Upside Down Reality

 Upside Down Reality

by Leslie Gaddy

“If you change your mindset, you have the ability to change your whole world”

Damien Thomas

In 2020, I experienced what I prefer to call a spiritual awakening. This awakening created an “upside down reality” which was so foriegn I was left in a state of confusion.  The most uncomfortable feelings and emotions ever felt were at this moment in time.  It was as if I were in one of those stuffed animal games where you use the arm to pick one of them up and I was the stuffed animal that was pulled out of the glass box. Everything felt foriegn and I felt lost, wondering, WHAT NOW!   Everything was chaotic, physically painful, mentally anguishing, felt as if I were trapped, knowing something was misaligned, and within it emerged the undying desire to fix it.

My first step was listing all of the “extra” and unnecessary things I was doing and then began eliminating those things from my life. This left me with the critical components that kept me trapped in this “maze of hell”. Events and happenings began to unfold rapidly. The most significant unfoldment, however, was the perspective or mindset I held.  I began to piece together how many of my recognized thoughts connected to the events and people around me.  I began to see how my physical appearance and well being was reflected in my life and through its experiences. I was eating unhealthy foods, drinking too much beer, too much coffee, sodas, etc.  Then I would counteract those self destructing behaviors with a few healthy foods, convincing myself that I was eating healthy.  I smoked cigarettes and talked bad about myself. I always felt out of control, so I became more controlling. Any pressure I perceived to be coming from outside of me created a loop of giving and receiving of that pressure.  I could clearly see that it was myself who kept the loop going and I would have to stop this loop for it to end.  Without throwing out a lot of spiritual jargon, I now understand that nothing exists outside of ourselves.  At this moment in my journey I was too spiritually immature to understand this concept. 

Those experiences that suck the most are the ones that will either break you and push you into the “darkness”, meaning in a state of ignorance, or will break you and push you into the “light”, meaning in a state of knowing. The outcome truly depends on which “mind” you listen to, the mind of the ego or the mind of the heart.  The ego mind only knows survival, it only knows the harsh dense physical reality.  It has only the capacity to react to the environment and only in a way that it has personally experienced. The ego mind operates on the lower emotions of fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, lack, guilt, and shame; constantly replaying old movies that contain outdated methods; never regenerating anything creative and new. The mind of the heart, however, is the mind that opens you up to new ideas and thoughts and shows you the raw truth, expanding every aspect of your being. Trusting the mind of the heart is the true meaning of “taking a leap of faith”. The mind of the heart disregards religious dogma, societal rules and judgement, input from closed and negative sources, then only listens to the soul. The soul is always maneuvering through and around the poor choices made by the mind of the ego made from a survival mode of existing. The soul operates only through love and its abilities far outweigh the abilities of the egoic mind. The soul mind only operates on the higher emotions of joy, peace, happiness, love and harmony.  Clarity of what free-will is and how to purposefully utilize this divine right to direct my life resulted from being able to fully understand the minds of the ego and heart,  I could clearly see that each choice made in each and every moment was a choice I made using the free-will divine right to make it.  When I slowed down and took a closer look I could see clearly that the choices I made directly correlated to my personal reality and shaped my perspective of the world around me.  

What does it mean to really take a closer look? 

This question in itself is one of the most pivotal questions to be asked and should be asked often. The answer is very complex and is ever evolving.  Like an onion, the answer has many layers. You must go through each outer layer before you can understand the inner layers. The layer you begin with must be the layer that reflects your own personal level of understanding, which lies in the physical plane and is processed through the Egoic mind. For clarity, the physical plane includes the people in your life, your home, your job, your material possessions, finances, etc.  It is anything you can observe with the five physical senses (sight, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling). Taking a closer look means to look at the physical environment, assess each individual aspect, then through the assessment observe the emotion you feel or attach to that aspect.  For example, when you look at your home, what feelings immediately surface? The emotions will be in the lower level,  in the upper level or neutral. The assessment then gives you a map of where you are on your own personal journey, highlighting which areas need attention.  Knowing the areas needing attention can better help us change and eliminate those areas which no longer serve our needs. For example, when you look at your home and its messiness creates a negative emotion, you can logically conclude that you must take the action to clean it up and then decide how you can accomplish this.  Will you clean it yourself, hire someone to do it for you, decide the messiness is not really a concern? This is where you can use the divine gift of free-will to make that choice which aligns best to your circumstances in that moment. 

Once I made the personal choice to take notice of the areas that needed change, the areas that were neutral, and the areas that were already serving my highest good, I was able to create short term goals to purge myself of the areas that no longer served me.  My logical brain began devising a plan that would guarantee success.  I fixed the easiest areas first.  Each success brought with it confidence and the will to keep going.  For the first time in a while, I felt I was truly in control of myself. Once the easy parts were fixed, I moved on to the more challenging parts and as before, each success brought with it confidence and the will to keep going.  This process roused feelings within that I forgot even existed and I wanted to share it with anyone who would listen. There were plenty who wanted to hear it so life got exciting again.  I had something new and adventurous happening, which created a better reality.  It was during this time we moved from a rental house into our own home, I was in great physical shape, I was smiling, singing, laughing, loving, and living my best life in each moment.  I progressed quickly and got excellent results until I hit what I call a plateau. All the corrections that needed to be made had been made, and now instead of having a map to the areas that need attention, I was left with a map of the past. 

I will stop here and leave you with a final thought.  The beginning stages of spiritually awakening are the stages that we can more easily relate closely to since it is the physical aspects we are focusing on.  We naturally operate on the physical plane because we are part of the physical plane.  It feels normal and familiar, so early and fast success can be expected.  When we hit the plateaus things get more complicated and require us to create new maps to guide us to the next layer of the onion.  In the next newsletter, Issue No. 3, I will discuss the plateaus and how I learned to create new maps of understanding and ways to maneuver through to the next layer of the onion.

May we all live in peace, harmony, and joy for the remainder of our lifetimes here on Earth.

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