Thought Creates Reality

Recently someone I know started speaking very negatively about something in her life, and I was concerned for how she expressed herself, because it exemplified her various health problems too. I said ‘be careful what you say, if you say something, you will create it in reality’. A few days later when I said I was struggling to master something different she pulled me up and said if you say you are struggling then you will.

She was right and wrong too.

In my case I was prepared to put the work in to overcome what is effectively dyspraxia to achieve said set of dance moves, but I was struggling and needed it filmed so I could practice at home. I hadn’t given up. I hadn’t said ‘the limitations in the way my brain functions means I can’t do it’, what I said inside my head was ‘it would take me far longer to achieve the set of moves than non-dyspraxic people’. I am no quitter and I will get it soon enough.

But it means what I had said to her had been misinterpreted and rejected.

Fair enough, keep your thoughts to yourself Sylvia, no matter how well intentioned, but it got me thinking. How easy it is to take such profound truths and misunderstand them as a way of avoiding looking at yourself and working on it. I get that — I understand that — I was once like that too, unable to trust anything and staying rigidly to the reality I thought was real for me, the one I knew and firmly believed, had been reinforced over and over by my parents. By refusing to budge from it I was guilty of self harm and that was how I learned to take responsibility for the content of my own mind, using mindfulness.

However if we do cling to our original belief systems, this means that someone will never move forwards in their suffering in life, will never heal their mind /body /spirit illnesses. That was once true of me too, until life showed me the errors of my ways.

Thought does indeed create reality but in very specific ways that are based on how the brain and unconscious mind works. If I believed that every thought I ever had created my reality, that reality would be all sorts of crazy. It is not that simplistic. What creates reality are the thoughts based on our paradigms of ‘how life works’ that do the harm or the good for us. They are our interpretation mechanism for relating to subsequent experiences. When we change them it is like learning a new language, but it’s a new way of translating our world instead.

I used to have a belief system that ran roughly like this — I am the victim/ sufferer/ martyr of various ailments and physical structural and painful damages to my body because that is how life treats me, I deserve no kindness or compassion and I am unlovable, or unlikely to be truly loved by the people who say they love me, or currently choose to love me and it is only a matter of time until someone else snaps them up and away from me, or they realise what a mistake they have made. And guess what, that was my lived reality in actual experience or deepest fears even if it didn’t happen. My fear risked creating it constantly until I changed my ways of thinking and then I met a man who loved me beyond those fears and was able to help me to address them and dissolve them. Nothing much changed, I just stopped believing that story in my head and my life changed as a result of my belief changes and thus my thought changes

Thought creates reality.

Same with my structural suffering and chronic pain. Once I stopped believing I was a sufferer of that pain and started to work with it constructively as a connection and communication with my physical body, it just stopped hurting by over fifty percent. Instead I started to feel grateful for all the things that my body was great at, in spite of age etc, and thus my paradigm changed, my thought changed and my body is much much less painful. I still have to work at it of course, it is like exercise or like that movement I want to master. I will work harder at it than most people but I will achieve it. This I do know.

So why does this matter and how does it work?

It matters because it affects every living conscious and unconscious moment of our lives. It matters because it can make or break our lives, make them miserable or joyous. It matters because by affecting our lives it affects the lives of all those around us. Our thoughts are a collective experience in so many ways. It matters because it’s not what happens to you that counts but how you deal with it.

Our thoughts come in many layers. The foundation layer is possibly the most important and is often the one we are least aware of. It has mostly been programmed into us in childhood, holding all those early ideas and insights we develop as we start to make sense of the world. They are the foundation story of our life, but they are just a story. No matter how deeply we believe them, they are not one solid truth, they are simply the dream we lived in personally. Have you ever noticed that some people just do not see life as you do and thus there is a struggle to communicate with them, but with others it is far easier. That is because your base paradigms are either in sync or not. The more out of sync you are with them the more you are likely to struggle with communicating together and no matter how much you might like someone, it just doesn’t flow comfortably, or only sometimes. This creates ‘no go’ areas with those people.

Laid over the base paradigm is our interpretation of following experiences as they fold into that foundation layer. The foundation layer enables us to make some sense of further experiences, giving us headings under which to place them, mostly along lines of nice /nasty, good /bad, right /wrong. Over time our belief base builds a strong and sometimes unassailable certainty for us. But it is still just a story, an interpretation of reality ‘as we see it’.

So we may have a belief about something that seems unshakeable, but that belief may equally limit us into our adult life. It can be an apparently positive belief, like ‘I had a great mother,’ or it might be ‘I had a terrible mother,’ ( the good/bad interpretation) but both of those beliefs limit us enormously.

I have written memoirs (link here) about my mothers treatment of me, but in the end I realised I’d had some profoundly awful terrifying and challenging experiences resulting from my mother, BUT they taught me some truly amazing life lessons and I am profoundly grateful for them, though I would not wish her on anyone. I had to challenge my first story in order to find a deeper truth for the rest of my life that enabled me to grow and benefit from that life experience. Some people, many even would get stuck on the first statements, and as a result never be able to explore their original stories for how they create a reality in the present that is a struggle. The early stories are too immature, back and white, and rigid to be useful and we need to change them. This means we need to change our thinking foundations to create alternative realities.

For some people, if they hear me saying I am struggling they might think ‘she is complaining or giving up’. But I am not that woman. Behind that thought is another one which is saying what else must I do to overcome, how much additional effort is required, and how much am I committed to conquering this limitation. Sometimes I do say ‘no it’s not worth the effort’, but that is rare and unusual. My base patterns of thought are of constant challenge, change and growth. So whatever comes on top of them will fit into those curves and grooves, and that is what matters.

My thoughts are mostly about challenge, about the positive in all things, the lessons to be learned, the changes to make in myself, my behaviour, and my belief system. I have no fixed stories any more, and I have learned to relax fully into being loved for exactly who I am just as I am.

If my thoughts create my reality, then I am doing something very right nowadays compared to my history. It wasn’t my luck that changed, it was my belief system that was already on the move and was ready to be built into a new more flexible one. I did sincerely these changes occurring as I challenged those early paradigms, bit by bit, as I came to understand them. That spurred me on too.

I am so incredibly grateful for that journey. I wouldn’t change a thing for myself, and I am so glad I realised the power of thought and belief. It has actually changed my life amazingly. I love it.

So check your underlying paradigms, your core beliefs and be prepared to challenge them. The more you are certain of them, the more they are likely to in some way be holding you back from growth and self awareness. Challenging our scared cows may feel awful to begin with, but it might just make your own life so much more wonderful to live through.