What does the expression “Be The Change” really mean?
It’s an interesting statement because I usually find in my practice that when people are unhappy, troubled, angry, or distressed that they usually 
try to figure out what they can change outwardly in their life first. Their focus becomes scanning job opportunities on CareerBuilder.com or they start thinking about if they need a different person in their life to be in a relationship with. Stressed out parents look to see what they can change about their children, perhaps with rules or consequences.
Most people want to look outside of themselves rather than INSIDE to try to find answers to their distress. However, over the 30 years I’ve been doing this work, it has become quite clear. Unless you decide to go within and decide what you can change, then you can look outside of yourself all day long for years and nothing will change. Change can occur either by thinking about something differently, spending time within the silence to gain clarity, or creating a new path of thinking, doing, feeling or BEING.
Why is this? The truth is that no matter what changes outside of you in your environment, if you haven’t created some internal changes you will still perceive the outside changes with the same perspective as before!
Isn’t that wild? For example, I had a client that was angry…I mean super angry! She certainly had reason to be as she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and her mother did nothing when she finally confided in her. Double betrayal is a very difficult feeling for a young person. However, my client was now in her thirties and still VERY ANGRY.
If she was driving, she was angry and pissed off at all the STUPID drivers in the world. If her child did something “childlike,” she would overreact with a vengeance. She had a great husband, but she always thought he was going to cheat on her. It haunted her day and night! She continually thought her friends were going to betray her in some fashion as well.
This client could have changed her friends, children, husband and everything else in her life, but she would have still feel exactly the same! As a matter of fact, she did end up leaving her husband and children. During the next seven months as she worked on herself in therapy, she realized what a terrible mistake she had made. She became suicidal many times and almost ended what had been a very good life until she finally decided to work on changing her perceptions and address her angry feelings.
This story has a happy ending because her husband also was in therapy and understood what was happening. He had the patience to wait for her to sort through her issues. I also will mention that the husband had past-life regression and found the lifetime where he had been with his wife only she was the male and took care of him physically, protecting her (him) at all costs. As he rose above that lifetime he understood that they had made the agreement when they came into this life that he would emotionally protect and care for her now. This made it so much easier for him to wait for her to deal with “her stuff.”
Be the change if you’re not happy about something, and watch what happens!!
New Pathway to Healing
Connect to Mind – Body – Spirit with Petey Silveira
