Blog

How you perceive the world needs to be seeded from the inside.

---

No one can see the world as you do, and within that canvas we all share, you are the producer of your own reality, a world only you can carry. Add another pair of eyes, and you find yourself with two frames, with two realms of interpretations, with two worlds ready to collide. That’s perspective.

And there’s a gap between perception and reality.

The state of things you believe to be true is, in fact, nothing more but a small portion of the bigger truth. A truth no human ever had access to, nor could hope to hold in the palms of his hands.

And yet, too often, we are preoccupied with what other people are thinking. Too often, we are preoccupied with how others see us. Too often, we forget that things are not what they are, but in fact, what we think they are.

Within that gap between perception and reality lies the power to reframe things.

Wayne Dyer said:

“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”

In other words, how you perceive the world needs to be seeded from the inside. — Kim Petersen

---

1. Let’s Talk About Inputs

The world in which we live is a lively place. Take a look at how busy you are, multiply it by 7 billion, and you won’t even get close to the answer. With so many things to do, discover, and experience, it’s easy to get lost. With so many versions of the same story, it’s easy not knowing what to believe anymore.

Our sense of sight has long been corrupted by what the people around us see as beautiful. Our sense of taste, criticized by what people deem as non-healthy. Our sense of touch, condemned by people with a golden cage of principles. And our sense of self, alienated by our desire to be like the celebrities on our screens.

In a world with so many inputs, the best thing you can do is to never lose your output.

It’s okay to learn from others, and it’s definitely okay to learn from their successes as well as their mistakes. But there are two truths hidden here:

You won’t necessarily meet success where someone else did, and where someone failed, you can succeed. Don’t be quick to jump in the fray, and please, don’t sell yourself short.

Every input life throws at you needs to be filtered by what’s inside you. They all need to be digested and transformed by your experiences and aspirations. And then, redirected out in the world through actions of your own.

No one can relate to you as well as you do. So you have to do the job by yourself and reach that world only you can create.

You lived a beautiful life, you went through a compound of experiences, and you survived. For that reason alone, your voice matter. For that reason alone, you have the right to perceive the world in a way that benefits you.

---

2. Let’s Talk About Approval

The reason why we want to please people so much is that we want to be accepted. We want to be loved, invited to gatherings, included, and we especially do not want to be left out. We are social beings, and we long for that connection of the psyche, for the warmth it gives us in the winter, and for its freshness in the summer.

But before being accepted by others, please accept yourself. You may think the people in front of you are the only ones that will ever accept you. You may think you have to do whatever you can to stay in their good graces, but that is simply not true.

You have the right to be yourself, and by being you, you will attract people in love with that self. The world is of different spices, and you have yet to taste them all. Don’t be afraid to show yourself, don’t be afraid to be alone because of what is right. Sometimes, the best place to see the light is in the dark.

Please, be the You only you can be.

I recently read a tweet:

What doesn’t kill you makes you weird at intimacy.

What we forget is that weird can only exist within contradictions. Dancing naked at work is only weird if you’re not in a strip club, eating ice cream in the winter is only weird if you do not want to eat it, and saying “I love you” is only weird if you don’t think it to be true.

When you see the world as others do, and not as you do, you contradict yourself. And thus, you act weird.

Clive Staples Lewis said:

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

The only way to be you, to be the best version of you, to get what you want and what you deserve is to be you, the person only you know. Everyone else is already taken.

---

3. Let’s Reframe It, Perception

I walked a subjectively fair amount of years in this life, and I met my share of people. Of them all, never once, I heard someone seeking the opposite of happiness.

That feeling of joy and contentment has long been a quest of humankind. Some went to look for it in material goods and riches, others in love and pleasures. And when the high passed, the bummed started.

Because someone is rich, you think he must be happy. Because someone is accompanied, you think he should be exalted. And that may be true, but are the circumstances of our life all it takes to be happy?

I watched a Ted Talk recently. The speaker talked about an experiment with two dogs in two cages made of electric floors. Every now and then, an electric shock was sent to both. But one of the dogs had a button that could stop the discharge.

At the end of the experiment, the dog with the button was relatively happy, and the other one was completely depressed.

“The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives.” — Roy Sutherland

By getting out of the box you were put into, and by perceiving the world from your point of view, you can take back the control over your life. And with it, more chance at happiness.

Here’s a quote from Terry Pratchett:

“A European says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with me? An American says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with him?”

Reframe it, perception.

As Roy Sutherland perfectly summed it. Choose your frame of reference and the perceived value, and therefore, the actual value is completely transformed.

