The sun burning off the fog to reveal what has always been there
When I moved to our property in Raglan, the outside space was being choked by privet and weeds. They blocked the light, obscuring the beautiful trees that were struggling to survive by stretching themselves taller as they sought light and space.
I recognised this struggle, striving to be a better me, with every ‘how to’ thought coloured with urgency as I sought the space to thrive and be the way nature intended.
*******
Yet within and around us, is space, an abundance of space.
Space provides the context that allows us to experience form, and space also exists within form.
Space is everything – literally.
So often in our busyness, space is overlooked and invisible to us. It becomes crowded out by the different forms we have created. The things we think we should be doing, the way we think we should behave; all that we have innocently attached our peace of mind and happiness to.
Have you ever typed a message on your phone or in an email, only to re read it later and it says something completely different? Auto-correct has altered what has been written and we didn’t notice…often not until after we have pushed ‘send’.
From time to time I see a parallel of this happening with my thinking. I might have an idea. It looks like a good idea, maybe a bit out of my comfort zone, but very doable and worth a try.
Then I wake up the next day and feel ‘Yeah…nah!’ Yesterday’s energy and enthusiasm to follow through on my idea or implement it has disappeared.
When I scroll down through my thought process the thread starts to read…
Maybe it’s not such a good idea.
Maybe I should just keep the status quo.
What if…(insert various disaster scenarios here)…?
Who are you to do…..?
Yep my internal predictive text has sent me down a very familiar rabbit hole.
Granted I’ve hung out here a lot, so I guess that’s why my ‘internal predictive text monitor’, felt it had the authority to autocorrect my idea and rewrite it as a series of problems. And given that I’m now looking through a ‘Yeah…nah’ lens it seems to make sense to take notice.
And so the idea returns to the periphery of my consciousness.
However I’m waking up… and I’m renaming Auto correct as Auto INCORRECT.
Predictive text is based on the memory of past experiences and beliefs, and these are often limiting. For me it can be fear based, playing small and not poking my head over the parapet. I see it’s applying old, ‘out of date’ thinking, that I learned or adopted along the road of life, to protect me from failing, making mistakes, being hurt or encountering criticism. Very innocent and understandable as like most people, I don’t enjoy any of those scenarios. However when I stand back and consider this objectively this response really doesn’t make sense.
Auto incorrect is feeding into a conditioned resistance towards having an unexpected experience of life. Yet life is a series of happenings. We may have an idea or a plan of how a situation might turn out; but really we don’t know how the next moment is going to play out.
The flow of life is unpredictable. Sometimes life deals up pleasure, and sometimes pain. Our inbuilt resilience is agile and responsive. Unfortuantely this resilience has often become buried by our ‘predictive texting thinking mind’ and the ‘auto incorrect’ that swings into action before we even know it.
My invitation to you is to have a play and be curious if this could be the case for you.
The other night I went to bed about 10pm but felt restless. So I got up and curled up on a chair with a blanket and my cat and watched the moon appear to rise up over the horizon and shine it’s beautiful glow over the Whaingaroa Harbour where I live.
I’ve always loved watching the way the moon appears, for me it has a sense of mystery and power. Always there, but not always clearly able to be seen. However, regardless of our ability to be able to see it, like clockwork, it pulls the tides, day in and day out. 100% reliable. It’s know how is intrinsic in the design.
We also have intrinsic know how, it’s part of the deal. It’s how this incredible universe functions, each part of the whole with a role to play in this macro system.
It often feels like a huge dance with inbuilt choreography that’s leading us between the familiar and the unfamiliar, do we follow the lead? Do we shy hesitantly when we are unfamiliar with the steps? Or do we stay curious and allow ourselves to be led by this inbuilt know how? Toes can be stood on, frustration can be felt but so can freedom and laughter and joy.
