Paradigm Shifts

For the majority of my life, I have been surrounded by well-meaning people who made a point of teaching me that I was responsible for what they think and how they feel.

I’m aware that these people did not actually know any better, and that the life they had lived taught them the same thing: that we are all responsible for how other people think and feel.

There’s even a lot of people in the world who think that other people are responsible for the way they behave. I.e. person 1 is responsible for how person 2 and 3 behave.

In the 21st-century we are learning that this is not the case, and that we each have 100% responsibility for our own thoughts actions words and feelings.

It’s great that we’re learning these things and it will most likely create a much better world to live in if we can learn them.

This is a paradigm change, and like most paradigm changes, it would be a bit heartless to not consider those who have learned the old paradigm and have put in all the work to learn it, and are now being considered in a less than favourable way because they don’t know or understand or apply the new paradigm yet.

This is one of the paradoxes that a paradigm change creates, there is a crossover between what was, and what will be, and what is right now.

I’m sure I myself have disregarded people who have knowledge or experience that doesn’t match my knowledge and experience, or that doesn’t meet my expectations based upon what I’ve learned this week, or this decade, or even this century.

Every day of my life I am digging deeper within to find all of the places in me that I have created this kind of separation and separateness from others. I don’t want to continue that way, I want to open up and genuinely appreciate every being because that is who I am.

Every day I see many people who are caught in this cycle of separateness that assumes that the paradigm they have learned to apply is better than another paradigm, or that “now” is better than “before”, or that “then” will be better than “now”.

As much as I appreciate their position too, I pray for more compassion in the world and for more open dialogue about the challenges that every person may face when a paradigm shifts.

As an example: I remember over the course of many years attending and graduating a number of communications training courses and seminars. These were offered to me throughout a range of different industries and I often wondered why I needed to redo this subject so many times. Once I felt competent in the area of communication, I suddenly became aware that I actually no longer felt able to communicate freely from my heart space. All of that training and the expectations that the people around me seemed to have for the training to be followed rigorously, had left me feeling fearful and essentially not wanting to communicate any more.

I had people congratulating me on my communication skills and wondering why I didn’t do more with them, but the truth was that I had also learned to be afraid to communicate. I had inadvertently allowed the world to tell me who to be and how to be it, and I suddenly found that I couldn’t do it that way and I couldn’t be me that way, so I withdrew. I isolated myself and learned how to stop communicating again.

This was an act of great self-care for me. I recognised that I needed time and space to come back to centre, and learn to communicate with myself again in my own way, and in my own time, in my own flavour.

I needed to take the pressure off that I had placed upon myself to do everything someone else’s way, to speak using someone else’s words, to flavour myself and my communication with someone else’s spice. Most of all, I needed to remember that there is nobody else in this world whose feelings or thoughts or actions I am responsible for. I had come to learn that my style and form of communication was responsible for creating what people hear, think, feel and do, and it’s not.

Whatever labels anyone else wants to give to what I say, they are welcome to their labels, but I am not responsible for receiving their message the way they communicated it to me, and for changing myself so they feel more comfortable around me. This might seem really obvious to other people but the paradigm that I have been learning in for the past 57 years at least, did not provide me with the opportunity to learn what you might have learned and I can finally appreciate that about myself now.

I am not now or ever, responsible for how you feel.

I am not now or ever, responsible for what you think.

I am not now or ever, responsible for what you hear.

I am not now or ever, responsible for anything you do.

And, I’ve always known that you’re not responsible for me either.

Today I am putting down the excess weight of responsibility that I’ve been carrying consciously or unconsciously for other people. I am casting off the heaviness of unmet expectations and of the overt and covert shaming that I accepted and carried for so long and I’m setting myself free.

No matter what I may have thought or felt,  along the way, I am truly grateful to every person and every experience that helped me to learn what I’ve learned because it’s all been really precious.

I’m also leaning in deeper and recognising how I do this to the world within me. Throughout the course of life, there are different pockets of energy that I have thought myself to be at the time, that have been doing the very best they knew how at that time. I might look back on my life and see all of those aspects of self as the me that I am now, but are they?

The me that I am now is probably an amalgamation of all of those prior formations of energy that I thought myself to be. But just as in the way that we might look at past lives, those energy formations I regard as aspects of self, are also past lives that I have lived because they’re not the fullness of the energy formation that I am right now. The aspects of Self that lived through my past, would mostly have not been able to even comprehend who I be today. I often reflect and even joke about how my 22 or 32-year-old self would have thumbed her nose at my 57-year-old self. Most of the versions of me that I used to be, or considered myself to be, the memory of who I was in my past, is one that would have ridiculous than me that I am today, based on my previous learning and experience, and based on my fears around being my true and authentic self at that time.

I have long been learning to communicate with the past versions of self that I perceived myself to be for so long. But I recognise too that I was feeling responsible for how they feel and think and hear and for what they did, based on what I know and apply to life today.

But, when I was 17, I didn’t have the same knowledge or experience that I have today at 57. I didn’t have that same knowledge or experience when I was 3, and I didn’t have that same knowledge or experience when I was 35 or 46.

The knowledge and experience that I had at those ages helped me to make choices in the best way that I knew how at the time and at each different point in time, I berated myself or shamed and criticised myself for my past choices. Looking at it now as each point of self going through a paradigm change and seeing how I was caught up then wondering what on earth is happening, helps me to see just how unfair my shaming and criticism has been.

I haven’t looked at myself this way before, because that wasn’t something that I learned before now either. Right now in this moment, I feel grateful for the opportunity and all of the opportunities, along the way, that have helped me to learn and grow and feel and know. All of it together has created the opportunity to open up my heart and mind and learn compassion for myself and others and for the world as a whole. As that opening is a passion of mine, I value every experience for the gifts it has created to feed my passion of opening my heart and mind.

Today I offer a prayer of thanks and gratitude and hope to all of the energy of creation within and without that is experiencing any kind of paradigm shift and that may feel tired, heavy, confused, afraid, angry, lost, hopeless, disinclined, resistant, resentful, cautious, or unready.

Thank you.

Thanks for all of the learning opportunities that each moment brings, and for all of the opportunities for relearning that each change brings.

I pray that we can all find a way to recognise and appreciate just how much effort and energy we have each put into being who we be in this life. I see you and I thank you for being you. I truly appreciate you as you are.