Creating wellness moment by moment…
One popular
New Age premise tells you that “you create your own reality.” Sadly, this is often misunderstood to mean that
when you are sick, you have somehow done this to yourself. Of course there are instances in which you bear more responsibility
for your illness. Perhaps you made poor lifestyle choices in the past, such as smoking or excessive drinking or drug use.
But setting aside these obvious examples, most of the time you really cannot know why you have become ill. Therefore, it is
important not to add insult to injury by making yourself feel guilty.
The real truth of this premise is that you
do create your own reality, but only right now, in this present moment. You do this through the stories that you are telling
yourself and identifying with. You do not create the scenery you see, only your reaction to it. You do not create the weather,
but calling a day “miserable” makes you unhappy. Understanding that you are responsible for your own psychological
and emotional reality in the present moment has everything to do with awakening to the nature of your own mind and nothing
to do with creating guilt.
If you tell yourself “I (somehow) have created my disease,” the immediate
consequence of this belief is a feeling of shame and guilt, not increased well-being. Even if you had previously made unhealthy
choices, blaming yourself for past actions does not improve your present state. The key then to maximizing your potential
for healing is choosing to be fully present. In other words, let go of worrying about what caused your illness and instead
enter completely into whatever your actual experience is, moment by moment.
There is a further consequence for
believing that you have caused your illness: you will likely also believe that in order to find a remedy, you must first discover
what you did to cause the problem. Now the pressure is on: not only do you feel guilty, but anxious as well. You are indeed
creating your own reality—emotional stress—but only in this moment and only through your own thinking. Believing
that you are the cause of your illness (which, by the way, makes you special) leads to much unnecessary suffering.
When you are in the Now, your mind stops thinking about you and about everything else, and you are simply aware. Time in
a certain sense stops or slows down enough so that your sense of self is no longer that of someone on his or her way to somewhere
else. You are just as you are. Your situation—or, more precisely, your state of being—is not something caused
by something prior. You are not comparing your present circumstance to the past nor projecting into the future. You are no
longer explaining, justifying, rationalizing, or interpreting your experience. Therefore, you are not attributing cause to
what you are experiencing…you are just being. And in that being, you are always and already whole. 
Richard Moss received his doctorate of medicine in 1972, but eventually
left that career after a life-changing realization led him to his true calling: the exploration of consciousness and the integration
of self-realization in daily life. “My journey from traditional doctor working in emergency and hospital medicine to
scientist of the mind and heart was initiated on my 30th birthday with an experience that, for want of any better word, I
will call awakening.” Little did Richard know that this would be the core of the work that would occupy the
rest of his life. The author of six seminal books, Richard wrote his latest Inside-Out Healing because he felt a kinship with every person who suffers and because “I know that so much
human misery is unnecessary and can be relieved with the proper understanding and tools.” |