---

The Takeaway

Life has many teachers, empty pockets, broken hearts, and health issues are a few of them. And though they are the same for everyone, they do not teach us the same lessons, for you are your own person, with your own experiences and your own aspirations.

Be aware of the inputs the world throws at you, learn from them, filter them and transform them. Don’t be afraid of the word “weird.” It can only be applied to you if you contradict yourself. Reframe your perception and take back the control you deserve.

Your life is your own to live, and you matter more than you think.

How you perceive the world needs to be seeded from the inside.

---

Gerthy Bingoly

From Medium: Writing about the things the eye cannot see, and looking for inspiration where my feet cannot take me. Write me at [email protected]

Discover more of Gerthy’s work at his Medium page: https://gerthyb.medium.com/

---

This post was originally published by Living Out Loud on Medium.

“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.” ― Maya Angelou

---

Helping others seems like a strange way to work on your writing but please stick with me and let me explain.

Something happens in my brain when I work on someone else’s writing. I’m objective because it’s not my work so I know nothing about it. I’m reading like a reader would, but I’m also reading as a writer looking for flaws. I think about point of view, tense, punctuation, grammar, dialogue, character, story line. I’m conscious of arcs, inconsistencies, structure. I read for so many things and not always consciously, sometimes things just pop out at me. I become conscious of aspects that I may have learned about but previously overlooked.

Often times I’ll be annoyed by something in someone else’s manuscript and then, when I go back to my work, there it is! The exact same damn thing I had been noticing in the other person’s work. By critiquing another writer’s work, I’ve directly helped my own.

You wouldn’t think editing/critiquing someone else’s work would have such an impact, would you?

---

Ideas for helping other writers

If you wanted to do this, how could you go about helping? There are quite a few ways.

If you know other writers, it’s as easy as offering to beta read for a friend (be one of their first readers, after themselves), or helping a newer author by reading and commenting, often with small changes to help them learn. If you’re in a more formal writing group, you could organize chapter swaps, or judge a contest(s). You could attend a workshop (you never know who you might meet, or what you’ll learn). If you’ve been in the business for a while, you could run a workshop (gathering your ideas together, and trying to present them logically, can be eye-opening!).

Helping other writers doesn’t need such a formal setting either. Over a cup of coffee/tea you can brainstorm plot or character issues, discuss story ideas, talk at length about the industry or your fears or goals or plans.

When you sit and chat, you can go down conversation paths that shine new light on something that opens doors or activities you may never have thought of doing.

Sometimes meeting up for a cuppa can have you writing an article like this — which isn’t something I’d ever dreamed I’d do.

I’ve run workshops other than for writing, and no matter the topic I’m presenting, I learn things from the participants or other presenters. When I attend workshops, I’m there to learn whatever topic is presented, but I also pick up tips from the presenter(s) on presentation skills.

Recently I attended a workshop and the presenter had a marvelous skill at encouraging participants to share their work, something which I had been unable to achieve in workshops I’d run. Right at the start of the workshop, she shared her work by reading it aloud and talked about her experiences writing that piece. She then shared other people’s writing, and quotes from them. All of this was spoken. I had presented similar things, but in a written form. I wasn’t setting the example of speaking my truths, so I could hardly expect anyone else to do the same.

For many years I worked in agricultural research. When I moved into a more senior role where I had to present information to other scientists, I was quite terrified and intimidated. Fortunately, I had mentors who had vast experience.

One looked at me and asked, “Who did this research you’re presenting?” Well, that was easy, he and I had done it. “And who will know any more than you or I?” No one. Since it was the work we’d done and no one else had participated. I presented that talk with much more confidence — until he stood up and asked a question, then I almost turned into a puddle on the floor! Fortunately, it was something I could answer.

That same lesson applies to writing. If you’re speaking about your writing, your book, your process, does anyone know it any better than you do?

---

What if you’re new to writing?

What if you’re a new author? It’s not so easy to help others when you’re the one needing help. But if you’re in a writing group, there are roles you could volunteer to take on. There may be roles on a committee, administrative roles for contests, meeting organization, tea and coffee making.

When you get in and help, you never know who you may be helping, working alongside, or meeting along the way.

I managed in a contest for a few years. I began in my first year of joining Romance Writers of Australia because my first contest entry came way down the end of the field. The comments I received back weren’t so terrible, and I wanted to know how good the winning entries were. There was no way of knowing that other than volunteering to manage a contest.

