Life presents us with an ongoing stream of experience — with experiences of situations and events, of interactions of all kinds with our environment and the other people in it. These experiences are multidimensional, involving visual images, sounds, physical contact, sometimes smell and taste. We attach emotional reactions to them. Some experiences feel good; we are drawn toward them and want more like that. Others feel bad and we try to avoid them. We tend to think of experience as something that just “happens to us” as we go through life — the automatic result of the events and situations in which we find ourselves. It doesn’t feel like something over which we have much direct control, except by taking action to change the situation being experienced.

It’s really much more complex than that. You have a great deal more control over your ongoing experience than you may realize or acknowledge, and many aspects of experience that seem determined by external events actually result from choices you make. These choices are automatic and unconscious, for the most part, which is why they don’t feel like your choices, But they are. The more you understand that, and the better you understand the mechanisms by which you make those choices, the more control you will have over your life.

You compose your experience on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis. You do this by filtering and selecting bits and pieces of information from the much richer stream of information in which you are constantly immersed. You combine those bits and pieces with information and structure from your past experience to create your current experience. The kind of life you have — happy or sad, secure or fear-filled, bland or exciting, meaningless or rewarding — may ultimately be determined more by the way you manage that creative process than by the external circumstances you encounter.

Think about watching a movie. At first glance, this seems like a passive experiences. You sit and watch as the movie rolls by. Yet movie watching is really a very active process. The viewpoint you adopt — the filter through which you watch — plays a major role in the experience with which you leave the theater. Consider some different filters and the experiences they might produce.

• You might identify with one particular character, experiencing events through her eyes, sharing her fear, joy, excitement, etc.
• You might watch the same scenes as an outside observer with no sense of personal involvement, seeing them as events happening to other people.
• You might ignore the story altogether, concentrating instead on technical aspects of the moviemaking such as lighting, camera work, or set design.
• Or, realizing that there’s really nobody really up there — no people, places, or events, just patterns of colored lights on a white wall — you might just sit back and enjoy the light show.

Different filters produce very different experiences. The first may lead to an intensely personal participation in the story. The second might be less personal but still very empathetic. Both of these, though different, flow from the basic story the movie tells. The third filter focuses not on that story, per se, but on how it is told — on the craft of the moviemaker. The final filter ignores both the story and how it is told, simply taking in and responding to the raw flow of visual pattern that the movie provides.

You may choose your filter consciously or unconsciously. You might go to the movie with the intent of identifying with a particular character, or you might simply find yourself drawn into that experience as the movie progresses. If you work in the movie industry, you might want to learn from or critique the directing, editing or costuming, or you might find yourself unable to step out of your professional role and into the story itself. But whether you choose your filter consciously or unconsciously, you are making a choice. The more conscious you are of that choice, the more you control will have over your experience, and the greater your chances for a satisfying experience.

The same is true of your experience of life. You encounter and participate in a stream of events, like scenes in a movie, which seem to “just happen” to you. But those events do not completely determine your experience. You experience a filtered and interpreted version of the events in which you emphasize (and possibly distort) some aspects while you downplay (or filter out) others. This process of filtering and interpreting has as much influence on your ultimate experience, as do the events themselves.

Imagine, for example, attending a dinner party. On arriving, you mill around having a couple of drinks and making small talk. Then you sit down for dinner. You eat, the plates are taken away, and dessert and coffee served. You talk some more, and then those plates are taken away and you leave and go home.

What was your experience? As with the movie, there are different filters you might apply to the dinner party. You might focus on the food, making the dinner primarily a gastronomic experience. You might focus on your conversation with your dinnertime companions, letting the food play a secondary role. You may be interested in the content of the conversation, or you may be using it for other ends such as cementing business relationships or finding a new love interest. You might give considerable attention to the setting — the furniture, dinnerware, etc. — or you might give it very little. You might observe a large number of people, or devote most of your attention to one or two. Your overall experience of the dinner party will flow from the way you make these choices.

This is not to say, of course, that life is the same as watching a movie. The movie scenes roll by in their predetermined order; the only choices you have are how to experience them. In life, you don’t just observe but you also act. You respond to events and that response affects what happens next. Your choice of where to sit at dinner and whom you talk with will affect the flow of your experiences in ways that have no counterpart in the movie. Life is, as computer people say, “interactive.”

That interactivity goes much deeper than your conscious responses. Composing experience involves choices you are not aware of making, choices you may not even think of as choices at all, such as which muscles you tense when you’re under stress, how you orient yourself in gravity, or the breadth of your awareness. These choices can significantly impact aspects of your experience that you may think are beyond your control, such as the ease or difficulty with which you move, the competency or lack thereof you feel under stress, and even your overall sense of security, or anxiety.

You may have learned growing up that life is difficult, and that you need to work hard to accomplish anything. If so, you may habitually use more effort than necessary in everything you do. You may hold your breath and stiffen your chest when you read something difficult, make a presentation to a client, or work at your computer. This extra effort is a bit like riding the brake when you drive. It diminishes the performance of the vehicle and creates unnecessary wear and tear. But it accomplishes nothing, except perhaps to validate the belief that life is hard, and make life harder than it needs to be.

Extra tension and effort also contribute to many common sources of pain and limitation, such as back problems, the epidemic of repetitive stress injury currently associated with computer usage, even the increasing stiffness and decreasing mobility that we normally blame on aging. This isn’t to say that you “choose” those ills directly. Rather, you make choices that contribute to and support them, without realizing that you are doing so. You really don’t have to do it that way.

This extra effort and tension can even affect your sense of security and emotional well-being. Your most basic support comes from the solidity of the earth beneath you. Your sense of safety and security is intimately tied in with feeling that support, and unnecessary tensions in your body reduce your ability to do so. On the one hand, not feeling the ground contributes to anxiety, because you feel insecure and unsupported. On the other hand, anxiety diminishes your sense of contact with the ground, because you respond to it by tensing and lifting yourself away from the ground. The tension and anxiety create a self-amplifying feedback loop in which each feeds the other. If this feedback loop becomes habitual, you may experience it as on ongoing sense of angst and insecurity.