Making Miracles

by Lynn Woodland

• It’s becoming increasingly clear that the universe isn’t simply an assembly of separate particles, planets and entities in set, predictable relationships to one another. Instead, we’re finding that all the pieces making up our physical world are dynamic, interrelated and able to affect and be affected by one another. It’s impossible, even, to separate ourselves from the whole sufficiently to observe it without our very observations having an impact.

These new truths, by their very nature, must radically reshape how we perceive ourselves and our relationships to one another and how we live day to day and relate to the world around us. Taken out of the realm of science and applied to daily life, these new laws of physics suggest a reality in which we have far more power to influence our environment than we’ve previously known. Our very thoughts have the power to affect the physical world and movement at the physical level can happen instantaneously, through a “leap” in time and space rather than a linear, mechanical process. The only limitations are the ones we impose on ourselves with our fixed beliefs and assumptions about life.

Addictions are born when we believe we can’t have that alive and pleasurable moment without the external catalyst, be it more of our beloved or more dessert. Addictions are all about more. When we think of what we’re addicted to, we feel empty and crave more. When we think about what we love, we feel full.

The more we cultivate these moments of love, the more we amplify good in our lives. I know a woman who helped herself recover from a serious bout of illness by looking at pictures of baby animals every day simply because they triggered for her this powerfully healing experience of love. Dean Ornish, M.D., in his excellent book Love and Survival, pulled together decades of medical research documenting the connection between physical healing and all different forms of love, whether from the impersonal touch of a nurse taking blood pressure, interactions with friends and community or the experience of stroking a pet. He concludes that “love and intimacy are among the most powerful factors in health and illness.” Quite simply, every time we experience even an instant of unconditional love, inner peace, compassion and forgiveness, we’re in a powerful healing state.

If it was difficult to find anything in your memories that could fill you simply at the thought – which can happen when we’re feeling at a low point in life or if we’ve had a long history of depression or disappointment – the way into these moments of fullness is through imagination. When we feel empty, we tend to use our imagination to envision and amplify everything we lack. Imagination is such a powerfully creative tool that when we use it in the service of emptiness, we dig ourselves into a deeper hole of scarcity. But imagination can also take us to wonderful places that life experience hasn’t.

Putting imagination to work in the service of love means not just envisioning the circumstances we want to happen, but cultivating the inner experiences we want in life. Too much emphasis on envisioning outcomes can amplify attachment, leaving us more concerned about the future than feeling content in the present. The inner experiences that fill us up in the moment, however, connect us to the Field and attract the outcomes that match the joy we’ve created within (often better outcomes than we could imagine).

If we want to experience the kind of mastery that enhances quality of life, we need to look, not just at our power to manifest occasional, lovely coincidences, but also at our responsibility for the unlovely coincidences of life that we call “circumstances beyond our control.” Our power to affect the world around us through our conscious intent expands in direct correlation with our willingness to recognize the connection between our inner state and outer reality, barring nothing, the pleasant and the unpleasant.

While many will accept this concept of self-responsibility to a point, the notion of absolute self-responsibility tends to be unpopular and choosing not to accept it doesn’t mean we’ll never experience success or happiness. It simply means we won’t have as much access to the magical coincidences that cut corners and make life easier. So this principle is for those who are very serious about making a “quantum leap,” as opposed to simply making progress, and there’s no right or wrong choice around this. We all have a pace and a path that’s right for us.

When I speak on the principle of self-responsibility to groups, the argument invariably comes up that there will always be things that we can’t control, that we can’t help, that have nothing to do with us. Many offer examples of things that, from the Newtonian paradigm of separateness and randomness, certainly appear out of anyone’s control to affect. However, if we shift into the quantum model of connectedness, how can any piece of the whole not affect all of the whole?