Another metaphor I often ponder is that we are all part of a universal orchestra with inbuilt music score. We’re all instuments being invited to play our whole song, and as we turn up and listen to our inbuilt know howwe sync with our envrionment, our communities, our world. Some instruments are tuned more finely, some play loud and strong whilst others play a smaller quieter part, but all are important in the overall texture, tone and effect of the music produced. There is often dissonance in music but that discord can be part of an important transition in music to reach another level of complexity and depth.
Isn’t it amazing how the planets know how to revolve around the sun?
How the seasons come and go and how nature knows how to respond. How the seed pods of last years sweet peas left some of their seeds, that those seeds survived the heavy rains, the digging around them, stomping on them…only to know how and when to germinate, take root and provide the most beautiful scented pathway to the beach.
We are all born with the equivalent of an inbuilt operating system…some examples include:
We have a cut and our bodies know how to go about healing it.
A baby is born and knows how to suckle in order to feed.
We catch a cold and our body knows how to fight it off.
A crisis happens that we have never thought about and we know how to respond.
We have an idea and when we listen internally we know how to proceed.
And maybe the most miraculous is – given the right conditions – after the act of sexual intercourse the body knows how to create new life.
Often know how is referred to as common sense. For example ‘I just Knew what to do/say’, ‘it just made sense to act that way’. It’s often a quiet inner sense of knowing how to respond, without the drama that can surround a lot of thinking/figuring out etc.
We see this in children, they know how to get their needs met, inbuilt survival know how. This know how is then topped up.
In the first 7 years of life we ‘absorb’ from those around us, 95% of the beliefs that we then go on to live by in our lives. We’re also consciously learning all the time; in the early years our parents are our teachers, then school, peers, work, social, cultural etc. As adults we identify those who have expertise in areas we don’t – so when we see the need to, we set out to learn from their knowledge in order to increase our knowledge.
Often we tend to ‘value’ our most recent learning, especially that which we have invested lots of money in. This is not a problem except where we forget or over-ride our inbuilt know how.
A common question I get asked in my work is ‘How do I……respond to/deal with different situations?’ I can see there is an internal knowing but there can be a lack of appreciation that this knowing exists, or maybe a sense that it is inadequate and requires more/different skill and expertise. This can breed a sense of anxiety and panic…’I’m out of my depth!’ or ‘It’s not ok that I don’t know what to do.’
I’ve seen for myself that there is a big difference between ‘I don’t know how’ or ‘I can’t know how’, that feeling of being less than and inadequate; and ‘I don’t know how, but I’m curious….’
The latter doesn’t have the noise deafening special effects and it invites a deepening into who we are. Vulnerablity, and a recognition that it can be the most truthful thing to say I don’t know. Often we ‘think’ we should know how….(cue….the special effects!!!) However, recognising and being honest when we don’t know, staying with the discomfort, sometimes qualifying it with ‘I don’t know…yet’, actually invites knowing. It occurs to us the next step to take, when it makes sense, we stay curious.
Somewhere through my childhood, I picked up the message that getting something wrong was a bad thing. Bad consequences would happen. It was on me to make sure I got things right. And for the most part I bought this. My job was to ensure I didn’t make mistakes or get things wrong.
I didn’t realise till later in the piece that right and wrong are subjective. What’s right in one family, community, culture or religion can be wrong in another. When I did start to see the subjective nature of this, sadly I didn’t see the mission impossible that I’d embarked on. I just got more vigilant. Ok in this setting, this behaviour is right, in this different setting, this is the expectation… Omg what a job it was, with the added driver that I thought that something terrible would happen to me or those I loved if I didn’t stay ‘on it’.
Over time bits of this dropped away, I saw through the chaos and impossibility of what I was trying to do. But essentially I was still unconsciously functioning from the same job description, ‘I had to work at being me!’ In hindsight it was a bit strange as I didn’t have such a strict set of rules for others, but it was so ingrained I didn’t question it.
