Internal Locus of Control

After my last blog post on Thanksgiving, I had a few people ask me what happened to me that made the last 5 years the hardest of my life. At first, I thought, well the grandparents' thing happened, the relationship thing happened, the baby thing happened...But reflecting on it further, I realized it wasn’t those external events that caused my struggle, it was my internal reaction. And this is not to say that those events didn’t merit a good amount of sadness, they did. I decided to be the victim for a while partly because I felt I deserved a few years of Netflix and wine, but I was also partly procrastinating happiness because I thought it would be hard. When bad things happen, we either become victims or we rise above. We wallow or we transcend. So the answer to the question ‘What happened to me?’ - I happened to me.

I remember a time when I was young - my parents were still together, I hadn’t had anyone close to me die yet - and I remember being nervous about how I would feel when that first truly bad thing happened in my life. Little did I know that the hardest battles are not the ones that happen to us, but the ones that happen within us. You might have heard of an internal vs. external locus of control, well I like to think of it as an internal vs. external locus of creation. Do your external or your internal circumstances create your reality? I believe that in every situation, no matter how embedded in facticity, there’s a sliver of freedom to create. If you choose happiness, in whatever sliver this moment offers you, eventually, that will expand.

I didn’t understand why I had been so fortunate in my life to have good parents and people who loved me. I didn’t understand why I was so drawn to studying transformation and consciousness. But now it makes sense. I was put on this path so that I could see just how powerful our internal battles can be, and how we also possess this amazing capacity to work through them and heal ourselves.