Ed and Deb Shapiro, meditation teachers and authors of “Be The Change,” write that: “When we are unhappy or angry, then we are also angry with other people and increase the suffering in the world. When we are in pain, that pain gets projected onto others or blamed onto everything around us: “It’s your fault that I am unhappy!” When we find our peace… then that means there is one less person suffering and one less person causing suffering to others.” They propose that the way to finding peace– getting out of the blame game– and stop adding to the suffering around us is meditation.
Meditation definitely helps to clear our minds and set a more peaceful tone for the day ahead. But what if we could, as Gandhi said: “be the change we want to see in the world” by communicating with ourselves and others differently? What if we spoke in a way that reminded us that we are always creating the world that we are perceiving? If we are more aware that we are doing this, we will have a better chance to make a conscious choice to add kindness rather than suffering to the world.
Perception Language is a way to speak that brings to consciousness the truth that all meaning of any experience is being constructed within our own minds as a result of our perceptions. Knowing this is our pathway to finding peace because we can choose the meaning we give to anything, anytime. Each of us constructs our world by how we think. With practice, we can choose a peaceful perspective.
How we perceive the rain when we are suffering a drought is different from how we perceive it when it has been raining for weeks. In the latter case, we might blame the rain for spoiling our day. But the rain is just doing what it does. It does not make us unhappy, we make ourselves unhappy—or happy.
If we can choose to see the rain as just rain, then perhaps we can choose to see our partner or friend, or those people of different faiths and traditions, as just being who they are. We free ourselves from being reactive and become more responsive. As the Shapiros say, “The world is a reflection of how we are thinking and feeling and acting and speaking”. We can even begin to appreciate others’ differences. And we can also appreciate our own differences and begin to make better friends with ourselves.
To learn Perception Language we need to immerse ourselves into the language for a few days. We are creatures of habit and it takes time to make the mind shift of no longer victimizing ourselves, and accept and perceive the profundity of this language. We also have to be willing to practice, just like meditation, except we can practice every time we speak. A four-day or eight-day Live Conscious Retreat is required to really get started. Free ongoing online support is available afterward.
The more of us in the world that learn the philosophy of Live Conscious and start using Perception Language, the more peaceful the world will be. As the Shapiros say, the “way to stop the aggression is to find our own peace… Having a more compassionate understanding …bringing kindness and kinship and bonding…is vital to our development and survival as a human race” . . .this is Live Conscious.
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