I started seeing that ‘trying to be me’ shouldn’t really be necessary so I embarked on a mission of ‘trying not to try…’ It felt like the obvious solution to change my behaviour. I see now, how innocently I was still judging, assessing, comparing; not to mention I had a new layer of thinking to engage with, all in all quite a lot of work! Sadly most of the benefits only lasted when I remembered to change the behaviour.
I remember feeling quite confused as to who I was….a role? Mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend, homeopath, coach, gardener….until the illusion of this became apparent.
As I began to see through the misunderstanding, I saw that my behaviours were not actually me, they were a response to learned thought. Simply a belief about what being me entailed. And who I actually was, couldn’t be wrong! I was just a human being, doing what made sense in the moment. Sometimes it worked out as I’d planned and sometimes it didn’t. Go figure!!
I recognised that being offensive wasn’t my natural state; therefore trying not to be offensive and not upset anyone was unnecessary. I saw that caring was my natural state so I didn’t have to ‘try’ to care. I realised that constantly gauging how I was doing from the reactions of others was also unnecessary. All of this ‘trying to be me’ had stemmed from an unconscious misunderstanding that I had innocently acquired. I had simply thought this was how I was supposed to turn up to life.
I see now it is not about behaviour. That’s merely a response. Not who I am. Who I am can’t be right or wrong, only my behaviours can.
Relief is an understatement. I have settled. I have connected with a trusting peace in myself that has always been there, but was previously obscured by a heap of ‘well-intentioned’, believed, thought.
Being less careful has not made me careless. Instead I often have this beautiful sense of being carefree. I’m free to be curious about life. I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day, which ends with the question ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’
On the occasions that I am wrong or make a mistake, the world doesn’t end. I am ok and so is my family. Sometimes there’s a bit of a palava, but it clears. I can breath. I am free to apologise or be apologised to. I feel humbled by life and all the misunderstandings that occur as we innocently go about doing the best we can. I accept that not everyone sees life the same way. I can stand in my humanness and see that this is all part of the human experience.
And I’ve realised something else that is an incredible gift. I am resilient and so is everyone else. Who we are, our connection to each other, goes way beyond behaviour and reactivity.
Trying to be me, is increasingly a thing of the past. I notice when I’m there because it’s totally confusing, adrenally exhausting, unrealistic and an uphill struggle.
One of the many privileges of having worked closely with people for over 20 years is I know this is not just my misunderstanding. I have experienced and witnessed the many ways this manifests. My deep wish is to share this simple understanding of how our minds actually work and where our experience of life comes from, and to have others experience the deep joy and freedom that is available to us all.
More and more people are diagnosed as ‘having anxiety’ or ‘being anxious’.
Anxiety sure feels like a ‘thing’ when you’re in the grip of a load of anxious thought. But have you noticed that putting attention on the anxious thinking and trying to fix it tends to ‘lock it in’?
Strategies and tools to ‘manage anxiety’ become another thing to fit into the day. Or we swallow medicines in an attempt to relieve the symptoms.
Anxiety is one of the many emotions that comprise the human experience. It’s generally unpleasant and can produce a plethora of symptoms. Commonly they include a racing heart, churning stomach, sweaty palms, feeling jittery, confused and often fearful thinking. Actually many of the symptoms of unwellness have anxious tentacles…
When we are in an anxious state it is as if our thinking has been ratchedted up and the special effects have been turned on to maximum volume.
I can see that in the past I have been quite gullible regarding my anxious thoughts. I’ve taken them seriously. My BS detector hasn’t picked up the cues.
The ‘special effects’ that come with anxious thinking, kind of guarantee that we fall for the anxiety script….until we don’t!
It can go something like this….
This must be serious.
The thoughts and feelings are so strong and unpleasant, something is really wrong.
It feels urgent, I have to act – and now!
This can lead to hasty reactions to people and events that at other times don’t bother us, and often we conclude we are ‘not ok’…and therefore the obvious solution is to get fixed!
So we search for an answer; medicines, counselling and psychotherapy, complementary therapies, quitting our job, leaving a relationship, moving city/country, never leaving the confines of our home, and the list goes on.
