Hello everyone. Spiritual teachers teach a wide variety of things, but every spiritual teacher has a forte. And my forte, as you know, is shadow work. Shadow work is work that involves bringing awareness to the deeper, more painful aspects of our psyches, things that are buried in the shadows of our unconscious mind. The reason this is my forte is because I lived a life of unimaginable suffering. I was in hell for many, many years, and the only way out of that hell was through it. Because of it, I became an expert in human suffering. And so today, I'm going to talk to you about a subject that I consider myself an expert in: suffering. Suffering is perhaps the biggest issue when it comes to us trying to understand the universal truth of you create your own reality and the purpose of your life is joy. And who would blame us? How can we say that we create our own reality or that the purpose of our life is joy when we are watching people get killed by serial killers?

How does the child who gets chopped up into little bits create their own reality at the age of five? How can it be that the purpose of your life is joy when we are losing loved ones to cancer, when we are in the middle of war? It's very understandable that we have these kinds of opinions. This is why it's so important that I'm the one talking about this subject. Because, I am the child that opted into an experience of the most extreme forms of physical, mental, and sexual abuse that a person can experience and still remain alive after the fact. So, it means more when I am the one that is telling you that you create your own reality than when somebody else who lived a life of relative ease says the exact same thing. It's difficult to listen to channels who aren't physically manifested, who have not lived lives of torture down here on planet Earth, tell you that you create your own reality and tell you that the purpose for your life is joy.

It's a lot easier to take when it's coming from the mouth of somebody who manifested those very things in their own life as a child. And I can tell you myself, even though I was going through it, it wasn't obvious that I was creating my own reality. If it had been, I would have changed it. It is obvious in retrospect. Our entire reality is being arranged around us like a 360-degree mirror reflection of our thoughts. Our senses perceive this reflection and translate it into a physical experience for us. And so you can think of it like a learning hologram. When we are born, we know we create our own reality by virtue of what we are paying attention to. This is why it is so easy for babies to ignore you. But pretty soon, we get more flack by the people around us for ignoring the things we don't want to pay attention to than we do for paying attention to them. And so, we pay attention to them. But the minute we pay attention to them, we begin to manifest those things in our reality, and we begin to feel like victims.

Eventually, we forget that we create our own reality. Sometimes, this happens before we are even born. We are influenced by the thoughts of those who are in our environment, especially our mother, even when we are in the utero. So, we may adopt these vibrations before we were even born. That means many of us are creating our own realities before we were even born. That's why we even line up with the birth that we do. But once we have forgotten that we create our own reality, we fail to recognize the precursor for experiencing things in our reality. We lose our awareness of what we are thinking in order to make ourselves a match to what we experience, and so we become victims to a world that we think exists separate from us, where things can happen to us. We forget that this reflection environment is as non-biased as your bedroom mirror is. It has no judgment about whether what you were thinking is good or bad for you, or whether it is right or wrong for you to think, or whether it should or shouldn't reflect it back to you.

It simply becomes the exact reflection of your thoughts. Then later on, we trip across this truth or this idea. It's a philosophy at first that we create our own reality, and we immediately go to a space of self-blame about it. Because we go to a space of self-blame, we feel defensive. We are really angry about the fact, as if the original event is not painful enough, that now I have to add on top of it that I did it to ourselves?! I'm the one that created my son dying? I'm the one that created my divorce? I'm the one that lined up with a dad who raped me every night? But this is not the truth of it. It is not anyone's fault. Because, if we knew that we were creating our own reality in the midst of it, we would stop doing it. You can't blame yourself for something you didn't even know that you were doing. Besides, there is no blame. Like I said, this mirror hologram is non-biased.

It doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong for you to think these things. It literally is: I think a thought...it's reflected. No judgment about this type of reflection. No judgment about whether the reflection is right or wrong. No judgment about whether it should or should not be there. It simply becomes the reflection. The universe is not going to save you from your own mind because it is not ignorant to the truth of who you are. It sees you as what you are, which is an extension of itself, an extension of this universe, and so you are no more or no less a God than it is. And if it recognizes the God aspect of you, why would it intervene? It sees every being in existence as God manifested, and so why would it intervene at all? It would not intervene even in the experience of a tiny infant. Perhaps to understand this, it would help if I use my own story as an example in terms of how I created my reality.

I did not intentionally create a reality in which I belong to a psychopath and was tortured, like I was as a child. This happened by default. I was around my mother’s fear, which she adopted from her father, and he adopted from his father before him... etc... etc... Because our thought patterns work like genetics, they are passed from one generation to the next until we realize we can deactivate them. I adopted my mother's fear; I began to think maybe if she is so big and powerful compared to me, after all, she can reach the top shelf in the kitchen and drive a car, then maybe she is right about the world, maybe it is a scary place to be. That one thought which I thought set in motion an entire cascade of events that resulted in me losing my childhood. I began to attract scarier and scarier things. I began to feel like a victim, and the more I felt and thought like a victim, the stronger that vibration became until eventually, the reflection of the depths of my own thoughts of victimhood took the shape of a psychopath.

