De Ja Vu? Or something else?
How Bill Murray can help us change our lives
Did you ever feel like you were living the same reality again and again? A feeling of questioning how you got back to thisplace. Sometimes this comes up in arguments with a partner or someone from your family. Sometimes it's a feeling that creeps up when you step into a familiar place. Or, it can even be an identity pattern that keeps playing itself out. The Spiral Effect is like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murry. Have you seen it?
Bill plays a cynical reporter in the film who travels to a small town to cover yet another year of celebrating Punxsutawney Phil, the famous Groundhog who may or may not see his shadow. Needless to say Bill is not happy about this, in fact he's not happy about life. He's a cynical, middle-aged man who has no close friends. After another day of the same miserable story called his life he goes to sleep only to find that he's woken up to the same exact day playing over again. And this happens the next day and the next day and the.....yea.
We don't necessary have entire days that play out exactly the same but we do have identities, protective masks, and relationship scripts that seem to play out the exact same way every single time. "I'm sick of this!" is a common term used when we are experiencing The Spiral Effect.
Poor Bill was experiencing the spiral effect in every part of his life, every second of his life over and over again. But, in the movie what Bill started figuring out (after indulging in an all you can eat breakfast and lots of meaningless sex) was he had a chance to change his behavior. When he changed the way he saw the people in his world the world started to react to him differently. By changing his mind about how he'd go through his day it literally changed the course of his life....literally....in one day. By the end of the movie Bill, no longer cynical, and very much in love with the women of his dreams learned how to find the absolute beauty in the present moment. And then, like magic, he woke up to a different day.
So we may be feeling like we are having the same arguments over and over, or the weight just wont come off, or the faucet drips just to kill you a little inside each day. Maybe its all happenstance. Or maybe it’s The Spiral Effect showing us the same situations over and over again until, just like Bill, we decide to change our minds about it. And when we change our minds about it, just like magic (I swear this is true), we experience a new day.
Now when we are met by The Spiral effect it takes a bit of finessing before we finally feel the relief of change. This is where most people give up. "Well look, I tried to be positive and see? It's just not changing!!!!!" It is changing. In the movie Bill had to wake up to the same day countless times before he learned all lessons and really changed his mind, and that was just a movie! This is our real life that lasts well...a lifetime. So, it may take a few tries (or more then a few tries) at changing our mind about something that seems out of our power before we see a clear result. But, it works.
The leaky faucet actually happened to me! I just moved into a new apartment and there was this drip coming from the faucet, and the shower had no hot water, and the only way to get luke-warm water was to keep the pressure as low as a dribble. A dribbly, luke-warm shower!! Poor me, right? Needless to say I was a grouch about the whole thing and this went on for weeks. To make the situation even more dramatic the heating was faulty as well. So after every underwhelming shower I walked out to a freezing house in the middle of January. Every day for weeks I got aggravated, complained, hating my new home, and victimized myself by blaming my landlords for their shitty pluming and pipes.
One day in my dribbly shower I was sick of feeling sick and tired of it all. In that moment I remembered the Spiral Effect (I'll see it again until I change how I feel about it) and the Law of Attraction (what you put out is what you get back). I knew I had to change my mind about the pluming in my apartment before my apartment would change the pluming. I laughed at myself in the luke-warm shower thinking "really?! Why didn't you remember this weeks ago?!" Now I knew:
1. What I put out is what I get back
2. If I'm seeing the same difficult story over and over again the Spiral Effect must be telling me something needs to change about how I'm feeling
3. Change it.
4. Keep up and don't be impatient
5. Know that soon enough you'll wake up to a new day
Within 3 days all the pluming in the house was fixed. THREE DAYS! And of course, miraculously, I figured out how to control the heating in my apartment too.
Why is it called the Spiral Effect? Think of traveling up a spiral staircase. Each floor looks the same; same stars, same door to get to that particular floor, ect. If you weren't really paying attention you wouldn't know how far you've traveled because it all looks the same. The truth is that when your working on changing your mind about how you see the world it may look like its all staying the same but, just like the staircase, you're moving up. When you’re working on yourself consciously you're climbing up the staircase! Even if it looks really similar to the floor/day/week/month before, it's not. You're getting higher! Bill finessed his Groundhog Day until he figured it out. As you climb the spiral staircase of your conscious self you're traveling a little higher each day as you're figuring it out.
So keep up! Literally.
I'll see you at the top!!
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