*** WE ARE ALL ONE
Agents of Perpetual Change – Part 1/2
Change ahead? Say what?
Archangel Michael lovingly chided the Nova Earth team in my last personal reading over our responses to change. He said:
“It is ironic, is it not? You are ― and I do not just mean you, Stephen ― I do mean this little circle – the group that are worrying the most and yet effecting the biggest change. And then you say, ‘Should I trust in the change? Should I count on the change?’ when you are in fact the agents … of change.” (1)
In my view, all of us lightworkers are agents of change. If we weren’t, we’d have little reason for being here. We’re the agents of constant, endless, perpetual change, it seems.
There’s no escaping it, no matter where we sit or live. It’s part of our job, as communicators, to develop ways and means of moving with as much change as possible.
So I’d like to examine processes that we can use to work with change. Not merely to cope with it but to flow with it.
What I’m going to do here is minutely describe one process I went through recently as an example of working with ourselves in a time of seemingly-perpetual change.
This is a detailed look because I’m wanting to provide a template for others to consult if they wish.
The process I want to look at revolves around discovering and working with hidden factors – what I here call the “unknown” – causing stress.
Many lightworkers may feel more stress before things get better. Many of the situations we’ll face may never even have been dreamt of in our philosophies, so to speak, let alone planned for.
One has only to think of meeting and working with the galactics to see the novelty of some situations. Where’s the user’s manual? The rule book? There isn’t one, yet. We’re writing it on the fly, pun intended.
We’ll be constantly confronted by the new and the unknown as time goes on. The new can be met on its own terms but the unknown can cause us some bother.
We’ll face two types of “unknown”: That which we know we don’t know and that which we don’t know we don’t know and perhaps don’t even know exists.
Both types will impact what sociologists call our “definitions of the situation.” As basic as they are to us, those definitions may become open to question. That alone can be stressful. One feels as if there isn’t solid ground under his or her feet.
I’ve been feeling increasing stress lately and I’d like to use my own case as an illustration. The way I’ve been defining my situation turned out to be part of the problem. Seeing that I wasn’t defining my situation adequately was part of the correction.
My definition of the situation was incomplete. I was defining the situation as having a workload that was overwhelming. It is overwhelming. Not saying it isn’t.
But my way of looking at it to that point didn’t result in complete release from stress. So I suspected that there had to be something more, a hidden factor, that was causing or contributing to the stress. (2)
Hidden factors may be hidden, but they still affect our behavior. This factor was hidden from me but it was still influencing me and quite heavily.
Knowing I hadn’t seen the full truth of my situation, I kept digging deeper. I sought the release that comes from knowing the full truth.
by Steve Beckow
(Concluded in Part 2.)
Footnotes
(1) Personal Reading with Archangel Michael and Steve Beckow, Oct. 29, 2014. I added as a footnote: “Right. After all our griping too. Watch us in the end say, ‘We did it!’” I laughed and he responded: ”Yes. You will want full credit.”
(2) I say there must be a hidden factor because, when one defines the unwanted condition in a situation, usually the unwanted condition disappears.
But me saying I had an overwhelming workload was not resulting in a complete relaxation of stress. Therefore it wasn’t completely capturing the situation. So I began to search for a deeper cause, a hidden factor in my increasing stress.
http://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/11/15/agents-of-perpetual-change-part-12/
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Agents of Perpetual Change – Part 2/2
Now let’s borrow from what we know of the process of paradigmatic breakthrough.
When something isn’t working and the basics of our situation are called into question, we experience cognitive dissonance. Things don’t fit. They don’t seem right. A process of paradigm breakdown begins.
Matters reach a point where the status quo can no longer be maintained. In my case, I could no longer make heads or tails out of what was driving me and yet I knew something was. I needed to know what it was before I succumbed to it.
This was the moment of breakdown, the moment of letting go of the feeling that I controlled the situation. Something was controlling me.
Immediately following it was an “Aha!” or moment of paradigmatic breakthrough and clarity. In a flash of awareness, (1) I realized that my stress was increasing because I, a hermit-monk in my own mind, have more people in my life than I’ve ever been used to managing.
I saw that I was having the equivalent of the bends, coming up too quickly. I had suddenly thrown open my acquaintanceship doors and was spinning from the increase in communication of every sort that it brought. As a hermit, I had no precedent to fall back on, no social graces to rely on.
I also saw that I add to the situation by feeling responsible for everyone and nearly collapse from the stress I create as a result of it. I saw that I needed to let go of feeling responsible for people, an issue that keeps recurring for me.
The next thing I saw was that the workload created by responding to so many emails and Skype messages was also near toppling me. I began letting people on Skype and email know how busy I am.
This problem of availability may face lightworkers generally, as small a number as we are out of seven billion. I’m just going to know more and more people so it isn’t as if this predicament will go away for me. It must be creatively resolved.
And if I don’t handle it, I’ll move from being creative to reactive. I’ll cease being the chooser and become the victim. (2) Life then begins to go downhill. I’m being transparent here about typical lightworker dilemmas.
The strangeness of relating to so many people was the hidden factor that was adding to my stress. Seeing it, I watched the majority of my stress subside. (3) The fact that release followed says that I saw more of the truth of the matter.
So what I’ve tried to illustrate here are the kinds of problems we may meet in our capacity as lightworker agents of change. Some matters that affect us will be hidden from us. Some may need to be coaxed to the surface.
As long as we don’t deal with them, we’ll feel cognitive dissonance, discomfort and stress. Once we know what they are and address them, we’ll feel relief from stress.
This may seem very basic now, but, once the busy-ness of life sets in, we’ll be asking for a checklist, handbook, and a mobile app! (Just kidding!)
Long-range weather forecast and horoscope combined: Expect no end to change in the foreseeable future. Accept that you may need to be inventive and arrive at new ways of responding to change, maybe perpetually, certainly repeatedly!
by Steve Beckow
Footnotes
(1) Whether guided or not, I don’t know. Most probably guided.
(2) Right away, my mind, dyed in the color of the growth movement, remembered what John Enright said: on the Wheel of Life, I’m at “Doing it and not digging it.” Unless I change course, my next stop will be “Not doing it and digging it.”
But I don’t want to go there. I want to be at “Doing it and digging it” and so to do that I have to figure out what to let go of and what to hold on to. (See “John Enright’s Wheel of Life” athttp://goldenageofgaia.com/2012/04/25/john-enrights-wheel-of-life/.)
(3) The truth had set me free.
http://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/11/15/agents-of-perpetual-change-part-22/
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