A Life Lesson About Ice Cream - Chocolate or Vanilla, Life Is All About Choices

My mom always bought the gallon size container of ice cream containing half chocolate and half vanilla.  She also had a knack for ruining our excited anticipation when the time came to eat the ice cream!

As she was scooping ice cream into bowls, she'd ask, "Do you want chocolate or vanilla?"   I always wanted chocolate so that's what I'd ask for but she always gave me vanilla.  When I thought I could outsmart her, I'd ask for vanilla and still get vanilla.  We knew better than to complain, if we did, we'd get no ice cream at all.  If we looked disappointed at what she gave us she'd simply say, "you get what you get, now eat."

This experience taught me to believe that, "no matter what I asked for, I would never get what I asked for."  

Probably not a big deal when we're talking about ice cream but it's a BIG deal when I started applying that belief to other areas of my life like, a life partner, my job, money, relationships, my health, my body, my education and the big one for me was "God never gives me what I ask for."

Something so simple, like ice cream, created a huge limiting belief in my life that often held me back when I wanted something.  After all, why ask for something if you know you can't have what you want!  And for the longest time, I was able to blame that belief and not having what I wanted on my mother!

When I got older, I asked her why she did that to us and her answer was, "I tried to teach you kids that life is hard and I wanted you to be tough so you could handle it."

Can you see where I'm going with this?  

Because my mother had a belief that "life is hard and you have to be prepared for disappointment" she passed that belief on to me and my siblings.  She became my teacher on the subject of "Life is disappointing, will always disappoint you and you might as well face it and not ask for what you want because you won't get it!"

My child-self interpreted her action as someone being mean to me but my mom saw it as teaching me a valuable life skill.  Isn't it interesting how two people can experience the same event and have two completely different interpretations of the event!

Life is never what it appears to be and we have the power to see things differently whenever something comes into our awareness that we do not want.  If we're unhappy about our how someone is treating us, the number of our bank balance, the image in our mirror, the car we drive; our unhappiness is defining our self-confidence, self-worth, self-love, self-image, and self-esteem.

Life is all about choices; we can choose to blame events, people, experiences and circumstances for what is currently showing up for us, or we can choose to see another side of it.  The existence of "opposite" is a metaphysical process of creation.  When the opposite of what you want to have, do or be is showing up for you, express gratitude for it and make a choice to bring forth the opposite of what's currently showing up for you.  You have that power, we all have that power!  

The word "metaphysical" roughly translates to: "after physical" - when you accept that nothing happens on the outside until it's first created on the inside, you realize how powerful you truly are!  Once I understood that I could continue to give my power away by blaming my mother for my beliefs and my shortcomings, or I could embrace the existence of the law of opposites as a metaphysical process of creation, my inner power began changing the outer manifestations I no longer wanted to experience.

If life has been serving you something you don't want, would "now" be a good time for you to start practicing the "law of opposites" as your process of creation?

Nancy Mueller ~ Life Sensei at MasteringYourBeliefs.com