Deciding Ahead of Time what Feels Good.

Notes from Neale...
My dear friends...

Let me speak this week about the process of deciding Ahead of Time what Feels Good.

You will remember (if you are a regular reader of the Weekly Bulletin) that we have been discussing here the school of thought that says we should always move, in life, toward what Feels Good. And that this is also a good measure of whether a decision we are contemplating is the "right" one. It is Feels Good to have made a particular choice, that's a pretty good sign that you're heading in the "right" direction.

Of course we know from Conversations with God that there's no such thing as "right" and "wrong," but here we are using of the word "right" to mean the course of action that feels most immediately beneficial. (All courses of action are beneficial, it's just a question of which one will produce benefit most quickly, within our constructs of Time and Space.)

And as we've explored this idea, I've been saying here that we don't have to wait until after a decision has been made to take a look at that. We can notice ahead of time which choices and actions feel best to us, bring us the most peace, joy, and happiness, and we can have our feelings determine our choices rather than having our choices determine our feelings.

This is the road taken by all Masters.

I have observed in life that people fall into one of three categories. They are either Masters, Students on the road to mastery, or Participants in life who are moving through their days and nights with no particular or specific thought in mind as to what they are doing in most moments, or why they are doing it, but just mostly in a reactive mode, doing the best they can with what is happening from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year.

Participants make their life choices and decisions mostly as a reaction to something, while Masters make their choices and decisions as a creation, and Students fall somewhere in between.

Masters decide ahead of time not how things make them feel, but how they wish to feel when things occur. Let me give you an example...

A Master decides ahead of time how she finds that the front desk clerk at the hotel cannot find her reservation and does not have a room he can offer her when she arrives at 3:30 in the morning after a 14-hour flight. A Master can decide this because a Master knows --- especially if she travels regularly --- that things like this are bound to happen, that there is no surprise in this, and that she can depend on it occurring sometime in her journeys. Knowing this, she can choose ahead of time exactly how she wishes to experience the moment, and then express herself in a way which announces, declares, and fulfills Who She Really Is.

A Participant in life may be a person who is surprised by such an event at a hotel front desk and has not thought for a moment about how he or she wishes to react and respond in that moment. The participant therefore reacts spontaneously, in a way which more often than not will fail to be an accurate demonstration of who he or she really is.

In our annual Christmas CwG Spiritual Renewal Retreat (coming up in just a few weeks...still a chance for you to grab a space for yourself or a loved one --- or both!) we explore this whole process of Advance Creation. We invite retreat participants to take out a sheet of paper and make a list of at least three life encounters or incidents they know of a certainty they will be experiencing again before too much more time goes by.

These could be occurrences as simple as "my spouse is late --- again --- getting us out of the house for a dinner party" to something a little more impacting, such as "the checking account has been badly overdrawn," or "the furnace has stopped working and the repair guy can't make it out for a day and a half," or..."the clerk at the store has not given me the service I deserve and paid for..."

There is no doubt that these, or other, similar, incidents will occur in your life sometime in the future. The only question is, who do we choose to be in the space of that?

Having made this decision, we can begin to apply it to even bigger incidents and more challenging moments --- until we find that we have literally "mastered life." Ah, but what is there to do after that?

Hmmm....a good topic for next week...until then, have a wonderful 7 days.


Love and Hugs,
Neale