Skin in the Game
The inevitable cost of the life you want is you. Yes you.
Life requires many sacrifices.
The cosmic play out of give and take.
Whatever you need costs something. Whatever you want costs something. A constant exchange of energy that results in pleasure or pain.
Causes and effects on a never-ending metronome, lending themselves to one another effortlessly.
Having skin in this game of life is the default setting—the factory settings.
Ever since birth, you have been giving energy into this realm.
Being held in your parents’ arms. Or not. Sitting on the school bus by a kind you never knew. Standing in the line at the grocery store. Meanwhile, it may be the lady behind you’s last day on this planet.
We are constantly interplaying with each other, with our environments, and with the energies within us when we’re alone.
Even when we’re sleeping, we are charging ourselves to give life to an innumerable amount of causes and effects. Every. Single. Day of our lives.
To make life a movie, you have to be knowledgeable of the bets you make. Although winning and losing in life are subjective, there are things called intentions and expectations.
When you take action with an intention, you are betting your current thoughts and beliefs on that experience. Gambling with your life.
Just as you can do things with intention, you can do things unintentionally. These are actions often deemed involuntary or most times “on accident”.
However, things in life are not cut and dry. Black and white exist, yes they do, but they are two extremes of an entire spectrum in between.
Actions done not on purpose could also be deemed automatically. Without thought. Like a reflex, a knee-jerk reaction.
These are what we call subconscious beliefs. Experience-born thoughts, embedded into the projector of our reality. Embedded through either repetition, trauma, or symbology. The last of which is the most powerful.
Pictures are worth a thousand words. Or a million. Maybe even a bil- you get the point.
Symbols are the most efficient language there is. You can encase many meanings into an image. Hence, why movies often depict the person staring at a painting in a museum. Overwhelmed with the intense emotions triggered by a simple image. Meanwhile, someone else can see the same painting a feel nothing.
We know that a picture is a still image. We also know that a movie is also known as a motion picture. A picture in motion. Or many pictures in motion.
In the early days of animation, everything was hand-drawn. Every image and every movement of that image.
Now think about this in terms of your life. Every traumatic experience. Every day was filled with child-like glee.
These were individual images.
With you, the image, having a myriad of emotions. Just within one image. Then you moved. And there goes the flow of your emotions.
There are days upon days of these experiences. And because it would be inefficient for all these days to be on immediate recall, your subconscious mind serves as the storehouse, organizer, and projector of the beliefs developed from these experiences.
Let’s return to pictures being worth a thousand words. This amount of images recorded in your mind is astronomical. And yet, they are there. Things you seem to have forgotten can be remembered by a simple smell. Or one soundbite from a song you think you’re hearing for the first time.
Your subconscious mind, linked with your autonomic nervous system, is considered involuntary and automatic. This efficient.
When it comes to your beliefs, intentional or otherwise, they are the bets you are constantly taking in life.
Your beliefs are what make you do everything you do.
You eat what you eat because you believe it tastes good. You believe it comforts you. You believe it makes you healthy.
You go to work because you believe it is necessary. You sit in traffic to and from, leaving at a certain time, believing it will make you on time for work. Sometimes you get there at the intended time. Sometimes you don’t.
When you change your beliefs, you change your reality. You expand the borders of what you thought was possible, increase the likelihood of your intentions, and take control of your life.
Having skin in the game is the ultimate sacrifice. “Whatever external image I uphold and whatever internal belief supports that, I offer as a sacrifice”.
Taking control of your reality is an act of going all in. When your intention is pure, your visibility of the cards of life becomes clearer. You no longer make automatic bets on life. You cease to accept a lower vibrational life as acceptable. You reprogram your beliefs to serve you versus “playing the cards I was dealt”.
Change your cards. Change the entire deck. Change your life.