by Karen Ryder, M.A.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake...” The words of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau flit across the surface of my mind as I open my eyes to the soft morning light filtered through the white drapes. I tumble from bed and draw back the cascade of fabric in order to view the gift of the night. It had been windy and very cold, and sure enough about a foot of new fluff had been dropped on the earth by the heavens last night. A few frayed remnants from the retreating hem of the storm still swirled about before coming to rest on the glowing blanket below. To shovel now? Or wait till later when the wind stops sculpting drifts, deposited where it likes, not necessarily where I want them?
Darn. I have so much to do today, and now I have to spend time shoveling that which will eventually melt away on its own. Perspective. Change viewpoints. Wow, here is a chance to be outside, to get some nice aerobic exercise, and—oh, here comes the sun! Suddenly a billion jewels catch the light and sparkle more brilliantly than a field of diamonds. Wake up! What an opportunity, to feel, to be alive to enjoy and appreciate creation! And I can create it as I wish, simply by choosing the viewpoint I stand in.
One of my identities in life is being a counselor/psychotherapist, and I used to be a hypnotherapist too. Some time ago I noticed that most of the people coming into my office were in one kind of trance or another—anxiety, depression, smoking, age regression, time distortion, hypnotic dreaming, etc. And I decided that what needed to happen was not to put them into another trance, but to help them wake up. This is where Avatar comes in handy!
The way we see things, often filtered by our beliefs or our trances, leads us to have the experiences that we collectively call our life. Before waking up, therefore, what we tend to experience are variations on our particular trance or dream. Rather than seeing and experiencing things as they are, we may be aware only of our mental representations—of spouse, children, friends, job, world. It’s like seeing things through filters or glasses that give only a limited version of reality, but we fool ourselves into thinking the constricted view is reality. Waking up means that we, as Source, have the creative ability to take any viewpoint we desire and experience that as our reality, in any moment. Wow, that’s powerful!
Thoreau felt the need to go off on a solitary retreat in order to be more wakeful. He spent over two years at Walden Pond. He wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” He observed the Concord farmers around him existing in “lives of quiet desperation,” just like many people in our day, caught in trance-belief traps of their own making, not knowing how to awaken from them. How fortunate we are, in our own era, to have a technology for waking up that we don’t have to rely on a hypnotherapist or anyone but ourselves for, that takes only nine days, and that keeps right on working better and better the more we use it, enabling us to experience fully the wonders and miracles of our lives. Thank you Harry Palmer, for Avatar tools and for living deliberately.Karen Ryder, M.A., Cumberland, R.I.
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