In order to get away from the hell I had created for myself, all I did was reverse this process. I began to focus on things that made me feel free and empowered, which led me to thinking thoughts that made me feel free and empowered, until the reflection of the heights of my own thoughts of freedom and happiness took the shape of an opportunity to run away. I could not have gotten away if it were not for swallowing the pill that I am, in fact, in charge of my reality, that I had unintentionally created the very torture I was living in. It was a hard pill to swallow. I went to a place of self-blame at first until I realized that no one was to blame. I was just living the unbiased reflection of my thoughts and beliefs, which whether or not they were or weren't true, were the ones I continued to give energy to. An argument comes up over and over again by those who don't believe they create their own realities and it goes like this:

Those of you who believe that you create your own reality believe in that belief the same way that some people believe in the false sense of God. It's because it helps you feel better. It's because even though it's an erroneous belief, we don't create our realities. It makes you feel good, kind of like a pacifier or a pollyanna way of thinking about the universe, so that you feel like you are more in control than you really are. So, this belief, by skeptics, is seen as us sucking on a binky so that we can cope with the lives that we are living. I'm the first to tell you that if you don't actually try to see whether this might be true for you, then you are never going to be able to prove to yourself that it is true or that it isn't. But I can tell you personally that it is exactly how I got myself out of my childhood situation when I was a child.

I am living proof that we create our own reality, which is why it's so important for me to be standing in front of you talking about that today. But I do have a question for those of you that believe you don't create your own realities. Let's put the truth of it aside. Let's pretend it doesn't matter whether it's true or untrue that we create our own realities. Do you really feel better living in a reality where your belief is that people can be victims? Do you feel better when you think that it's possible that just by happenstance and a turn of bad luck that a child can be born to parents that kill them? Does it really make you feel good? And if not, why are you making that choice? Why is truth, what you are convinced truth is, so important to you that you would keep it, even though it continues to cause you pain, even though it continues to make you feel like a victim, even though it hurts you every single day?

And I have one more question. If it feels better to you to think that you don't create your own reality, that no one does, why does it feel better to you? Universally, you see our negative thoughts as an invitation for negative things to happen to us. Our fearful thoughts are an invitation for things that scare us to happen to us. It is seen as an invitation. And so often, we see victims as the underdogs. When we fail to realize that victims, I can talk about myself in this scenario, we are the ones that are thinking thoughts which reflect in the mirror hologram as a tack. No being that is imbued with consciousness, whether that be a human or an animal or plant, is exempt from this law that you create your own reality. You are creating your own reality whether you like it or not or whether you know it or not. A bit like you don't need to know about the law of gravity to be held to the surface of the earth.

It's happening. You're doing it. And the more aware we can be of this process, the more that we can take responsibility for lives and create the kind of lives we want to be living. And let me tell you, from Source's perspective, there is no way that we would choose to opt into a life that is purely sunshine, gumdrops, and roses. Why? Because there's no forward movement and no expansion for that kind of experience. If you came down and everything that you were living was in a state of perfection, there would be nowhere else to go. Your desires propel you forward, and the necessary conditions for you to give rise to your desires is to experience unwanted things. So why might an entity, a soul as you call it, choose to come in to experience the life of a fetus who is to be aborted? We could call that existence a life of suffering. They would do that because of the experience. Because of what that experience causes them to desire.

And when they desire and line up with it, what it will cause them to experience. The perspective it will cause them to hold. So, why then would I opt into the experience of a mother who was in the fear state that she was in, and later into the experience of a psychopath? Because of what it caused me to become. Because of the perspective it gave birth to within me. Going through that experience caused me to have to ask some of the biggest questions in life. And when you start asking the questions, the answers are not far behind. Those answers came to me. I had a whole new understanding of this universe based on that. I was blown open to love, blown open to compassion, blown open to awareness of this universe and how it operates. And now I hold a brand new perspective. And those new desires which the experience gives rise to within me.... I desired things like freedom, I desired things like happiness. I spend my life lining up with them more and more every day, and my life becomes more and more the reflection and

the reality of those desires, which were the byproduct of the childhood which I chose into. And now I hold an entirely new perspective. The new perspective is what universal expansion is all about. The universe is in the process of self-realization, and it does that through every perspective that has ever been and will ever be. The totality of all those perspectives, which could be infinite, is the perspective of the universe at large if you combined them all. Each time a new perspective is born, the universe's perspective expands. The universe sees these lives like walking into and out of a movie theater. It is not stuck in the illusion that this is all that exists, any more than when you walk into a movie theater, you are convinced that the storyline in the movie is now you, and it is all that exists. It is just an experience you are having. So, why go to a drama or horror film? Because of the experience and what the experience evokes within you. The new perspective the movie gives rise to within you.

