“Reading Your Life" is a method that focuses on recognizing the specific ways we each decipher information that’s meaningful for us individually. Everyone who has ever lived on earth has had at least one way she (or he) communicated with others. They've also each had his (or her) very singular, very personal language in which they communicated with themselves.
You too have your own alphabet; your own melodies; your own symbols; your own codes.
One of the best ways to start to discover how you communicate to yourself about that deep river of meaning running beneath your attention is to investigate the snapshots you've taken over the years. Not necessarily the ones you've framed. More like the ones you stuff in a dresser drawer or hide in the back of your closet. Those photographs you take quickly, without much planning are just like a box with a big red bow on it, waiting to be opened. They're golden!
Before you can actually begin to decipher the clues in your snapshots, there are three things (I call them "Quests") you can try to help you start looking for the shapes and symbols that make up your particular "alphabet".
First, you've just got to take a trip away from your ordinary reception channel. Pick a time each day, not more than two minutes, to mentally move out of the context of the everyday world. Retreat from the place where we all struggle to find our own meanings by looking through other people’s lenses instead of our own.
Find a comfortable place where you can have a whole two minutes to yourself. Now, picture yourself in front of an old door that looks like it hasn't been opened in decades.
This is the door between the two worlds. You'll have to turn the rusty, squeaky knob of the door until you hear it dislodge. Then push hard enough and firmly enough until it begins to creak open allowing a space just big enough for you to squeeze your mind through.
Stand there, on the other side of the door, and try to adjust your eyes (the ones in your mind of course) to the subtle kind of light in this place. Almost instantly, you’ll start to make out familiar silhouettes. You’ll be able to see a color, a shape and you may even hear a sound (bells, music, singing). This isn't like meditation or hypnosis - you aren't clearing your mind. You're actively allowing these elements to come to you.
Ultimately, you’ll be able to use them, and all the others you'll find, to read your life. They're always there and have been there for as long as we’ve been alive. We've learned, as almost all of us do when we’re growing up, that we had to compete or rely on drawing our primary meanings from someone else's view of ourselves. We overrode the simple wonder of this great vocabulary we’d spent so much time constructing for ourselves. This intricate matrix of individual meaning and complex purpose took a back seat to making good on a test at school, dressing for success, swimming with the sharks.
Here's a fellow who's just beginning to be influenced. Zack is one of my favorite teachers.
It’s still there. It’s alive with the elements that electrify your deepest sense of who you are and always have been. Your alphabet is populated by and represents the people you admire; colors you adore; music you worship; words, symbols, signs and aromas you cherish. It’s always ready to infuse your waking life with who you know yourself to be at your widest, most soulful depths.
Here’s three ways you can get started right away.
1. You with a Capital “U”
Okay, hang with me for a moment. Focus on the “U” in “Unique”. I phrase it in this particular way because it’s the first step to relearning how to look at shapes and meaning. It appears simple. It sounds like a children’s song. It’s comes across that way because it's basic. You can hum it or you can rap it but it’s more than a favorite line of Mr. Rogers.
There’s only one of you (U). . . dum dee dee dee dee dee dum....
U is also a letter. . . dum dee dee dee dee dee dum....
U is also a symbol. . . dum dee dee dee dee dee dum.....
U is also a shape....dooooooooo wahhhhhh...
U r U !
U R the only one of U there will ever be. U R the writer of your movie. U R the director of your movie. U R the actor in your movie. U R also the audience (most important point).
It’s so critical to this process that you understand this concept first, on a very deep level, and ACCEPT it. Just consider it permission to spend time having fun finding out what you’re saying to yourself.
Although other people may be more than thrilled to give you advice, help you see the forest for the trees, pass along a hint, or flat-out lay their opinion of what they perceive about your life on you: they CANNOT “read” your life.
Only U can.
2. “I BELIEVE IT!!”
You have to trade in the exclamation, “I don’t believe it” or “unbelievable” for “I do believe it” and “believable”.
A lot of times we don’t want to believe the most obvious combinations of images we see (or perceive) right in front of our eyes. All it takes is a little practice. And it’s mostly a lot of fun. It shifts U over time until U do BELIEVE what you reading in your life.

When U begin to believe what you see, it’ll drench you a with feeling of awe you’ll carry around with you for days at a time. And the more you believe, the more you'll see.
Of course, if you’re the least bit like most people, you probably say it once a day (“Oh my gosh! I don’t believe that just happened!”) Just try it the next time a phrase containing “unbelief” passes your lips (or pops up in your mind). Change it. Quick!!!
3. See the light!
Unless you’re a person who works as an artist, a photographer or a videographer/cinematographer; you probably don’t give the element of light a lot of brain space.
It’s just there. It’s good. It’s too bright. It’s not bright enough.
When we put our attention on light, we realize can’t do anything without it except perhaps sleep. But no light, no day. No plants. No progress. No life at all.
Light has also been used as a metaphor since people were started making them up to represent other things they wanted to explain. “You are the light of the world.” “She saw the light.” “He lights up when she walks into the room.” “I’m gonna punch his lights out.” “The light went out of her eyes.” You get the picture.
Just a quick brush up on a metaphor: it’s a figure of speech that uses a real element to represent an idea that’s less easy to grasp without it.
Metaphors can be represented by other images as well, but for our purposes the element of light is both a real, observable phenomenon all around us, everyday and it's a way to represent a thought or idea.
We think, see and read our lives in metaphors. We’ve made up our own internal metaphors to remind us of what something means when we encounter it.
A powerful experiment in the beginning stages of reading your life is to notice and become increasingly familiar with light.
Watch it in the morning. Walk around your house. Go into a couple of rooms and notice the shapes it makes because it’s there or because it isn’t.
What shapes do you see in either the patterns of the light or the areas where the light isn’t?
Watch it in the middle of the day and into the late afternoon. How does the amount of light and its direction change in your rooms from the morning light?
How does that make you feel? Does it remind you of something in particular?
Watch it in the early evening and into the night. How does the quality of the light change in each of the rooms?
What color is the light now?
When you see the color of the evening light, do you remember a sound, a word, a smell?
Have a good time with these “Quests”. I like that word a lot more than "exercise"!
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