"I'm lazy. I'm too old to change. Wait, No, I'm not!"

The story the mind tells you about who you are isn't real.And this morning, as I woke up, I got a glimpse of how this happens - how the mind tricks me into believing things about myself which aren't true and, of greater concern, are hurting me.It happened as I watched myself come from sleep to conscious awareness. I listened as, even before my eyes opened, my mind started telling me who I am."You're lazy," my mind said and, without questioning this,  I took the thought in and absorbed it as real.  "I'm lazy," I repeated.I watched as my body responded to these words, absorbing and following them in the same wiling and neutral way that it obeys the imperceptible command to move an arm or a leg. And my body responded, sinking in the center of the chest, as if pulling away from this thought that I am lazy. And yet, in the next moment, I watched myself give in to the thought, and give up.I sighed in a kind of  full-body, Oh well...   a truly lazy response. I laughed a little. Out loud.I was astonished, intrigued, uneasy. Am I lazy?And then,  No I'm not! I sense it from deep inside - an uprising, a protest. And a counter thought - a new thought, I am brave and strong. I am healthy and whole, I am free. I like this thought better. I take hold of it and take it inside. I hold it in my mind like a treat, like desert, like a cookie I am not certain I'm allowed to have.I repeat it: I am brave. I am healthy. I am free, and my body absorbs and begins to follow.The movement is subtle, almost imperceptible - but it is real. Where my chest had collapsed a little at the words, I am lazy, now, the same part of my body, at the words, I am brave. I am healthy. I am free, shifts forward. I feel completely different!  How strange. I make a mental note, a bookmark being left in a book - a page folded down at the corner. I want to explore and study this. What is here to see?I repeat the positive words: I am brave and strong, healthy and alive, whole and free. Again, there is this rising - an effervescent bubbling upward, lifting my breastbone, easing my head up.I try the other statement: You're lazy. I'm lazy, and I notice a pinch of heartburn, the finger of a bully poking my chest. I watch my body back away. I feel a 'bitterness', swallowed acid, a golf ball of fire moving downward, a slight sensation of pain as it descends through my stomach and lands in the small of my back where it radiates a dull ache into my hips and thighs and bowels.Normally, if I noticed this at all I'd wonder if I was getting sick. I might take an Advil.This time, I take two breaths. I listen - I watch and feel. I draw the new statement toward me and deliberately consciously drop it into my mind.I am brave and strong, healthy and alive, whole and free. I feel it 'take over' and again, I feel that subtle lifting a my body responds. This statement has a very different effect on my body. It doesn't address the painful ache, doesn't go searching for the golf ball of bitterness. It just rises. And as this happens, everything else - the heat, the ache, the pain - is gone.There is only this rising. This lifting in the front of the body. This radiance upward.Amazing.The negative words that I woke with are also gone. I almost can't remember them, as if they've sunken to the bottom of a lake where it would take some effort to retrieve them.And then, suddenly, surprisingly, a new uprising begins - a flood of thoughts and images as the "I am lazy" story begins arguing with the new story.Intrigued, I watch as 'evidence' is presented - memories and stories of times in the past when I was lazy, and the consequences of that, in my life, in my body. As if all of this were attempting to prove that, because I have been lazy in the past, I am stuck in this situation forever.As if, the "I am lazy" story were defending itself.  As if it had a survival instinct all its own.The "I am lazy" story tells me I will never be brave and strong, healthy and alive, whole and free. It tells me it's too late, I'm too old - and too set in my ways.The "I am lazy" story presses me, more bully-poking at the heart - more 're-minding' that my hips ache' - and more evidence to ''worry' me the way that one might 'worry' a stick with a sharp blade, thinning it, making it smaller.As if I'm not allowed - as if it's not 'allowed' - we cannot change stories. We cannot say I am brave and strong, healthy and alive, whole and free, when these conditions are not yet realized, not yet manifested - not yet 'real.'But then... how do we ever change?I watch this question rise with fascination and, frankly, awe. So much happens inside of us - and it happens so fast, so all at once. I realize that I am being given a stretched-out, slow-motion view of things, allowing me to see the interstitial world between thoughts : the momentary blips of opportunity where choices are made and changes are possible.It's so beautiful.I see that I am watching a skirmish at the boundary between stories: each is literally arguing for dominion over my life, over me.Am I lazy? Could I be brave? Each story has its own pattern of thoughts. Each 'thought pattern' affects my body in a unique way, touching in with mood and sensation as it flows through me. As if each pattern had a 'point of view' out of which it was working, a world view all its own.As I play with these stories, comparing their effect on me, I learn: that stories can change. That I can change them. That all it takes is a shift in preference - and a kind of inner 'holding'.I see that the story we 'hold' as real defines and then fills a kind of inner space - and that we 'hold' a story by practicing it, and then, using that practice as 'evidence' which we use to create density, to make it more real.We are literally making these stories real. Which means that if we continue to tell the story of  'I am lazy," it is impossible to make the other story real.There's no space for it.Which means that shifting stories is a truly radical act - in which we must challenge the old story, as it argues for survival. We must choose the new story, and hold it through the discomfort of being shown our past mistakes. We must let the old story go and let the new story move into us - and let it move us.---This morning, as I saw the way that thought interacts with the body, I realized that I was watching the birth of a new aspect of myself - a new aspect which could not rise, unless it were being born inside of a new story. A story inside of which I am brave and strong, healthy and alive, whole and free. This is how change happens.This is what I watched, from that part of myself which is permanent, unchanging and already free.A part which is showing me how to awaken inside of the new story, to become more and more real.And this is the teaching today.A teaching which, I am shown, I am to share with you.