This is the year of the chipmunks. Not sure why. Maybe there was a blackout one night, and all the chipmunks in our area spent the night making babies. For whatever reason, this year chipmunks had taken over our garden.
Chipmunks are adorable. And destructive. Put the two together, and that means we trap them. Then we take them a few miles away and release them into a small forest. Hopefully, they find their family and friends in the process, but at least they are free and have lots of room to roam.
Usually, we trap and relocate five or six chipmunks every summer. This year I stopped counting at twenty.
One day I came home from yoga, and Del was standing by the chipmunk cage, getting ready to take the trapped chipmunk for his freedom ride.
Del said, “This is a big chipmunk,” and held it up for me to see. I couldn’t believe it! It was huge! I watched it run back in forth in the cage trying to wrap my head around how a chipmunk could get that big and have such a big tail, until Del said, “This isn’t a chipmunk, it’s a squirrel!”
It took me a few moments to re-see what I was looking at and realized that we were looking at a young squirrel wondering how the heck he ended up in a cage. We opened the cage door, and the squirrel took off, climbing the nearest tree as fast as he could.
Why did we both see a chipmunk? Why did it take a while to register that it was a squirrel?
We were trapping chipmunks. Squirrels don’t get trapped in that kind of cage.
We saw what we believed.
No matter how many times we all talk about the fact that perception is reality, we forget how true, insidious, and part of the fabric of our day that it is. Until something like a chipmunk that isn’t a chipmunk, reminds us.
We see what we believe. But, do we know what we believe? It’s easy to find out.
What do we see in the mirror called the world? What are we aware of? How do we react to it? What we have accepted as fact, but is only our belief system reflected back to us?
If someone would have kept telling Del and me that we had a chipmunk in a cage, how long would it have taken for us to realize that we didn’t? Longer.
Listen to only what moves you toward what you want to become. Talk only about what you want the world to be. Live how you want others to live. It’s all habit and choice. As we become aware of what we have been trapping, we can choose to set it free.
Here’s the other part.
We’re not able to clearly see the world that our beliefs are making. It’s impossible. I used to think that I could do everything myself. Over the years, I have gotten a little wiser about this.
Now I know that no one, no one, can grow and thrive in a vacuum. Everyone needs what as a choreographer I called an outside-eye. We need someone else to look at what we are believing and give us feedback. We see from our own point of view no matter how hard we try not to. To be aware of what is really going on we need others that we trust to tell us what they see from their point of view.
How long would it have taken me to see a chipmunk if Del hadn’t said it wasn’t? Longer.
When I finish a book, I edit it myself at least five times. Then I send it to a “real” editor, who sends it back to me all marked up with corrections. After that, I fix what the editor has sent me. Then I send the updated book to four beta readers who graciously read the book and find more mistakes. Not the same mistakes. Different ones. Each one sees the manuscript differently and finds different mistakes.
Del just finished reading, Pragma, the second book in the Karass Chronicles and handed me a list of twelve more errors. One of which was that the wrong character was talking in the scene. Not one of us saw the mistakes Del found.
Why is that? That human brain fills in what it expects to see.
All of this is good news. It means that in order to change something it begins with us. Our beliefs. But first we have to become aware of what they are, and then choose to shift them.
Become Aware is the second step in my Seven Steps To Shift process that I wrote about in Living In Grace.
It’s a practice. It involves mindfulness, and it involves community. It involves breaking habits of perception and choosing the Reality you want to see first—because what we perceive to be reality magnifies.
Since this is what we have to do, we might as well make it fun, creative, and exciting.
Check your habit trap and make sure that what’s in it is what you meant to capture. And then—set it free.
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