I discovered that the entries that were finalists, as well as some further down the scorecard, were at a publishable standard. In fact, some entrants were offered publishing contracts during or soon after contests. I had a lot to learn and a long way to go. I read so many entries and so many of the judges’ comments as a contest manager that it was a brilliant, but steep, learning curve.

Another thing that happened when I was a new author, was that I was paired up with another new author in Romance Writers of Australia — we were called critique partners. In the beginning, neither of us had any idea what we were doing when we exchanged our manuscripts to critique and help each other. We could spot spelling mistakes, we helped each other with things like characters’ names and places, but that was about it. We had completely different writing styles and were writing different types of romance.

It was an absolute struggle.

Then we both began to learn things by attending different workshops or courses, and by going to the annual conference. We learned different things and taught each other by highlighting what we’d discovered in each other’s manuscripts. She learnt about using contractions in dialogue and highlighted all my stilted conversations. Wow! What an obvious thing I’d never noticed.

In the start, our pairing seemed like the craziest thing, yet it turned out to be a fabulous learning experience because by working together, we learned at twice the speed. If you’re in that situation and feeling frustrated, I promise as you each start learning different skills, you’ll end up moving ahead more quickly than if you worked alone.

---

Writing can be a terribly solitary occupation. Joining with others can give you such a buzz, helping others can make that buzz into real writing energy that can propel your writing career along.

Offer to help, smile, be positive, and watch the energy, and your writing skills, build.

---

Originally published by Living Out Loud on Medium.

---

About Catherine Evans

From Medium:

Australian, writer and creator. Inspired by nature and living. Weird thoughts are entirely my own, and I know they’re often not like other people’s!

Some connections never die.

---

---

“Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.”

— Paulo Coelho The idea of having lived before can be difficult to wrap your head around. As humans, we’re so ingrained in the here and now; caught up in our current life drama. That’s completely normal. It’s easy to believe that this present physical life is the only reality. It’s not as if we have tangible evidence to prove that we once walked the earth in a different skin in another lifetime, any more than we have concrete memories of knowing someone before actually meeting them. All we’ve got are peculiar feelings, Déjà vu-like memories and an uncanny sense of familiarity. Reincarnation, also known as metempsychosis, transmigration, resurrection or life after death, is most characteristic of Eastern philosophy, New Age and religious beliefs that centers around the rebirthing of our non-physical essence (or soul) beginning a new life in a different physical body after death. No doubt you’ve heard of this phenomenon as a past life, where your soul is born into another person after you expire from …. erm…. this life. I know, the thought of being the same but not can be a bit mind-boggling and maybe even a little far-fetched. As if body-hopping is only reserved for evil serial killer entities in supernatural horror films. Except, there are many scientific experts out there with thousands of case studies behind them who believe that reincarnation is, in fact, genuine. For instance, the late Dr Ian Stevenson dedicated much of his career to finding evidence of reincarnation. And while there can be never be irrefutable proof that reincarnation is a real thing, his work has supplied evidence suggesting in its reality. Thinking about the soul and past lives always brings me back to Dr. Wayne Dyer and his book, Wishes Fulfilled, where he quoted an ancient spiritual avatar about the ‘real’. “What is real?” Guru was asked. “What is real is that which never changes,” he replied. More from the book:

“When looking for what is real and unchanging about ourselves, we can apply this definition. There is an unchanging spark from the Creator in each of us, our highest self, a piece of God. And we are all connected.”

The way I see it is that your soul is the unchanging spark which remains the same after your present body has exhausted itself. This can definitely account for the fact that we are not just limited to one body and one life experience. Perhaps, body-hopping isn’t just something that happens in movies after all.

---

Have you ever encountered someone for the first time, yet instantly felt as if you’ve known them before? I have. It’s the strangest and most incredible feeling. A few years back, I met someone who instantly struck a mystifying sense of familiarity in me. The feeling was so powerful that it overtook my entire being to the point that even though I tried to brush it aside, it was impossible to ignore. Eventually, I began to accept that this was something different than I’d ever known with anyone else. I just intuitively knew that there was a soul history between us and became aware that it wasn’t in the scope of my intellectual understanding. I realized that I was deeply connected to this person, even though I had no explanation as to why I felt that way. You’re curious. You may have met someone who feels oddly familiar without reason, and who ignites a powerful sensation that can uplift your heart as much as kill you on the inside. Have you encountered someone from a past life? Here’s a few signs that might help you determine if it’s the real deal:

Obscure Memories

Meeting someone who activates deep soul recognition from a past life is an intense and unique experience that cannot be mistaken for anything other than an eternal bond. You don’t consciously know it or think, “Hey, I know you from a past life”, but you do understand it at some level — the unchanging spark within you knows sacred secrets from bygone eras. You just know that your soul and theirs have shared time before. You have no idea how or why, but you begin to remember unclear moments that manifest as random visions, flashbacks, dreams and feelings not experienced in this lifetime with this person. You may even begin to question your sanity at times.