If I go to a movie and I’m really caught up in it and it’s scaring me; my heart can be racing, I might be clenching my jaw and fists, I can feel sick…. Once I notice what’s happening, I can remind myself this is just a movie and it’s not real, then I can relax. Or I can choose to stay caught up and experience all the hype and drama. Or if I’m taking it so seriously that I can’t listen to the ‘this is just a made up story’ then I can leave the movie theatre.
In this scenario it’s as if I’ve forgotten that I am actually the neutral screen that the movie is being projected onto. When the movie is finished the screen is untouched by all the special effects.
Similarly when the ‘special effects’ of our anxious thinking kick off we are free to choose the ‘I’m not falling for this’ option. We can remember we are the neutral screen that these special effects are playing on, and if we don’t pay the anxious thinking any attention it will pass, and the screen that is us, returns to neutral.
As is often quoted. We are the sky not the weather. The sun is always shining even when we can’t see it. Similarly the wholeness of who we are is always there, even when it is obscured by a load of murky anxious thinking.
It is a normal part of the human condition to experience a range of emotions. Just as it is normal for the weather to be changeable… sometimes four seasons in one day…yes! I lived in gorgeous Wellington for 24 years!
By judging our emotions as good or bad and seeking the ‘good‘ ones and doing everything we can think off to get rid of the ‘bad’ ones we create an inordinate amount of unnecessary work and distress.
Trying to control our thoughts is the same as trying to control the weather…GOOD LUCK!
Thoughts occur to us quite randomly, we may have thousands in a day, some we ignore, some we act on. As humans we have free will. As we wake up to the power this affords us, we learn to be curious about our thinking and less gullible about taking the ‘special effects’ seriously.
As with the weather, when it’s a stunning day we might swim, walk, enjoy being outside, or choose to be indoors, and when it’s cold and stormy we might choose to stay indoors, or at least rug up to head outdoors.
We are always free to choose how we respond.
It’s the same with anxiety…we are already ok. Often no solution needs to be sought. We just need to remember that from time to time we will experience anxious thinking and like that southerly blast that can roam through NZ, it will pass.
If you would like to explore further this simple understanding that frees us to turn up to life with enthusiasm – no mattter what your thinking – please contact me! hello@thereseboyle.com
Our state of mind affects how we turn up to everyday life, including to our relationships with family, friends, colleagues and strangers. Equally our state of mind affects our performance at work, study, sport and so on. This is because
‘We see and respond to life as we are – not as it is’.
We experience ease when we allow ourselves to turn up to what is; to be present and respond to life from this grounded place. This space is often described as ‘being in the flow’.
I did my coach training with Michael Neill and he often talked about premature practicality – I’d both laugh nervously and cringe inside, as I realised I spent a lot of time being prematurely practical. What if? How can I avoid? Arrange? Get them to see? Make xyz happen? It was endless.
I see how I can talk myself out of acting on ideas…and those conversations I catch myself having in my head can be pretty convincing. Of course I know all my vulnerable areas, so in the guise of trying to protect myself…boom! I’ve stymied another idea, without giving it the chance.
Innocently.
I truly don’t mean to keep taking myself out of the game, but it’s not until I stand back, and wake up to my thought processes that I see I’ve simply made up a bunch of scenarios that make actioning my idea seem crazy! And yet if I were to follow the idea through it might be brilliant…or crazy…but when I’m prematurely practical I don’t let myself be curious enough to find out.
Everytime, without fail, premature practicality takes us away from the present moment.
The implication being that I don’t back myself to be able to handle things ‘on the fly’. Yet the truth is that whenever life deals me the unpredictable card, I ALWAYS turn up and respond in the moment. It’s how we are all designed. All the ‘just in case’ preparation is unnecessary, irrelevant and time consuming!