To illustrate this idea, let's pick an all-American classic. We all loved the movie The Last of the Mohicans, right? We loved it because we could have the experience without fully becoming the characters and losing the truth of who we really are, sitting in the chair watching the movie. Go watch the movie again. You could not say that you'd want to live that exact experience. If your reality became the movie's reality, you would not want to be in the middle of the war where your friends are being slaughtered and left out on the grass, where you are losing the love of your life, where your race is being annihilated until there is only one of you left. This is how your soul sees life. Why would it opt into the experience of this life as painful as it is for some of us? Because it knows it will stand up and eventually walk out of the movie theater we call life. It knows the truth of who it is. It knows that the truth of who it is, is more than the character we are identifying with in this movie called life that you call by your name.

It knows that the truth, who it is, the observer of these experiences, can never be harmed by the experience on the screen of the movie theater we call life. The worst that can happen is the drama or the horror of the movie which we are watching causes us to stand up and exit the movie theater, which is what we call death. Suffering is not inevitable. Contrast is inevitable for you to know what is desired. You must know what is unwanted. And so, unwanted elements will be in your reality, and the day that they cease to be in your reality, you will cease to exist because the universe will no longer be realizing its expansion through you. Contrast is a necessary ingredient to expansion, but suffering is not. You came here so that you could experience the contrast...i.e., that which is unwanted, so that that thing that is unwanted can inspire you towards what you do want. And your joy is going to come emotionally to you as the response of going in the direction of those wanted things.

And so, we could say that the purpose of your life is to follow your joy. Suffering is the result of not going in the direction of your joy. Not going in the direction of it with your thoughts, your words, or your actions. Suffering is the byproduct of continuing to focus on the unwanted things, regardless of the fact that the wanted things have already been given birth to within you. Suffering means that you have experienced what is unwanted, and so you have decided what you want instead, even at a subconscious level, and yet you continue to focus on the unwanted thing instead of going in the direction of what is wanted. Suffering is the byproduct of focus. It is always the result of continuing to focus on what is unwanted and on what invokes negative emotion within you, and so it is always in your control whether or not you suffer. Suffering is optional. We just don't know that it is optional because we don't know that we control our own focus.

We control what we pay attention to and what we think about. Suffering is not inevitable as long as you are the one that controls your focus. And your focus, though easy to influence, is absolutely uncontrollable by anyone other than you. To amp this up to another level, I will explain this: When I was a child, my childhood perpetrator used deliberate and very sophisticated scientific methods to program me mentally. But the truth to the story is, he did not control my thoughts. He couldn't do that because he couldn't think for me. All he could do was try to influence me to think in the way that he wanted me to think. And that kind of influence is called training. Training is nothing more than heavy influence. And influence can be undone the second that we are wanting and willing to undo it. We are hard-wired for survival. What that means is that when we believe that the world is bigger than us and that it can impose itself on us, in our reality, by bringing us something that is unwanted, without us inviting it first, our brain goes to work trying to prepare for the worst.

You have not informed your brain yet that it creates reality. It is simply following self-preservation commands according to the previous program of: I can be hurt by the outside world at any time. And so it focuses hard upon potential threats. It pays much more attention to things that hurt than things that feel good because it is convinced that if it pays attention to things that hurt, it will somehow be able to avoid it in the future or find a solution to it. In essence, we are convinced that our basic human need for certainty will come as a result of focusing on the problem. Because we are so preoccupied with survival, we focus more on avoiding pain than we ever focus on going in the direction of pleasure. But this is a reality where focus on avoiding something is focus upon what we're trying to avoid, and so, our reality reflects those things that are unwanted. That causes pain when we focus on them more and more and more until we are suffering. This is all suffering is.

Suffering is not necessary. But the upside, and therefore the purpose of suffering, is that it cuts us off from who we really are and from our joy, to such a degree that we find ourselves at a crossroads. When we reach this crossroad, there's nothing more to lose. The decision we have is: I either die or I go in the direction of whatever feels better. And by making this decision, to either die or to go in the direction of what feels good, we set ourselves free. When we set ourselves free, we begin to reach enlightenment. And though suffering is not a necessary condition for you to go through in order to reach enlightenment, it is often the doorway that people choose to reach enlightenment. Because it pushes us to this crossroads where we have nothing more to lose, where all there is to do is to go in the direction of our joy and we find out that doing that is the very answer to how we are going to live our life without suffering.

The pain of our lives narrows our focus until suffering is all we see; it surrounds us. But the truth of reality is not only what we see. And we will experience joy the minute we learn to expand our perspective past what we are currently a match to seeing. Because all we can see is what we are thinking. So, if we are thinking thoughts that hurt to think, all we can see and experience in our reality is hurt. You did not come here to suffer. You came here to follow your joy to the ends of the Earth. How bad does it have to get before you have the courage to make that decision? You don't have to suffer to make that decision. You can make the decision to follow your joy to the ends of the earth right now. And I have a question for you today: Did you opt into a life of suffering so that suffering could suck the life out of you, or did suffering opt into your life so you could suck the life out of it?

If We Create Our Own Reality, How Do You Explain Suffering? - Teal Swan

If We Create Our Own Reality, How Do You Explain Suffering? - Teal Swan