Welcome To A World Unfurled...

We all orbit around one another in our own personal little planets. Most of these little planets are completely unaware of each other except when these worlds collide or brush up against each other. Our little universes consist of family and friends, generally in a tight orbit, and coworkers and acquaintances in a slightly more distant orbit, but any other worlds outside of our personal universe are really unknowns to us.

The next time you drive somewhere, look around you and look at the other drivers or the occasional person that you see on the street and notice how they are completely unaware of your existence or only see you superficially. You see them, but you know absolutely nothing about them or about their lives. Their world is as important to them as yours is to yours, but you are both really unaware of each other.

There are billions of such worlds and combinations of mini universes that are unknown to us. Each human being is unique and caught up in their own world as they know it. It is a bizarre experience to look around and see how we are so entrenched in what we know and what is familiar to us that remain relatively unaware of other people’s personal worlds. Think about the different cultures and belief systems that are out there as you contemplate what you think you know about individual people.

Our awareness of ourselves ranges from being completely clueless to being somewhat or even, in the rare case, very aware. Most of us fall in between. I can see some people thinking right now that they are more aware than they really are. Yet the more you know about yourself the more you realize you don’t know. The litmus test is if you are one with yourself, you are one with God and with all the people around you, with no exception. It is a humbling experience to have this realization.

So how aware are we of these orbiting worlds around us? How much do we really know about all these people other than when we briefly intersect with them? Why should we even care about these other worlds that people live in? Why bother looking any further past the surfaces that we get a glimpse of in passing?

When we start to become more aware of these other spinning planets that we call people, we become slightly less self-important. This in turn frees us from getting caught up in our day-to-day patterned behaviors. It takes us outside of our small and limited worlds and allows us to see how other people exist from outside of our usual perspectives. This in turn allows our own perspectives to grow and expand, giving us deeper and broader vision.

Everyone is at the center of his or her own universe. Every person is entirely different, depending on what their life experiences have been, and on what their current belief systems are. When we observe any world other than our own, we are limited to understanding those other worlds based on our own experiences and beliefs. Miscommunication occurs when we think we understand how another person thinks, feels and reacts, based on how we think, feel, and react.

Yet if you take this down one step, we do this twith ourselves as well. We keep reinterpreting our experiences based on our past whether we are aware of it or not. We judge ourselves from that past. We learn how to love or not love ourselves from our past. We learn how to exist in relationships and we learn what to expect and how to act based on what we observed in our childhoods.

If you could take a step back from your own world and look at it from the outside, you would be able to see how all your beliefs, perceptions, and emotional reactions were based on what you were taught so long ago. If you can train yourself to observe others without judgment, you can learn to see so many different ways in which you can exist.

If there is anything that you don’t like about your world you can change how you feel about it at any point in your life. You only need to become aware of what is not working for you. If it doesn't feel good you need to change how you feel about that. Looking at other people’s worlds gives you an opportunity to use them as role models for how to change your own behavior. If somebody handles a challenge well, analyze how they did it and redefine your own experiences to try and match what you see.

If you are having trouble with another world that is close to you in your orbit, stop looking at them to find fault and making your world the right one. Even if they have done something wrong in their relationship with you, learn to admit to yourself that every relationship is a two way street emotionally. You both have equal power in the creation of your experiences. Increase your self awareness and always look at how you can improve yourself.

In relationships, when two worlds get too close to spin freely, both orbits are adversely affected. This happens when we try to get our partners to fill our emotional needs rather than take care of them ourselves. The emotional imbalance becomes magnified the more we judge, blame, and find fault and the slower and more convoluted our own orbit becomes.

The purpose of seeing people as little worlds is to develop as deep of an understanding of other people’s behavior as we can. We can only do this when we move out of the thoughts and feelings that limit us. There are many ways to go about shifting how we think or perceive our own and other's experiences. Any time you come across a new tool, use it until it becomes an automatic part of you. Anything that helps you let go of judgment and frees you from the curse of needing to be right will lead you in the right direction.

One interesting exercise that you can do when you encounter other people is to visualize or imagine them as a spinning world. Look closely to see how very different everyone is, yet also notice any similarities such as shapes, vibration, color, intensity, speed, etc. See if you can also imagine your own world. Then watch how your world intersects with these other worlds. Can you see how your world reacts to the different worlds you encounter?

Sometimes you can see and/or feel how the energy field of your world will brighten next to a positive world. Other times you will feel or see your energy field try to move away from a negative world. When you feel love your energy field wants to be around that world that you feel closely linked to. By practicing this kind of “seeing” you will develop better self-awareness where you can see how the people around you have an influence on your own behavior, depending on your own unmet emotional needs.

You can take this a step further by noticing how you emotionally react to a situation. When you go into emotional reaction, you have lost self-awareness and are following old patterns of behavior. You can teach yourself to become aware of when this happens so that you can learn to create different meanings for what you are experiencing, and then take different action. Over time you can desensitize yourself to that particular kind of trigger.

A physical technique that you can use to stop emotional reaction is to consciously lift your facial muscles up into a small smile and relaxing your eye muscles while keeping the corners of your mouth slightly uplifted. I challenge all readers to try this whenever they have negative or stressful thoughts. It becomes difficult and even impossible to maintain feelings of negativity or worry while your face is held in this small smile. The overall feeling that you have turns into a sense of happiness and contentment.

Using this technique has multiple effects on you. First you will notice that when you change your focus from what you were thinking about and place it on your physical muscles, your thoughts dissipate. It requires concentration to keep a small smile on your face while relaxing the eye muscles. You start a physiological response that brings you many benefits.

You will notice that after you relax your eyes, any tension in your shoulders tends to relax a bit as well. Encourage your shoulders to drop down even more. This in turn leads to taking deeper breaths. Notice how your breathing relaxes and becomes slower. Keep reminding yourself to keep the corners of your mouth turned up while keeping the eyes relaxed.

Now talk out loud while holding your facial muscles in this way. As a comparison, allow your face to form a frown and say something out loud again. Go back into a smile and speak again. Your speaking voice changes when you have a smile on your face. This is an old and well-known tool used by sales people to keep their voices more positive in order to better achieve their sales. Look in the mirror as you practice this and see how it can transform your face.

Why not use it in your own life to achieve your own goals of wanting to be happier, more relaxed, free of worry, etc. It doesn't mean that you ignore your stressors, you train yourself to focus on the solutions instead. When we get annoyed, using this technique will cut through the feeling of annoyance and allow us to instead think about what it is that we want. Instead of emotionally reacting and using our energy in that way, we can instead focus our energy on finding ways to get a step closer to whatever it is that we want.

Start watching the worlds around you in the imaginary way mentioned above. It will not only help to desensitize your emotional triggers and the ensuing reactions, it will also slowly teach you how much we assume that we know about the worlds around us when we really don’t. Your own parent, sibling, child, partner, etc. are all worlds that you only have somewhat of a deeper glimpse of than with other worlds.

If you think you really know who that person is and why they do what they do then that is your arrogance speaking. We can never fully know another person. You have not been privy to every moment of their lives to know how each moment has impacted them and given meaning to the infinitesimal number of experiences that have affected their psyche.

Put your effort into learning more about yourself and how each event has affected your world. Know that your world only exists in the present moment and that it can become a conscious choice to learn how to stop bringing the past with you into each new event. Keep watching how other people's worlds spin around in order to learn how to open up your own world.

Ewa Schwarz

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