‘Trying to figure it all out’ beforehand puts us so ‘in our heads’ that we often end up missing out on life in ‘real time’. It doesn’t feel like that though as being prematurely practical is a big job, and keeps us very busy, we just don’t have time to see the wood for the trees!! It’s anxiety provoking and can be sleep depriving… We can all do this at times, but for some it’s more like a full time job!
I still occasionally catch myself being prematurely practical, and when I do, I just stop. It just doesn’t make sense for me to behave this way any more.
Life is unpredictable
We are all perfectly designed to navigate this unpredictability
My preoccupation was a learned state of mind that originated from a belief system I had innocently adopted. Chances are you may have too! It looked like it was THE way to be. Being preoccupied can also be a reaction to past memories or experiences and we innocently believe that if we think about them enough we will avoid a repeat performance. Yet paradoxically we often end up creating the very scenarios we’re trying to avoid.
‘A Memory is just a thought that
we have carried through time’
Sydney Banks made this statement, and the truth of this is mind boggling. Just sit with it for a moment…
‘A Memory is just a thought that
we have carried through time’
Being preoccupied with a lot on our mind, tends to achieve the opposite of what we are busily trying to do. It can result in us thinking that everyday life events, e.g going to the supermarket, meeting new people etc have become overwhelming. Yet when we are on the ‘overthinking track’ it strangely seems to make sense to respond to overwhelm by thinking even harder! Go figure! No wonder so many people are challenged by anxiety!
So what I’m saying is that it’s not the events themselves that overwhelm and lead to feelings of stress. It’s that our minds are ‘over-full’ endlessly trying to protect, defend, try our hardest, be good, be liked, avoid calamity etc.
The overwhelm gets diagnosed as anxiety or depression or some other ‘mental illness’, and now it looks like there’s another THING to navigate. And IT can look like a seemingly insurmountable hurdle to climb. However, good news! Anxiety, depression etc are not things!
In truth it’s not that complicated. It’s only our thinking that is preoccupying us. If we feed into it, the thoughts keep running around in our minds, winding us up, putting us into ‘fight and flight’ and so the vicious cycle continues. A bit like a fire, if you want it to die down, then stop putting wood onto it.
Consider, for example all the thinking we can have around our work. The importance we place on our work, our results, how we identify with it, how we pin our happiness on it, how we strive, we seek recognition, we make it matter, we make it our reason for getting up – or not! We struggle with it, we feel bound by it, bogged down, appreciated or under appreciated, valued or not, tied down, anchored, limited, caught up in, we blame it for our misery, our lack of time, we judge ourselves and others as successes or failures… We can have a lot on it!
Yet what is work? Work is the way we bring our gifts to the world, in our unique way. Our presence, our talents, our learned skills and our passion. We exchange these gifts, generally for money, in order that we can buy the things we need to survive, e.g food, shelter etc.
Our purpose, as best I can see is:
To be lovingly present to who we are.
To recognise and accept our gifts… and they don’t need to be fancy, or even recognised by others.
To know that we are where we are meant to be.
To be curious and playful with this precious life, applying ourselves to endeavours that make sense to us, and just seeing where this takes us. Destination unknown.
To allow ourselves and others to experience joy. Seriousness and being ‘full of care’ can be very weighty…and loaded with premature practicality!
We have freedom of choice, and this starts with the thoughts we choose to engage with.
We are not broken – no-one is. There is nothing to fix. Just life to experience.
The definition of a blind spot is ‘an area where a person’s view is obstructed.’
I don’t know about you but over the years I’ve had a number of areas where there were things I just couldn’t see that were pretty obvious to others. I tried to see where others were coming from but it just didn’t make sense to me.
A personal example. I really thought it was my duty to give every ounce of energy I had to my job. Even when I could see that others were having a lot more fun as they adopted a more 9-5 approach. I was blind to the fact that I too could have made this choice. It just wasn’t even on my radar. I didn’t even question why I was often one of the last ones at work. I guess I figured that was just the nature of my job and me being determined to ‘do it as well as I possibly could’.