It’s not that the argument against absolute self-responsibility is wrong. It’s that, as physics is demonstrating, seemingly mutually exclusive realities can both be true. The phenomenon of two seemingly incompatible realities coexisting has a name: the Principle of Complementarity. The Principle was first formulated by physicist Niels Bohr, an early pioneer of atomic physics. Fred Alan Wolf writes about this phenomenon in his book Taking the Quantum Leap, saying Complementarity “taught us that our everyday senses were not to be trusted to give a total view of reality. There was always a hidden, complementary side to everything we experienced.” Furthermore, he writes, “The more we determine one side of reality, the less the other, equally true side is shown to us.” In other words, the more we focus on one perspective of reality and hold it to be the only truth, the less we’re able to see other perspectives. This is why flexible thinking and unlearning everything we think we know for certain is such a crucial ingredient in miracle making.

Miracles happen in natural accordance with spiritual law. If we want miracle-making principles to work for us consistently, we need to be willing to work with them as absolutes. If we hold that we sometimes have the power to determine our reality but not always, where then do we draw the line? How do we decide when spiritual law is in effect and when it’s not? Ultimately, the more we hold that we only sometimes have the power to be miracle-makers, the more we’ll live a life filled with unpleasant circumstances outside our control.

The resistance that comes up around this principle is understandable. Absolute self-responsibility is an idea the ego can so easily run away with, and then, when things go well, we become obnoxiously full of ourselves. We feel a little better than everyone else, a little more evolved. Taken to extreme, this becomes delusional “magical thinking” and a sign of deteriorating mental health. The flip side of this coin is that when things don’t go according to our wishes, we beat ourselves up and resolve to become better control freaks dedicated to eating right, thinking right, talking right, breathing right, and more, believing that if we control our every waking act we’ll never again have an unpleasant experience.

The ego, as I’m using the term, is the part of us that believes we are defined by the limits of our physical body and, thus, are vulnerable and separate. The ego looks at the world through a filter of judgment in which everything is either better than or lesser than everything else. It is “particle” consciousness rather than “wave” consciousness. When the ego embraces this principle of self-responsibility, it becomes abusive and much abused. Consequently, it’s crucial to understand and head off the pitfalls of this very powerful principle or it will be more detrimental than helpful.

Blame, shame and self-responsibility

Before the principle of self-responsibility can be useful, it has to be unravelled from the whole paradigm of blame and shame. The more we bristle at the idea of self-responsibility, the more likely it is that we were taught at an early age to feel shame. Blame and shame go hand in hand, one giving rise to the other. They both have to do with finding fault, pointing a finger of judgment and defining something or someone as “wrong.” For those of us who’ve been taught to feel shame, it’s unbearable to let go of blame because then all the energy that had been going into blaming external forces for what’s wrong has nowhere to go except toward ourselves. Then we swing from feeling victimized by external circumstances to shaming and victimizing ourselves. While the experience of being an out-of-control victim is certainly not pleasant, at least it allows us to feel innocent rather than shamed and to feel justified in being angry at our circumstances.

Self-responsibility can be a crushing burden when carried this way. For example, many have applied the idea of self-responsibility to physical illness in a way that assumes an ill person has done something terribly wrong to create his or her disease. Others hold a perspective that they are somehow less spiritually evolved if the outer circumstances of their lives don’t reflect joy, abundance and health all the time.

The catch in this way of thinking is that our conscious control only affects those aspects of self that are within the range of conscious awareness. Painful and unexpected challenges are often the catalysts that heighten our awareness of limiting beliefs and patterns that have been operating at an unconscious level. Most of us have an assortment of conscious and unconscious, sometimes conflicting, agendas all operating to create our experience in life. An example of conflicting agendas would be a person who very much wants to heal from an illness yet receives so much benefit from the rest and caring attention resulting from the illness that an unconscious investment is made in maintaining whatever circumstances are needed (such as the illness) to keep these rewards coming. Another example would be a person who longs to be in a relationship yet unconsciously fears that an intimate partnership would mean the loss of personal freedom or would lead to painful abandonment.

