You Need to Get in Touch with Reality!

For the vast majority of our adult lives, we live in a world of make-believe. However, as most of us know, it’s no fairy story – most normal lives are a mundane up and down affair that never really goes anywhere – more like a second-rate soap opera. However, in stark contrast to our personal make-believe, reality does really exist. It’s wonderful, it’s the world of opportunity, the world of happiness and peace of mind – and it’s right before your very eyes.

Before we explore reality further, however, I want to make one thing crystal clear. You may be content within your comfort zone – your normal life. As one reader of my articles said “I’m happy in my normal life – I’m happy taking out the trash, washing the car, doing the laundry, picking the kids up from school...” But there are degrees of happiness – and it strikes me as odd that someone such as that reader that I’ve just quoted would not even want to explore the possibility that she’s only just scratching the surface of her unlimited potential for happiness.

So, if you’re content to simply stay put – like the guy in the Bible who was given one talent, decided to bury it for safe-keeping and got thrown out into the wilderness for his lack of get-up-and-go – then, be my guest – stop reading this article and go back to your make-believe happiness. But if you’re looking for even a little more out of life or if, like many people, you’re actually dissatisfied with your lot in life right now – then read on, there’s a whole world all around you that your normal mind has been too muddled to notice, that your normal eyes have been too blind to see.

If we were to look at the everyday normal life from a psychological perspective, it could be said to closely resemble a series of old re-runs! The facts are that we stop experiencing reality when we’re eleven or twelve years old. Up to then, the world was a place to be explored – an adventure simply waiting to happen. But, as the construction of the brain’s neural highways comes to a conclusion around puberty, our brain’s electrical activity changes. As a result, as adults, we fall prey to about fifty thousand random thoughts that whizz along those highways every single waking day. As a result, what the learned about life and who we are – what psychology calls our ‘stored knowledge’ – gets stuck in our subconscious mind. This stored knowledge becomes the basis for how we feel about ourselves, how we view the world and how we behave and react to everything and everybody. As a result of this mindset and its related behavioural patterns, we create a make-believe world for ourselves. And whilst reality is before our very eyes, we are still stuck with our very personal version of a reality that dates back to our childhood.

You will never achieve the success, happiness and peace of mind that comes effortlessly to those who know how to touch real reality in the here and now of today. You will simply continue to repeat the same behaviours, the same patterns, the same mistakes. You will continue to encounter the same pitfalls, same hurdles, same barriers – none of which actually exist in reality. And, whilst you you’re going to have to break the habit of an adult lifetime to break out of your Groundhog Day, you’re not going to have to take major action in your life to see and experience major change.

Let me explain. I have a client who meditates daily – yes, three hundred and sixty five days a year. The great thing about meditation is that it stops your mind paying attention to the noise in your head and develops your ability to simply focus on what it feels like or sounds like to be just here, now. In other words, meditation takes you away from your make-believe world and enables you experience reality. When you meditate you, quite literally, come to your senses – you start seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting the here and now in a way that you haven’t done since you were a young child. Meditation disciplines an otherwise completely undisciplined normal mind.

I’m not suggesting that you meditate every single day – I’m a realist, very few people that I’ve worked with will do that. I don’t. But I’ve all kinds of little tricks and tips to enable you notice the difference between what you think is going on (your world of make believe) and what is actually going on (reality). And that’s why I mention my meditating friend! Even he gets frustrated or stressed out during his working day. It’s a problem that a lot of people who meditate encounter – they don’t know how to bring their clear state of mind into play when the going gets rough. You’ve got to learn how to, quite literally, touch reality during the course of your day. During a consultation with my friend, he was called away to what was going to be a very argumentative and potentially explosive meeting. “How am I going to stay grounded?” he asked me and I told him.

A couple of hours later, he came back into the room with a broad grin on his face. When people were trying to unnerve me, I simply ran the palm of my hand along the polished surface of the table – I felt reality, I stayed calm and, even though I only spoke for, perhaps, thirty seconds during that ninety minute meeting, I ran the meeting and I got what I wanted – effortlessly.

We can all get what our heart desires – effortlessly. But it takes real action on our part – not the continuous reaction that is thrust upon us by our normal minds. If you want to rise above that, you’re going to have to start being abnormal and start touching the reality of a world that’s simply waiting to pander to your wishes.