Once I twigged, once I could see what was happening, I couldn’t go back. I felt a huge range of emotions, hurt, indignation, undervalued, used, all ‘poor me’ thinking. I now see how ‘outside-in’ this was. The truth is it was my response to work, to proving myself, to ‘getting it right’, in some weird way I had the feeling that the sky would fall in if I didn’t ‘give-my-all’. I set the whole thing up. Innocently. It was one of my blind spots.
How we experience being alive
‘moment-to-moment’
is completely influenced by our thinking.
Often this seems like it can’t possibly be true…another blind spot maybe?
We can get caught up thinking that how we’re feeling is a result of someone:
– being rude to us,
– cutting us up in traffic,
– tailgating us,
– not doing what they said they would do,
– or us being under pressure to meet a deadline
…an endless list of possibilities.
But can this be true?
Are we really at the effect of other people’s behavior, whims, tantrums or demands?
Whilst the things listed above do happen to me from time to time, I don’t always respond in the same way.
Sometimes the behavior of others doesn’t affect me at all, I don’t even notice it, or if I do, I can see they’re not in a good space and it’s nothing to do with me.
Other times I take it very personally. How dare they – angry? Why would they react that way to me – hurt? I don’t deserve it – indignant?
The variable?
My state of mind
Another common blind spot for most of us is our blindness to our awesomeness. We might be able to see other’s awesomeness, but ours? Nah!
We are blinded by the thoughts that we are not enough…not good enough, not funny enough, not experienced enough, not smart enough, not old enough, not young enough, not beautiful enough…..on and on and on!
Innocently we surround ourselves in a haze of self criticism which feeds into self doubt, inadequacy and fearful self talk…we wind ourselves up mercilessly!
The Truth
It’s our thinking, which generates our response to people and events, and it’s our thinking that we experience
100% of the time
Recognising the truth about the role our minds play in how we experience life, is an amazing gift. One that’s always ready and waiting for us to receive.
We wake up, our blind spots dissolve and our view is less obstructed.
We have clarity seeing things just as they are….not as we are!
We have insights.
We experience a connection to our innate wisdom and intelligence.
I’m just back from a yoga class and became aware that my ‘how am I doing tape?’ is hardly running any more.
What a revelation!
…and until the tape had wound right down, I hadn’t realised that it was running so constantly.
So with yoga the tape went something like… ‘I should go, I can’t be bothered, I’m too tired, it’s cold, I’m not sure about that teacher…’.
Then once I got there… ‘Am I feeling this, stretch harder, gosh look what that person’s able to do’. Yanking my body around, pulling it into poses rather than simply being with the breath and feeling my way….
And most significantly for me spending the class thinking about what I had to do afterwards, what I should have done before I went, blah blah blah all taking me away from being present to the moment.
Striving, straining and my internal critic all having a field day, under the guise of me trying to be a better version of myself.
Me? Lost…
The moment? Lost…
Mark Twain’s quote “Comparison is the death of Joy” really highlights how when we compare ourselves we can lose the joy of being present in that moment as comparison instantly invites us to step into observing ourselves and asking ‘how are we doing?’ in the moment, rather than just being in it.
I don’t know about you, but when I compare, I usually come up short, this or that could be better, improved upon….and even if I don’t come up short I can still feel uncomfortable. All in all the thinking about ‘where I am’ doesn’t nourish me.
Yes we can have all of these thoughts and none of these thoughts or a different set of thoughts.
That’s a normal part of being human.
When we remember that we are the sky and all of our thoughts are weather, we can settle. When we think we are the weather it can feel like a pretty rough ride.
The extent to which we engage our thinking and inhabit these thoughts is often where we get ‘lost in thought’ and miss out on being in the moment.
Being in the moment isn’t necessarily always joyful, it can be very uncomfortable which is often why we expend a lot of energy trying to avoid or protect ourselves from this experience.
