Can blissful higher conscious awareness be born from devastating life-dramas?
What is The Shift? I had the opportunity to download and view this entire film. I had no idea it was going to be as enjoyable as it was.
While the advertiser positions it as “the story of the most important moment of your life”, it’s also about a handful of individuals, unknown to each other, all going through their most important moment.
That they do so while staying at a seaside resort and amid rustic beauty is not only clever direction–the scenery alone makes this memorable and worth viewing–but hides a meaning in itself that the soul ‘gets’ even if the mind doesn’t.
Because the visual panorama is only part of the film’s attraction. It so happens that this special place forms the backdrop for the life-changing dramas unfolding for a few people staying there. Tell-tale, perception-altering events that come just before ‘the shift’, changing how they view life forever.
Who would have suspected that beauty itself can open you to experience in such excruciating detail that sharpness of reality which in normal life passes unnoticed. There’s no place in this resort, a metaphor for the place of deepest introspection, to cover one’s inner revelation over with outer world ‘normalcy’.
When I read the marketing blurbs for this film, they sounded a little too ‘Pollyanna’, even for me. I thought, what’s new here? I really hoped it wasn’t it going to be like watching Wayne Dyer on all those Public TV membership drives. It wasn’t like that at all (although Dr. Dyer does play himself and he gets to drop his Dyerisms here and there); it was something more.
It wasn’t just the music and cinematography that drew me in. It wasn’t that I just watched it for the pleasure, which I did–my criteria lately for taking time to view any film. What I didn’t expect was the extent to which I felt something like magic happen inside me. And it was long after my inner critic dismissed it as a story within a story that I realized I had dismissed the critic.
Unlike other films that pose as documentaries but are stories, or are stories that pose as documentaries, I found I was in the moment with each of the characters as they experienced raw emotion.
The surprise for me was not only the sense I had that reality for me was about to change while viewing the film, but how long that particular change lasted–even permanently. The experience of watching, reflecting, and then being open to something special coming into my own experience was like having an energy healing, or a soul reading, or a clearance.
Here’s what my shift felt like: being at my most vulnerable, feeling the rawness of being human. Not in a bad way, nothing specific. But I was open. That is the point in anyone’s shift, specific to events or not, when the energy you have been holding the most tightly suddenly unravels.
It is after that unraveling that you realize that no matter how long you have tried to avoid this letting-go moment, you are about to drop old assumptions and feel totally relieved doing so. At that moment, when you let go and dive into the unknown, you experience yourself as the real being you are.
So ‘that something’ did happen to me: after the film ended I turned off all noise and just stayed quiet for hours. Not really thinking, but mostly feeling. In a handful of hours I had immediate confirmation. My ’shift’ had come in a way that I not only wouldn’t have predicted but would have told you ‘no way’! This never would have come to me in this way. I wasn’t even thinking about it at all.
The real message of this film?
I won’t give that away except it is something brand new, something you have never heard before. And it comes to you on its own, not from the messages in the movie. So be prepared. Because if you ‘get it’, that realization does come after old paradigms have gotten your attention, rearing their ugly heads, getting you to release them. You come away feeling tons lighter, finding you now accept the flow of energy that is life.
In classic metaphysics ‘the shift’ was called ‘chemicalization’, a term coined by Christian Science founder, Mary Maker Eddy. Dr. Eddy used it to explain what happens sometimes when a patient appears to be getting worse before they become better.
It was later used by others in New Thought to describe a similar action when change is decreed in any area of life, not just physical health. Dr. Harriet Emilie Cady wrote about it in the spiritual sense in one of a series articles she wrote that later became published by Unity as Lessons in Truth, their introductory text.
Simply described, ‘chemicalization‘ as these New Thought pioneers used it, was the experience of throwing off old energy patterns to make way for significant positive new experiences. It can follow events similar to those the characters experienced in the film, or maybe not quite so dramatic.
Rejoice: Your Shift has hit the fan!
However, whenever, wherever this dramatic or not so dramatic experience comes to you, your life is about to become more real, more full, more for you. If you’re ready to put that last piece of an old puzzle into place, then see this film. Let yourself be an innocent. Be open to the real message that, ironically, doesn’t come from the teaching part of the film.
Then tell me what you think.
To see a good clear version of the movie trailer click the photo below to go to the product page, then click the link below the Product Description.
If you decide to buy it through this link, you get to download the entire film and view it immediately like I did. Or you can buy the expanded DVD version here.
“When you get it—that you don’t do things because of what somebody else is going to do for you, but you do them because you’re living your life’s purpose—you can light up the whole world with that kind of love. That’s how it works for me.”
—Wayne Dyer
