3D Movie Glasses

Do you remember those old school glasses? Are you old enough to remember the old school glasses?

Now they have the fancy ones that just look like sunglasses, but back in the day we had the white cardboard ones with the 2 different colored lenses. The featured image with this blog is a pair of those old glasses. It brings back memories doesn't it?

So, why am I talking about 3D movie glasses?  

Because they affect how you see the movie. They affect your perception depending on whether you're wearing them or not.

When you wear the glasses, they allow you to see the 3D effects in the movie. It makes the movie an entirely different experience from what you would see without the glasses. Those glasses don't affect the story that's playing out in the movie; who falls in love with who isn't affected at all.  The glasses do affect how you see the scenes where the 3D effects are present. This is an important distinction.

I think of perception much like wearing a pair of 3D glasses. Your perception is directly affected by your previous experiences, wounds, beliefs, pain, and your own interpretation of what's happening. Those things are the glasses and the effect the glasses are having on your perception.

Unlike the 3D glasses that you actively take on and off, you aren't always consciously aware of your own perception. You don't actively decide what your perception is.  In fact most of the time, people aren't consciously aware of their own perception at all. Nobody teaches us to do that. We buy into our own thoughts all the time without ever thinking about them. The mind has had carte blanche access to doing whatever it wants without any consequences to its way of being. It's been running the show for a long time with no limitation to its power.

Your perception is a filter in between you and the world around you, much like the 3D glasses are filtering your experience of the movie. The difference between the 3D glasses and your perception, is that your perception gives you the wiggle room to make up a new story line. The glasses don't do that for you.

You recognize the limitation of the glasses at the movie theatre. They offer some cool effects and that's it. The story of the movie stays untouched therefore the glasses are limited in their power. But your perception doesn't have the same limitations. That means that your perception does actively change the story line all the time, you just don't question that.

What if your perception worked the same way as those 3D glasses do?

What if you had the power to limit the effect your perception has on how you see the world?

What if you could gain some control over your perception by becoming consciously aware of it?

We're all wearing 3D glasses every day of our lives. We don't even know they are there because we are so used to them. We get given a pair the minute we're born because our parents and caregivers hand us a carbon copy of what they are wearing. That filter affects how you see the world every single day of your life.

When we have experiences that make the filter seem odd to us, that's when we begin to question things. We interpret the pain we experience in our own lives as arguing with what we were taught by our parents. This can make people pretty uncomfortable for a bit as they shed the old pair of glasses and put on new ones that seem to make more sense to them based on the new pain they're experiencing. We can often get to a place of recognizing that what our parents or caregivers taught us is no longer working for us and so we learn to shift our focus a little bit.

This isn't a perfect system and it can take a while to work through. Sometimes it comes with a wound of realizing that our parents weren't perfect and didn't know everything. That can make it hard to shed their beliefs and ideas to make room for our own. There are people out there that have never questioned the beliefs they were given by their caregivers. They try very hard to make their lives fit in those boxes, whether it makes sense to them or not.

Learning to see our perception as a pair of glasses gives us some control over it. Our thoughts about what's happening around us are clues into what our perception is at the time. If you make up a story about what's happening it's because you've put on a pair of glasses that are filtering your perception and it's messing with your ability to see what's actually happening.

To take off the glasses, we have to be willing to recognize the story we're telling. We have to see where our thoughts are screwy. We have to pay attention to what's happening in our minds. That's where all the action is.

What's happening around you is actually really boring. Those glasses you're wearing are adding a ton of color because they account for all the drama and pain that you add into your experience. Imagine walking around with a pair of old school 3D glasses on all the time. Everything would show up in 2 colors. It would distort how you see reality quite significantly. Well guess what? You're busy distorting your own reality all the time by adding in all kinds of drama to the story of your experience.

When you allow the filter to highlight the pain of other people, then you can use that to understand that what they are saying or doing is a reflection of pain and not a reflection of who they are. People are not their pain. Now you have space for compassion. When you can use the filter to see how your pain is affecting your interpretation of things, it gives you the room to stand back, remove the filter of pain, and see it more clearly. This is how we drop the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization that we like to tell ourselves.

We're making a conscious choice to recognize that we're all wearing these glasses and that we can take them off. We aren't stuck with them. They aren't glued to your face. You can take them off and choose to see your life differently. It's not all pain and drama, even though you want to tell yourself it is. You want to know where most of the pain and drama is? In your head. Until you're willing to realize that, you're going to continue to tell yourself those stories that keep you stuck.

How do I know this stuff?

Because I lived it. I made up an epic story of not being able to make my own choices in my life. That epic story created a lot of pain. I made some stupid choices because of it. After I was able to step back from it and see it clearly, I realized that the trap I thought I was in, was only a mental trap. It was in my head. I had made it up. I could have walked out of that trap anytime I wanted to. But because I had made up a story of victimization that told me I couldn't, I stayed in the trap and allowed it to cause a lot of pain. I hurt people that didn't deserve to be hurt for no reason other than I was wearing a pair of those glasses that were severely distorting the story playing out in front of me.

When I decided to heal I took those glasses off, actually I threw them across the room not really knowing what I was doing at the time. My world stopped making sense to me and I tossed the filter out. For a long time I just replaced them with a new pair of glasses that weren't a whole bunch better. But what the new glasses did for me was give me the space to find the truth in the pain. I learned how to take them off intentionally, consciously, and with awareness. That was life changing.

Uncovering Your Reality is about taking the glasses off. It is about learning how to see it without all the filters and the colors. A filter of pain will offer you pain no matter how hard you try to change that. You have to remove that filter if you wish to see clearly. The scary of removing the filter is that you have no idea what you're going to see. A reality that isn't distorted looks completely different but in a good way. It's not as scary as the filter would have you believe it is.

You have a choice in how you look at the world and the experiences you've had. It's up to you to decide that you want that change, that you want to feel better. The only one that can make that change is you.

Are you ready yet?

Love to all.

Della