The benefits of discovering a new perspective towards an issue, an event, one’s life should not be under-rated. A shift in your perspective may lead to a change in mindset that helps you deal with an issue or relationship. This change may stir deeper understanding and insights not just towards the narrowly construed issue or problem but where you’re at in your inner growth. In this article I want to tease out this important process and why it is critical to explore and act upon new perspectives.
Perspective renewal plays an essential role in every facet of human endeavour from educational to economic fields, organisational change through to personal health, especially mental health where many of us can be unconsciously caught up in a web of outmoded beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. We are all creatures of habit, pursuing our own urges and yearnings, the inner drives often arising from the unconsciousness of habitual learnings, conditioning and insecurities. Our perspectives are our specific filter on the interpretation and understanding of our reality we feel immersed within, often feeling helpless to change.
I will give a personal example of perspective renewal or what I sometimes call, quite cumbersomely, re-persectivising an event. One of my self-imposed labels I place on myself is that of an introverted loner, preferring my own company to the company of larger groups, beyond my family groups size. I have always been socially challenged, a bit of a loner throughout my life, bit of a misfit. Before I came to accept this aspect of my nature in my early 30s, I often felt lonely, excluded, different. While I have since felt loneliness I have for the most part just been alone. I have been socially isolated, despaired about this often yet not particularly suffering loneliness.
I often wondered why I could not fit in socially and my partner recently mentioned the impact that the energies of the mother and environs plays during the birth process. Our body is affected by energies – electric, electro-magnetic, ultraviolet – all the time in different contexts and when we are born from our mother we are affected by her emotional, bodily and psychological energy states as well as the energy within which the birth takes place. When I was birthed, my mother was alone in third world, country hospital with no family support, emotionally vulnerable and raw. A difficult birth, a blue baby lacking oxygen, a messy after birth experience and feeling lonely and forgotten, certainly not cared, loved or appreciated.
This was my energetic context for coming into this world, encountering and immersing within the sad, lonely state of my mother and the humid, basic surrounds of a hospital. Given the openness of a new born to what it is exposed to in those initial post-birth times, it is reasonable to assume that I was affected, physically and psychologically by this energetic context. Given how my life panned out, this sense of loneliness and/or aloneness continued from this point along with the sense of sadness, separation and doubts about my self-worth. The insight from this new perspective on my aloneness is that I can’t just blame this on a dysfunctional personality but Rather see this particular pattern of disconnect and social isolation arising from birth and early childhood experiences, from retaining the energetic frequency or signature of these contexts.
This insight, correct or otherwise creates an understanding about why my life has panned out in this particular way and helps me to make sense or meaning of my aloneness and social isolation. The point however is whether I can and want to do something about this new perspective. I can let this new perspective help me accept and deal with this held energetic state through breathwork or other therapeutic modality that can release this energy stagnation or blockage. I can also do absolutely nothing with this new perspective and understanding and just accept this life pattern because its more comfortable than dealing with the pattern. There is always a choice involved in how we deal with our suffering, our pain from conditioned perspectives.
You could argue that renewing or transforming your perspective towards something, someone, an event or a pattern in your life that creates friction is a pathway to inner growth and making greater sense of your life. It is and can be BUT the caveat is that the new meaning and understanding leads to letting go of any attachment with the pattern and its emotional resonance, including the retained energy…… that it leads beyond the easier response of acceptance of the status quo.
Acceptance can be viewed as a mental capitulation to the pattern or the emotional pain, remaining within your comfort zone despite the burden it places on you. It can let you remain in limbo and block your need to grow. I could easily, as I have done for many years accept this pattern of mine of social disconnect and isolation with the associated feelings of sadness and low self-esteem but never step out of it and grow beyond it to the next lesson. I am choosing these days to look at my habits of mind, my pattern of isolation for example as reminders, as frictions within my psych that motivates me to seek new perspectives and to see meanings and opportunities for fundamental change. The choice is mine to be open to creating new perspectives, to acknowledge and let go of my patterns and ‘frictions’ and grow into that future self that I reach out to.