Internal Sensations

• You feel an immediate “out of this world “connection with this person.
• You experience a strange knowing that he or she was always in your life, even before they arrived.
• The encounter and interactions conjure up an unexplainable well of deep emotions within you.
• Confusion is your new friend as your mind struggles to catch up with your heart and soul knowledge.
• You light up and synchronize with them right away.

The Sound of Their Voice Affects You

Hearing the voice of a past life mate is much like coming home. Their tone seems to vibrate at a frequency that was always meant to resonate with your energetic essence. As if it was some pre-determined signal organized between your souls before incarnation so that you may recognize each other. Their sound is comforting; arousing nostalgic sensations and the deeply sentimental, and their laughter may hanker on your heart like a wistful yesteryear.

Internal Sensations

• You feel lost and found all at the same time.
• You sense a shift within, revealing parts of yourself you didn’t know existed.
• All your existing plans become irrelevant as he or she totally redesigns your life.
• You slowly understand that you will never look at life the same way.
• You feel as if you could listen to them forever.
• Their voice activates and unlocks your heart to create a higher meaning of love within.

They Feel Like Unfinished Business

“Connection doesn’t care about the laws of the land; your soul will be pulled to the place it belongs.”

— Unknown Just as the sound of their voice brings you undone, so does the sense of unending “soul” business with this person. As if they have appeared in your life to challenge you in some way. Famous psychic, Michelle Knight teaches us about past life encounters:

“The souls with whom we have the deepest connection and with whom we have chosen to learn and grow with, are the ones who are there to teach us the most profound lessons. And sometimes these lessons are not easy. Just because you have known one another in a past life does not mean it will all be love and happy endings in this one.”

These challenges can manifest as either positive or negative, and the bigger the contradictions and/or obstacles, the more you will have to grow on a soul level in order to meet and understand the higher meaning. This characteristic is one of the greatest signs that you’ve met a profound soul connection from a past life here, because this person will push you to seek new meaning and discover personal uncharted territory just by showing up in your life. They will force you to do the inner-work.

Internal Sensations

• The mere presence of this person demands truth and honesty at a deeply authentic level like you’ve never before experienced.
• You experience a slight pulse that begins in your soul and grows intense when confronting deep truths and facing your demons.
• They excite, repel and delight you as you are propelled into intense introspection, self-actualization and startling moments of clarity.
• You feel your soul expanding and evolving as new revelations pour forth.
• Your mind and heart blows wide open to the possibilities.
• You begin to see everything differently.
• You begin to distinguish between real and illusionary realities.
• You can see right through them and them through you.
• You discover in yourself a strength that you never knew existed.
• They have a knack for making you feel unimportant and important simultaneously — they can break or lift you like no other.
• You sense what they represent to you at an intricate level.
• You know that the connection is much more than yourself and this lifetime, and realize that they are a part of you and it will always be so.

Feeling of belonging

You feel as if you’ve gazed into their eyes a thousand times before. What you see reflecting back at you is a great sense of belonging — your mirror in another person through to your soul. As well, time and space mean nothing and your connection remains strong even when you’re apart. The feeling of belonging is in their eyes that ignite an inner-journey toward your whole self, and the perfectly orchestrated path that led you to the exact moment of correspondence. Belonging is in the dreams and constant confirming signs, and the way you know each other’s thoughts and emotions without having to speak it out loud. It’s in the ease in which the relationship evolves through your soul.

Internal Sensations

• You feel like a different person around them.
• You might feel as if your very survival depends on this person remaining in your life in a certain way.
• You begin to merge with your subconscious-self, which does not differentiate between past, present and future.
• Your sense of time surrounding this person becomes irrelevant.
• You feel an intimate connection with them, even if you do not spend time together.
• You feel an intense longing to be close to them.
• You may feel that earth is not your true home.
• You yearn to go home.
• You have a great affinity for this person that continues to grow over time.
• You now have a profound sense of wisdom and an unusual capacity to see the deeper meaning in life’s events.

---

If you’ve experienced these feelings and sensations before, then you have likely encountered someone from a past life who you have run into once again on your current journey. Trust your intuition and be mindful of how you feel. And always remember that meeting someone of this soul-significance is a gift that should always be treated with the highest respect and honor.

---

Originally published by Living Out Loud on Medium