Perceived Reality

Take a look at this article: 2 Die and 16 Are Sickened at Spa in Arizona - NYTimes.com http://bit.ly/2zKbp1 What's your first impression? Do you have one? Do you feel empathy and if so for who? Does it make you angry, upset, or disgusted and if so at what and why?

What I'm asking you to do is to think about your Emotional Thinking because it has such a strong impact on our perceptions of reality.

My first reaction was anger and I was angry at the lodge who I felt must have trivialized, on a variety of dimensions including safety, a very sacred native american religious ceremony. I had read the article last evening and immediately concluded to write about it today. I was going direct my comments to how we sometimes trivialize expertise in ourselves and others. How we don't give credit to the difficulty in doing many tasks. We get a "Home Depot Do It Yourself" kind of attitude and where we might discount the skill and expertise of an Electrician and attempt to rewire our house ourselves.

Why did I have such a strong Emotional reaction to this article? After "sleeping on it" and thinking about my reaction I concluded that my recent vacation in southern Utah and northern Arizona and my stay on the Navaho reservation may have contributed to my reaction and I realized that what I needed to write about today was Perceived Reality. My perceived reality about what occurred at this resort had petrified. I wasn't thinking clearly.

Perceptions are reality especially if our Emotional Thinking has taken solid hold and hardened our mental flexibility. We all have our personal hot buttons and whether the debate is about Healthcare, Abortion, or Immigration Policy if we don't stop to mentally examine why we are feeling, thinking, and reacting emotionally, then we run the risk of unclear thinking. We can't solve tough problems if we are not willing or able to hear another point of view and honestly make an attempt to understand a different perception of reality.

A question to myself that I've always found helpful is, "What assumptions am I making about the situation I'm facing and what if the opposites were actually true?" This simple question can many times, as it did this morning for me, free the mind of rigid perceptions and allow the exploration of multiple Potential Realities.