Released 12th July 2019
This week’s Friday Shot of Clarity is an excerpt from my first book, CLARITY: Clear Mind, Better Performance, Bigger Results (©2013 Jamie Smart, published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd). This excerpt is taken from Chapter 15 – Resilience:
In The Wizard of Oz, the heroine (Dorothy, played by Judy Garland) gets caught in a tornado and wakes up in the strange land of Oz. She’s desperate to find her way home to Kansas, and goes on a quest to meet the wizard who she believes holds the key to her return.
At the end of the story, Dorothy discovers that she has the power she needs within her. She taps her ruby slippers together, repeats the phrase “There’s no place like home” and wakes up in her bed, surrounded by her family. Dorothy doesn’t believe them when they first tell her the adventure in Oz was a nightmare. She protests that it was a real place, but they reassure her that she never left her home; that it was just a dream…
We’ve all had the experience of waking up from a dream so realistic that we thought it had actually happened; felt the sense of gratitude and relief as the racing pulse of nightmare gives way to the reality of the here and now. The dream-reality seems so real that we mistake it for a material reality. But all along, the dreamer is tucked up in bed, sleeping soundly, perfectly safe.
Sleepwalking
A huge number of people today “sleepwalk” their way through life, innocently hypnotized by the outside-in misunderstanding. Occasionally they wake up to a deeper, more profound experience in the moment, but usually attribute it to some aspect of their circumstances before going back to business as usual. In fact, we all “sleepwalk” some of the time, no matter how “awake” we may be. We all fall into the outside-in trance on a regular basis – that’s part of what it is to be human.
We walk around with our heads in the clouds, lost in a world of our habitual thinking. But, all the time, the ground we are walking on is a world of clarity and depth of experience; a more profound sense of peace and understanding. No matter how real and compelling our personal realities sometimes seem, a world of deeper experience is just below the surface, in every moment.
Sometimes, the outside-in hypnosis is so powerful that it seems un- believable that our clarity and peace of mind could be so close by. We mistakenly believe that our ability to reconnect with them can be influenced by material-world factors; factors such as the length of time we’ve been thinking and feeling in a certain way, the intensity of our feelings or the difficulty we’ve had solving a problem until now.
We assume our thought-forms have the same qualities as the mate- rial world, but they don’t. They’re made of Thought, the reality principle; fleeting and ephemeral, the same thing dreams are made of. Your clarity and well-being is always there, always within reach, no matter how distant it may have seemed until now.
To your increasing clarity!
Jamie