Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow by Karen Casey

Author:Karen Casey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609250089
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

WITH SOMEONE ELSE ON YOUR MIND,

YOU MISS YOUR OWN LESSONS.

Many of us come by our codependency through the various roles we play in our lives. Certainly parenting requires us to have our children on our minds for periods of time because they need and deserve guidance. But even as parents, we must recognize that constant focus on our children, living through them, trying to control them, isn't always healthy for them or us. When we focus on them at the expense of focusing any attention on ourselves, we fail to learn what we came here to learn. And we stop growing. All kinds of caregivers find themselves sublimating their own lives, but this is never a necessity. We can, instead, choose to see caring for someone else as an opportunity to create and maintain healthy boundaries, even while in the act of offering appropriate attention. Obviously we have to be vigilant, asking ourselves whether our impulse to take an action might be preventing the other person from doing things for herself. When we start doing for others what they need to do for themselves, we serve no one.

Of course there are numerous ways of having others on our minds. I have touched on only a few. But all too commonly, we can get trapped by our own insecurities and then become obsessed with the imagined or actual capabilities of those individuals we are comparing ourselves to. In the process, we relinquish all opportunities to take advantage of the lessons that might be surfacing in our own lives, lessons that become apparent in the myriad interactions that evolve with the people on our path. Let's not forget, no one is on our path inconsequentially.

This idea, that we are here in these bodies to learn lessons, really mystified me when I first began my spiritual journey. Frankly, I had no idea what “lessons” meant in this context. Slowly, as I became willing to listen to the wise voices that surrounded me, my confusion lifted. However, it still took me years to appreciate that every single moment of interaction with another person was an opportunity to learn a lesson, if I wanted to take advantage of it. Even then, it was still unfathomable to me, however, that this had always been the case, not just for me but for all of us.

Now I know that our lessons are constantly vying for our attention. They were vying for my attention during my childhood and in the conflicts with my dad. My first marriage was fraught with struggles that were in fact disguised lessons that I failed to embrace. Lessons were vying for my attention in graduate school and on my first job after graduation. They continue to beckon and I am just as capable of ignoring them now as I ever was. All I know is that an open mind, a mind uncluttered by thoughts of others, is required if we want to be good students of life.

We are all teachers or students in one another's lives—all the time.

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