Through living with trauma, grief and a pretty hard life, I’ve learned that if you shift your perspective in difficult moments, life can bring more moments of peace, acceptance and even joy. We are in a major global shift, but we have tiny shifts all the time. If we learn to tap into our own shifts, we can shift our way through the Shift.

Questions to Help Your Shift Your Perspective

When you’re in a conversation or having a hard time, try this out. I’m talking about the picture I took but you can apply this practice and these questions to any situation.

What do you notice about this picture?

Breathe into your belly a few times, deeply and slowly. Now relax your vision. Open your heart and mind.

What stands out to you?

Can you guess where this picture was taken? Did you shift your perspective after that deep breathing?

What do you see and feel right now?

The picture was one of several taken at high altitudes on a plane to Penticton BC for a speaking gig at an Indigenous training event.

At first I was frustrated because my camera kept picking up the airplane window and wouldn’t focus on the beautiful mountains and rivers down below. Then I had a big sigh. When we sigh, it’s like a little reset for our brain.

HOT TIP: Just giving yourself a big sigh is one way to create a shift in your perspective.

Suddenly I noticed how fascinating my photos were. They were capturing the beautiful, intricate designs of frost on the outside of the windows, and as I stared at them, it almost looked like a form of hieroglyphs!

Can you imagine how this simple shift in perspective actually completely transformed how I was feeling? My experience of that entire 3 hour flight shifted too. My inner child came out to play.

Sometimes when we’re right in the midst of our own shift, we can only see it from our limited perspective, especially when things seem to be “going wrong,” like with my photography from the plane. Then we want to “fix” what we perceive as a problem instead of learning or remembering how to shift our perspective. But that’s often what messes us up.

Here’s How to Shift Your Perspective

Breathe deeply into your belly and let out a big sigh.

What if nothing you’ve ever done has been a failure?

How might your life change if your decisions – ones you’ve already made and that you will make – were actually always the right decisions?

Are you breathing a big sigh of relief at the thought of this? If not, breathe in again and let out a big sigh, even if it’s a sigh of frustration.

Your breath brings you into the present moment and it can very quickly reset your thinking.

Now here’s what happened on the plane.

I had a huge teaching moment from Spirit on how to shift your perspective. Instead of trying to find settings on my camera to “fix” the “problem”, I started to really look at the photographs. I saw immense beauty where only minutes before, I saw completely blurred landscapes.

One Shift Led to Another… and Another

My entire being shifted just as a result of allowing myself to see that actually there was no problem at all. It hit me that instead of what I had thought of as a problem, I was witnessing a fascinating unfolding of beauty and mystery in front of me. I could not take my eyes off that window!

My frustration was completely gone and replaced with a sense of gratitude and wonder. My mind turned to creativity, to see how many different angles I could shoot, how I could capture more of the interplay between the skyline, landscape and frost. Do you see how I became even more alive? And how you can too?

I could have wasted a bunch of time fiddling with my camera, getting more and more frustrated, trying to fix it, and then I would finally have succumbed to a feeling of not being able to get what I wanted or do things how I wanted. But that is not how I became as successful as I am today. It’s through engaging with life, expanding my creativity, and allowing my spirit to show me more than my logical side possibly can see.

If we can do this in ordinary life, especially when we perceive something as a failure, then there is just no such thing as failure. There is only an ongoing unfolding of life experiences and shifts, and a constant opening and expansion that lets you discover more and more beauty and life.

Love & Blessings,

Brenda MacIntyre, Medicine Song Woman

RESOURCES:

• Want to dive right in and get some support? Head over here.

FOLLOW ME ON SPOTIFY – MUSIC FOR THESE CRAZY TIMES:

• Follow My Artist Account on Spotify.
• Follow my Global Pandemic Playlist on Spotify. The studio (CD, not live) version of the songs I sang in the livestreamed concert are also in this playlist.
• Follow the RENEWAL Playlist for springtime on Spotify