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We recommend the following twelve keys to seeing your life through new eyes.

1. Allow yourself to feel and experience what is happening in the moment, to become aware of yourself through self-observation.

2. Stop coping in habitual ways. Begin to change old patterns. Be creative.

3. See apparent incongruities -- such as between gifts and hurts, or love and pain -- as separate but not contradictory or paradoxical events. This lets you appreciate the possibility that these different events can be connected in time and space and yet, more often than not, separate in terms of significance and implication. Try not to create a fixed meaning out of paradox. Leave uncertainty into the answer.

4. Stay with the discomfort of moving past old meanings and reactions to life's new experiences.

5. Acknowledge your unmet needs and meet them for yourself, as you would for your best friend. Be your own best friend. Perhaps your greatest calling is to meet your own unmet needs. Perhaps they were purposefully not met in order that you might begin the journey of reclamation. It is often the crack in our psyche that lets in the light.

6. Face your shadow, reclaim your disowned parts, and discover all the hidden faces of love. It is essential to bring your most cherished gift into balance with its opposite. It is also important to realize that the hidden gifts within the hurts can become addictions and obstacles to intimacy.

7. Find security in both aloneness and togetherness. This will give you choice: the choice to react in an old manner, which at times may be appropriate, or to opt for a new and different response.

8. Offer yourself in service to others, not out of fear or the need for approval, but from the outpouring of a heart in overflow, from the fullness of having met your own emotional needs.

9. Begin to live in partnership, seeing yourself as a mirror -- not only with your mate, but with all of life. We were all born dependent, and must live in continuing interdependency. With renewed awareness, dependency is no longer seen as weakness, but as an opportunity for shared joy, intimacy, healing, and interconnectedness. Co-create with life in life.

10. Breathe! Allow both pain and joy in and out as rapidly as possible. To cling to either joy or pain creates suffering. Breathe deeply, feel what it is to be human, and watch for the moment-to-moment clues that lead you to the next step in the journey of life. Life is a treasure hunt.

11. Practice "outrageous containment." To be outrageously contained is to feel as if life experiences were created just for you. Live your Insights. It is a balance between radical aliveness and healthy boundaries, between living in joy and living with compassion.

12. Create and sustain an attitude of gratitude (or, as we like to call it, "great fullness"). Gratitude is the key to the door that opens the heart

Once you begin to practice these ways of being, the signposts that point the way toward your unique gift to life, your calling, will start to become more evident. Remember: Life meets you where you are.

When you have begun seeing through new eyes, it might still appear to others that nothing about you has changed. However, you know inside yourself that everything has changed. A Zen proverb says: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

There is even more to life than enlightenment. Life is process. Life is purpose. Life is service. Life is play. Life is painful. Life is joyful. We are a "work in progress." Today's solutions can easily become tomorrow's problems.

Finally, if our genetic imprint affects our environmental preferences, and if environmental experiences can shape our given behaviors, then by becoming fully conscious, we have the choice to live what Carl Rogers called the "good life," which is "a process, not a state of being ...a direction, not a destination ... when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction." [Rogers, On Becoming a Person] Here's to the good life!

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

-- T. S. Eliot

This article was excerpted from:

Seeing Your Life Through New Eyes: Insights to Freedom from Your Past
by Paul Brenner, M.D., Ph.D. and Donna Martin, M.A.

Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Beyond Words Publishing. ©2000. For info., visit http://www.beyondword.com.

Info/Order book (new edition)

About the Authors

Paul Brenner, M.D., Ph.D., is an obstetrician/gynecologist and psychologist widely known in the medical community as well as in the self-help field. He directs the SafeReach Institute, an educational center promoting the understanding of addictive behaviors. He lectures extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Donna Martin, M.A. is a counselor, therapist, trainer, and consultant from Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. She has worked in the field of alcohol and drug addiction for many years.

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