“When you change the way you look at things, things change.”

When you change the way you look at things, things change.” – Wayne Dyer.

Conventional wisdom says that we have to “fight” illnesses like depression, cancer, heart diseases and drug addition to become healthy.

There’s a story that Louis Pasteur, the famous French scientist who developed pasteurization to protect milk form germs, admitted on his death bed that he agreed with another prominent scientist who said that our body isn’t attacked from outside by germs; rather, our cells are changed within by what we eat, our thoughts, our emotions and what we create inside ourselves

More recently, Candace Pert, a researcher and innovator acclaimed for her pioneering work in the area of psychoneuroimmunology, has concluded that our thoughts and emotions change the body’s molecules and affect our health. She is more popularly known for appeared in the 2004 film “What the Bleep Do We Know,” speaking as a serious scientist to the notion that we create our own reality

Her book, “Molecules of Emotion” contends that the brain, glands, and immune system are in constant communication which gives us real reason to observe our thoughts, notice our environment and wonder what we are feeding ourselves.

All this gives pause to consider how we change and what influences changes within us.

Looking at your experience with new eyes?

In a recent blog, we explored the challenges of experience and how we can interpret experiences to advance our personal development.

Now, there is a little bit of caution here. Sometimes we interpret an experience so narrowlly that is not to our benefit. In other words, the story that we made for ourselves ends up diminishing ourselves and our lives rather than enhancing our understanding of ourselves and our world.

An example:

I know a woman who lived in a small town and decided to leave the town and her family to move across five states to find a good job in a big city.

Her family was important to her. She tried to stay in touch with the family members who lived more than 500 miles away, but it wasn’t easy to make that long drive on a regular basis, especially after children arrived and the travels became more complicated. She always was the one to visit and very few members of her family traveled to visit her.

She came to the conclusion that they didn’t care about her and that their lives and families were more important than her and her family. Many years passed, and her contact with them diminished to the bare minimum – exchanging cards at Christmas with barely a note inside, just the names.

But I saw a different conclusion, a different story. She was the adventurous one – the one who bravely left home and hearth for a new life in a strange town -- full of courage. The ones who were left behind were hardly adventurous at all. They preferred to play it safe and stay in their hometown, even though opportunities were very limited.

The truth is the woman loved her family members and missed them. Rather than “experiencing” the sadness and the yearning to connect more with her family, she quickly made up a story that they were self-centered and too interested in their own lives to pay attention to her.

What might happen if you look at one of your experiences with new eyes and a different way of thinking? Ho might you change?

An experience about change to provoke your thoughts

I can talk for an hour about the challenges of change. In our conversation, we might admit that change is often difficult and scary -- although sometimes exhilarating and necessary.

But anything that I say will not give you the full experience of change. So, let's have an experience that will allow you to experience change that will lead to understanding yourself and an idea much more deeply than I can ever explain.

First, let’s put our hands on our laps. Then give attention to our hands on our laps. Without looking, interlace the fingers on your right hand with the fingers on your left hand.

Good. Now take a moment to glance at your hands and notice how your hands look, how your fingers are laced and where your thumbs are placed.

Notice if your right thumb is placed over your left thumb – or vice versa. It’s OK – whatever way your thumbs have intersected is just fine. We just want to notice what happens and we want to notice how this feels.

Now, slowly and with awareness, lift the thumb that’s on the top. Move your other thumb to allow the top thumb to go underneath and then put the remaining thumb on top.

Now, let’s take a moment to notice what your experience is like.

Odd? Strange? Different? Uncomfortable? Awkward? Or something else?

This is an experience – admittedly, a very simple experience – about change. Notice that one way is not right and the other way is not wrong. They are just different. And in just a few minutes you have an experience about change that goes much more deeply into your being than I could ever explain, even if I talked about change for the next 100 days.

Now, we also want to notice what you DO with the experience. Do you decide, without thinking very hard, that the second way is much too difficult and that you want to quickly return to the old comfortable way?

Do you notice that you are intrigued by the difference of the two experiences and start overlapping your thumbs in various configurations to learn more about how this feels?

Are you able to consider that change involves some level of discomfort and are you willing to figure out how to tolerate the discomfort while you are approaching or in the midst of change?

Notice that the experience comes first. Once we have the experience, we can begin to find the context about how the experience fits in our lives.

Facebook, change and other little life lessons

Change isn't easy. It especially isn't easy if you're a Facebook devotee and your Facebook page is suddenly showing up with new tabs and links and other strange stuff that clutters up the screen.

Problems with change are not a new concept for me. I'm a psychotherapist meeting with people daily who want to have a different kind of life than the life they have. They come in with stress, pain and problems and lay them down before me. What what they are saying -- in not so many words -- really is: "Take this problem away from me."

Somewhere along the line, it becomes clear that the problem won't magically disappear. There is some sort of change that needs to take place in the person's life to deal with the problem. It may be helpful to make a change in behavior, in perspective, in taking a positive risk or to otherwise address the problem in a new and fresh way.

But change isn't all that easy, even when you're a psychotherapist trained to understand change. I experienced this myself the other day when I logged into Facebook and noticed that lots of things on my page looked odd and unfamiliar.

I wasn't the only one to suffer. MSN even reported on the change and the backlash, and there's nearly one million people surging forth to join Facebook groups like Facebook: SWITCH BACK TO THE OLD NEWS FEED!!!

A Facebook friend sent instructions on how to return to the "old" display and I jumped on this information like a summer fly on a tasty picnic. I tapped in few key strokes and returned my page to the familiar view. Ah, yes. Then, feeling like a heroine and wallowing in my newly regained comfort, I shared my precious bit of knowledge with 200 of my closest Facebook friends. Judging by the number of posts that followed, I knew I wasn't the only subscriber rattled by change and relieved by familiarity.

Another sharp-eyed friend noticed that the return to the old display didn't pick up the new links that were added. So right now, I'm going with the "new" change and remembering that all change is really a challenge for us to discover new resources to meet it.

Sometimes those resources are friends and sometimes those resources are within ourselves. Sometimes they are both. Sometimes the life challenges are teeny and sometimes they are immense. However, all times we have the capacity to meet change and learn about ourselves.