You are hungry. It’s 3 o’clock and you haven’t had any lunch yet. You’re walking down the road, scanning the shops for somewhere that might sell a sandwich or similar that will silence your growling stomach. You see past the objects in the shop windows that aren’t food related even though, when sated, they are things that would typically interest you. You’re like a lion on the plains, scouting out its prey. Focused. Single-minded.
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You’ve lost your train ticket somewhere on the busy platform. As you search, your eyes skip past the myriad of receipts and discarded flyers, colourful shoes and the remains of someone’s burger. You are trained on the shape and colours of the piece of paper that will get you home tonight and you see nothing else.
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There are a lot of eligible singles at the party and you have been on your own for too long now. As a Christian, you would like to be with someone who shares your beliefs. When you get chatting to someone in the kitchen, you can’t help but notice the cross they are wearing around their neck, and you become keen to get to know them further.
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Having recently returned to work from compassionate leave after the death of your mother, you find yourself making coffee whilst other people chat in the kitchen. The noise of their conversation is background hubbub until you hear Mark from sales complaining about how he’s going to have to spend Christmas with his parents, and the others groaning in sympathy.
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What we notice is hugely dependent on what is going on for us internally. We have an amazing capacity to block out the things that are not relevant to us, which is important because otherwise we would be in constant overwhelm by the bombardment of stimuli we are subjected to each day.
Yet it’s very easy to see all that we pay attention to as ‘reality’, and to forget that we have screened out lots of other information. If we were looking for a warm scarf in the first scenario, we wouldn’t have noticed the shops that sell food; if we were looking for a dropped tenner on that platform, our eyes would have skipped past the tickets; if we were atheist, we would possibly not see the person wearing the cross as a potential match; we may have missed Mark talking about the event that we’d like to go to next week because we were honed in to what he said about his parents at Christmas. The whole picture is reality, but we can’t possibly see the whole picture – our reality is what we choose to see, and this is usually quite subconscious.
“We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.” Talmud
When people attend one of our award-winning War to Peace workshops, they are introduced to an exercise that encourages them to look at a situation with someone they find challenging as though a CCTV camera were recording it. All the factual data are recorded and these are separated from the perceptions that have been added to create our reality, rather than actual reality. Reviewing a situation in this way helps us to see to the extent to which we are altering reality (we all do this by the way) and reflecting what’s going on inside us. This process also means that we will have a more balanced and clearer picture of what is going on, which will allow us to make wise and often more helpful choices in how we interact with the people we are struggling with.
Over to you
- What is going on in your inner life that could alter the reality of a situation or person you are struggling with right now?
- How would your situation be different if you viewed it as though through a CCTV camera and presented the data to an independent and completely neutral third party?
Do you know someone who could benefit from War to Peace?
If you, or someone you know, would like to experience and understand more about being at War and learning how to be at Peace, even with the people you find most difficult, our next open-access War to Peace workshop is on 11 March 2016. Spaces sell out quickly, especially our reduced priced tickets, so if you would like to attend, do book yours today.
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©Halcyon Global 2015
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