When these secondary, but powerful, agendas are present, we often have the experience of spinning wheels. Even though we direct a lot of effort toward our conscious desire, we don’t seem to make any progress. And we won’t make progress—until the less conscious agenda is somehow addressed or released. It’s often through the challenging experiences in life that we have an opportunity to recognize and change these hidden agendas so we can stop being at cross-purposes with ourselves.

Blame and shame are disempowering, often immobilizing, emotions that keep us unconscious and don’t motivate us to be better people. They need to be tossed out altogether for the work we’re doing here. Shifting from blame and shame to self-responsibility means looking at what you don’t like about your life, not as something you did wrong (shame), or as something done to you by circumstances beyond your control (blame), but with the question, “How does this situation show what I’ve learned to expect from life?”

Take, for example, the experience of being a victim of violent crime or abuse of any sort: the distortion of self-responsibility would be to assume “I must have done something to deserve or ask for it.” The more positive application is to examine how you’ve been trained to expect danger or abuse as part of life. How have your previous life experiences taught you that you’re not safe? The opportunity here is to learn compassion for yourself, experience forgiveness for another and begin to develop a deeper understanding of your own safety that will ultimately keep you safer physically. As a counsellor many years ago, I noticed that my women clients who had been raped had almost all been subjected to sexual or physical abuse as children. They learned early in life to expect to be harmed. No one had ever taught them that they had a right to be safe. These painful beliefs about life can even be evolved in very productive ways: we can learn to protect ourselves, we can advocate for victims, we can fight victimizers and we can develop our strength. These are all very useful and helpful things. They simply aren’t the same as learning to be safe.

Finding the hidden gains

Self-responsibility means asking yourself what value a painful situation might hold and how it serves you. If you look closely enough, there’s invariably a gain. For instance, sometimes we fill up our lives with energy-draining obstacles because on some level we’re not ready for what we think we’d rather be doing. If we never have time or opportunity to pursue our dreams, we never have an opportunity to fail. Or if we’re constantly a victim of circumstances beyond our control, we can ask for people’s support and empathy and have less expected of us than if we had not fallen upon “hard luck.” There are hidden gains in even the most unpleasant life experiences.

The power in self-responsibility is that once we start seeing our own contributions to our circumstances, we can change them. If the world is treating you badly, look to see how this could be a reflection of how you treat yourself. Are you self-critical? Do you put everyone else’s needs before your own? Do you get so caught up in doing what’s expected of you and what you think you should do that you have no time left to explore what you want to do? These are just a few ways we may manifest our lack of self-love and acceptance.

Another frequent argument made against self-responsibility is that God creates our reality—we don’t. The essence of self-responsibility is neither about putting our will before God’s or putting God’s will above our own. Ultimately, it’s a call to heal our perceived separateness from God so there is only One Will. This, of course, means quieting the fears and grandiosity of our ego’s voice. No small task, but definitely worth the effort.

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Excerpted from Making Miracles: Create New Realities for Your Life and Our World by Lynn Woodland, Namaste Publishing.

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May is Making Miracles Month

Namaste Publishing and Banyen Books have joined together in a miracle-making experiment. In their joint initiative to financially support Seva Canada, an international non-profit that prevents, treats and cures blindness in developing countries, they are challenging Vancouverites to see just how many “miracles of sight” can be co-created. During the month of May, partial proceeds from the sale of each copy of Making Miracles: Create New Realities for Your Life and Our World by Lynn Woodland (Namaste Publishing) will be donated to Seva Canada. In addition, this free e-zine is available to anyone and online participants are encouraged to create a miracle study group or use this forum to report and share miracles. www.namastepublishing.com/miracles

May 25, 7:30 pm “Miracle Experience”

Miracle making, magical stories and inspired song: a collaborative experience in consciousness, intention and love. With Lynn Woodland, author of Making Miracles and Constance Kellough, president of Namaste Publishing and author of The Leap. (See Datebook for more info.)

 

May 26, 10-5 pm “Miracle Making”

An experiential workshop with Lynn Woodland. This lively, interactive event is about consciousness, time, quantum science and God, all woven into an exciting, collaborative experiment. (See Datebook for more info.)

image © Saniphoto