Heraclitus said, change is the only constant.
And changing for the better is what we all want. Better love, better success, better money, better luck, better laughs, better company, better circumstances, better environment, a better world is what we want.
And the way to be able to receive the better, is by becoming better ourselves.
With the Japanese concept of Ikigai in mind, I have always strived to becoming a better person. Making it my mission to understand what "my Ikigai" is has lead me to write this article on realizing – real-eyes-ing.
I learnt about the meaning of realizing from my life coach. She taught me that true transformation happens after a trigger is sparked in your mind. That trigger is like a the first domino stone that falls and creates a chain reaction of incidents and thought patterns that fall into place. This process is not visible externally, it all happens in the mind.
If we observe other people changing, we will try to understand their change and link it to an external incident: This happened to them, that's why they changed. They started doing this, that's why they changed.
Most of the time this is only half the story, the majority of the story happens in their mind. What environment were they in, that they received a spark / a trigger the initiated a change in thought. And that change in thought stimulated a new line of thinking which lead them to take new actions and behave differently.
Working in healthcare understanding people's motivation to change their behaviors is crucial. One concept that was used to categorize patients was the concept of "locus of control".
Based on patient's locus of control, patients were more likely to take the lead in their own healthcare or not.
Psychology describes two locus of control: External locus of control and Internal locus of control.
Based on your experiences in life and your beliefs you might have tendencies towards one or the other.
Verywellmind.com describes it as follows: "Locus of control is the extent to which you feel you have control over events that impact your life. Put another way, it is "a belief about whether the outcomes of our actions are contingent on what we do (internal control orientation) or on events outside our personal control (external control orientation)," explains psychologist Philip Zimbardo."
Try to understand your belief system and adjust it based on what you would like to achieve in your life.
For those who do want to take a proactive role in life, my life coach taught me the importance of realizations:
she said, it is the only thing that creates lasting change. If you want sustainable transformation, you need to create the environment that allows realizations to enter your mind - to enter your life. You cannot force a realization, you need to allow it. And she was the one that introduced me to the mnemonic of realization being the moment you "real eyes".
Think about it: what were you doing when you had a brilliant idea to solve a problem you had been pondering over for a long time - for some it was the shower, while they were sitting on the toilet, while they were taking a stroll. For me, I always had ideas when I was meditating. Whatever the task you were doing, your mind was calm, progressing the problem and allowing you to see the solution. After the realization, people often think: how could I not see it before?
It's that you suddenly "realize" and have a solution right in front of you.
The only thing that changed was the way you looked at the problem: You stripped away veils of ignorance and found the truth and voila - a realization that led to a solution.
This was also recently described in the book "Karma", that I was reading from Swami Vivekananda.
He described it as follows:
"Now this knowledge, again, is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside; it is all inside. What we say a man "knows", should, in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what a man "learns" is really what he "discovers", by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge. We say Newton discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere in a corner waiting for him? It was in his own mind; the time came and he found it out. All knowledge what the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in your own mind. The external world is simply the suggestion, the occasion, which sets you to study your own mind, but the object of your study is always your own mind. The falling of an apple gave the suggestion to Newton, and he studied his own mind. He rearranged all the previous links of thought in his mind and discovered a new link among them, which we call the law of gravitation. It was not in the apple nor in anything in the center of the earth."
The example of Swami Vivekananda really resonated with me and aligned with what I learnt from my coach. Having to regularly bring yourself in the "zone", where the mind can receive realizations to solve any type of problem you have.
Isn't this exciting? Join me on this journey to change for the better, real-eyes our good hearts, embracing the connection to our own good hearts.
Let's unleash the goodness in our hearts!
With love,
Ushma