start to wonder "is this it?" Maybe you've had one failed relationship after the next and you're wondering "is this it?"  

For other people this is an expression more in the realm of "I'm better than this" or "I think I'm supposed to be doing something else" or "I don't know what my purpose is." 

No matter how this shows up externally for you, for example "I want to lose weight", "I want to find work/life balance", "I want to have a better relationship with my partner/spouse", "I want to be more effective at my job" and anything else you can think of - everything in your life starts and ends with you.

While humans have asked the big questions like "what is the meaning of life" for thousands of years I believe we're at the beginning of a unique time in human history where our ideas about our self is being transformed in a way it never has been in the history of humans. What I mean is we're literally creating a new concept of what it means to be human. While many see the focus on "me" as being self centered or egotistical I think we're just at an awkward stage of a massive evolution in thought that starts with who you are for yourself. Since it's never been done we don't really know what we're doing and just like a baby learning to walk, mostly it's not pretty. Interestingly, pretty has no value in the process of learning how to walk but failing and trying again does. 

So let's talk about you. You have a computer that sits in your head called the brain and the programming of that computer is thoughts. Each sentence/thought in your head is a program. A group of thoughts can become a belief and a group of beliefs creates a belief system. Supposedly we have 60,000 thoughts a day, many on repeat.

Additionally your thoughts create your experience of life. Imagine you're driving in a car and someone cuts you off. They're so into whatever they're doing they have no awareness it even happened and drive off oblivious. (For the sake of this illustration let's assume you don't chase them down and express yourself to them.) However, there you are in your car having a response to the event. It can be as minor as a thought like "oh, they must not have seen me" and forgetting about it to as much as ruining your entire day. Who is being impacted by your response? Mainly you even if you also take it out on others. You are the one having an experience of feeling angry, slighted, imposed upon, insulted, or whatever your typical emotional response is.

This is how you're responding to life all day long. Do you have an experience of life that's generally stressed, overwhelmed, angry, depressed, bored, sad, etc.? Turns out you are actually generating that within yourself. This by the way is really good news because if you are capable of creating it you are also capable of creating something else instead. You get to decide "is this how I want to feel?" and if it isn't you can decide you want to do the work change it. Just a disclaimer that we're not talking about things which have at their foundation a chemical imbalance so if you require professional care please seek it.  

Said another way, whether you realize it or not you are creating your experience of your life. Why not take the controls and put it to work for your benefit?