What if … you could change the lens through which you view life, and change your life in the process? 

In 2011 I walked away my consulting business of fifteen years, Focus On Space,  with a desire to explore how my toolbox of skills might be useful in the developing world.  While my primary goal was to share my skills, I  knew that the experience would change me in some essential way.  What I could had not have anticipated was how radically is would change the filter through which I had viewed life and would influence  life moving forward.

It’s not an exaggeration to say it was the catalyst for a complete paradigm shift that gave me access to a missing link that had the effect of turbo charging all of my previous work.

That missing piece is the core of the work I am choosing to offer in this new stage of Post Peace Corps life: a Fourth Act, so to speak.

What if… you could not only heal your past, but shift the narrative going forward?  What if you could literally change your world?

The events and emotions of  childhood create our neural networks and therefore, our chemistry, i.e. the particular neurotransmitters  that are released as we encounter various stimuli. In that way, the chemistry established in childhood predisposes us to the way we  walk through life:

• • • with trust or fear
    • compassion or judgement
    • victimhood or curiosity.

Events during infancy and the pre-verbal years are particularly impactful, because they register chemically, but not cognitively, leaving an imprint we can only translate emotionally.   The footprint left by those events translates to feelings of acceptance and love, or rejection and unworthiness. These feelings can be so hard to decipher in later life because we can’t access the raw data, i.e. the precipitating event.   We develop patterns of behavior and strategies for interacting with life: for developing trust, establishing enduring relationships, and finding purpose and self-realization on the basis of these foundational experiences.

I’ve come to think of this as a lens. Just as a photographic lens influences color,  perspective, and clarity of the image in front of the lens, the emotions created by life events (remembered or not)  form the metaphorical lens through which we  tend to view and interpret past, present and future. 

But is that lens accurate, or are there flaws of which we are unaware? The scenes and events may be “literally” true in that they happened, but how we interpret  and respond to those events, and what we make them mean may not be.

That’s where crafting a new lens can be helpful, in fact it can be life-changing.

Just as a camera lens can filter out colors and create a mood to the scene in front of the lens, the filters through which we view life can also color the way we experience an event, and interpret it.  Childhood into early adulthood is a time spent collecting data and experiences,  not usually analyzing–but responding and interpreting on the basis of the limited information and understanding available to us at the time. Those interpretations guide our lives as they unfold into adulthood, higher education, jobs, and complex relationships.  

Few of us get all the way to adulthood without some form of drama or trauma that results in assumptions, judgement, and unresolved wounds.  Those experiences created vast neural networks which can be triggered by even  events that would otherwise be non-threatening.

We know now that those patterns can be changed.

Working with what I call “spiritual technology,” allows us to view past experiences through a different lens – not to bypass them, but feel them and re-evaluate those experiences and what they have come to mean. for us.

New light and colors flood the landscape of your memory, different emotions creep in, unfamiliar interpretations and understanding emerge.  And the unimaginable happens – foundational events begin to reconfigure in real time. And in that moment, your perceptions of your story begin to shift and new possibilities bloom as old emotional threads dissolve.

It’s alchemical, transcending linear thinking and mental gymnastics, evoking surprising emotions: the catalyst for a change so profound it qualifies as a paradigm shift.

Experiencing such a paradigm shift personally  has allowed me to navigate the present and future differently. It can for you as well.

When emotions shift,  the energy around the past and present evolve, allowing us to move forward in an expanded state-of-grace.

Sound too easy? Impossible?  Unsustainable?  

I would have thought so, but such an unexpected shift occurred spontaneously for me as I was writing my book, I Miss the Rain in Africa, about my Peace Corps experience in Uganda, 2011-2013, and the personal growth that followed. Writing about the process of returning, and later stepping into a family constellation with adult children, and a soon-to-born first-grandchild, I revealed that we had all found ourselves in unfamiliar territory, rife with landmines none of us had anticipated.

Patterns from my childhood I thought had been laid to rest along with my mother had erupted in real time as old neural networks  blindsided me in seemingly unrelated circumstances and with unexpected people. 

As I  looked back and wrote about the emotions that had flattened me, old memories flooded in, so I pulled up some journaling I’d stashed from a years back. 

As I reread  the material, I had a visceral response to the blame, judgement, and shame with which I’d written. I literally wept, not because of the pain of remembering, but because I realized I was no longer angry or judgmental about my mother. My heart ached as I read through my interpretations of our past. 

What had happened in the interim? How had I gone from feeling such emotional abuse to feeling gratitude and love without noticing it and seemingly all-at-once?

But it wasn’t all at once. It’s just that the process had occurred so organically, I hadn’t cataloged the work I’d done over the past few years. Radical shifts had occurred while I wasn’t looking, and seemed to come on-line  fully formed and had become my lens for re-examining life in general, but specifically, my past.  

Some alchemy had traded the old lenses with new ones and I began seeing my past through with a newfound emotional clarity and had brought compassion and forgiveness to bear.   

The alchemy was actually the synergy of accessing different emotional energy to override old-programming.   I traded the lenses of judgement and blame, for those of neutrality, then compassion, and understanding and rediscovered my history.

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