I recently returned from a family holiday. On the last day of our holiday everyone decided to go to the waterslide park. I put my swim suit under my clothes and agreed to go along and sit outside with the baby because he was too young to go in, with a view to possibly going in later. After about 10 minutes my sister and my husband came to see if I was Ok and ask if I wanted to go in. I wasn’t feeling that well, so as the baby was asleep I said I was happy to stay outside and have a rest which I did. After about an hour I woke up and decided that now I did actually feel like going in, so I did quick looks around inside to try and find everyone to no avail. Each time I went inside (abandoning my post) I got more and more into the thinking of how I wanted to go in and couldn’t someone else come and watch the baby. Then the baby woke up and I took him inside looking everywhere even the changing rooms for my son and husband but to no avail. By this point the baby was screaming and I had started to feel very angry.

My dad had come to see if I was OK and I screamed at him saying ‘I had been abandoned.’ My sister also came out and I screamed at her. Soon after my husband and son came out dressed and ready to move on. When they did – boy did I have a go at my husband – ‘You abandoned me. You didn’t check on me. I wanted to go in and I was stuck outside in the heat ‘etc – screaming and crying etc. (Well you can imagine!)  In his defence he said he had come to see me but I was asleep. This did not wash with me!  But eventually I calmed down and saw that all that had happened was that I had changed my mind about wanting to go swimming and how was he to know that?

I had had a change of thought from not wanting to go swimming to wanting to go. Then built a whole lot of thoughts on top of that and the more I thought about being abandoned etc the more impatient and abandoned I felt. – Yes my husband did go off for an hour and half but I created the feelings and thought storm I was having and then blamed him. In the 3 Principles world we often talk about the ‘inside out nature life’ meaning that our experience of life comes inside of us and not our outside circumstances.

To me in this circumstance it was really obvious what had happened.- I.e. I had a change of thought and decided to take it very seriously and  therefore I created my experience of the situation.  This enabled me to take responsibility for my behaviour and make amends accordingly. -But it made me think how many other times do we innocently have a change of thought about a situation or even another person and not even realise it and build these up into something bigger and bigger? – And how do we let these dominate our experience of life and our relationships with others?