As Sydney Banks said:
“If only we could learn not to be afraid of our experience that alone would change the world.”
The other day I heard someone explaining the purpose of experiencing Shivasana, the rest time at the end of yoga. Often we can be tempted to skip this part of class, as we’ve done the work out, so now back into the day. Or we stay but then spend the time listing all the things we have to do once we leave.
She said yoga can be akin to the work of making a delcious freshly squeezed juice. Shivasana is when we drink the juice. If we skip this we‘ve done all the work and then left without the receiving of the nourishment. This morning I recognized that I was present and able to receive. Now I feel nourished.
At the end of 2016 I had some private salsa dance lessons, where I was learning how to be led. It’s about knowing the moves, without anticipating the moves and without assuming the lead when I sense uncertainty on the part of my partner. Recognising my role is to stay in my centre, without anxious thinking about ‘will I know how to respond’ to a lead. Trusting myself. All very much a metaphor for what I have been realising this past year or two. I hope you enjoy!
Strong feelings and persistent thoughts appear to demand a lot of our attention and we can feel compelled to act on them. Many of which are unconscious and habitual.
However thoughts and feelings in and of themselves CANNOT be a problem. We cannot solve a thought or a feeling no matter how hard we try….and most of us try pretty hard. This is because they are simply thoughts and feelings!
I’m going to use the example of finding our work stressful. In this situation we often expend many hours thinking and worrying about it, we can even make ourselves feel quite sick about it. We would likely say we’re feeling stressed by our work, or our work is making us sick. Yet in reality it’s our thinking about our work that is causing our distress.
We can experience mental and emotional discomfort from our fixated thinking about a situation. We can also experience physical discomfort from this same thinking. The acute physical symptoms can be many and varied, but commonly can include quickened heart rate, headaches, stomach aches, change in bowel habits, stiff neck, tight jaw, disrupted sleep and nausea to name a few.
These can all manifest from us getting caught up in our thinking about various life situations.
It’s a vicious circle, as we can then go on to worry about our physical symptoms…and so the worry train chugs along – or races along – to an unwanted destination.
Simply noticing that we are having a lot of thinking about something and recognising that we have just ‘made it up’, is very powerful. Without interference our system naturally chooses to go in a different direction.
When we realise that we are feeling sad/angry/depressed we only need to acknowledge the presence of this feeling. There’s no benefit to giving it any more attention, no justifying, defending, analysing, blaming, fixing, putting a positive spin on it, pretending it’s not happening…this alone, significantly reduces our workload!
It is an inherent part of our human design that eventually these feelings WILL pass. We all have examples of times when distressing thoughts have just disappeared, because there was nothing to fix – because nothing was broken. Understanding this is freeing.
It’s a similar process to having a cold, it’s a nuisance, but with recognition of what is happening our inbuilt immune system deals with it.
It’s the same with thoughts and feelings. The intelligence of the inbuilt design of our mental and emotional systems allow us to experience the full range of thoughts and feelings without compromising the healthy functioning of our whole being.
We are free to trust that in any moment we will always have an appropriate response to whatever is presented to us in life….and it’s perfectly ok when that response is I don’t know. Because when what we “know” is that we don’t know, then we’re simply speaking the truth, and it creates the space for the known to become clear to us.
No preparation required…phew!! As a life long anticipator this is where I am waking up. Anticipating is engaging in unhelpful thinking. With the best of intentions it’s actually taken me down some roads that truly looked like they were going places, but which have often been filled with potholes and dead ends.
Anticipatory thoughts and feelings are just that. They don’t need solutions, no matter how good I’ve gotten at dreaming them up!
Staying comfortable in the unknown.
Listening to our inner knowing.
Knowing when we know. Knowing when we don’t know.
We are being led.
Dowe know how to follow?
As I’ve spent the last 24 years studying and working in the area of health and wellness it may be useful to explore how I see the similarity between our thinking and the functioning of our immune system.
Our immune system automatically knows how to respond to a bacteria/virus/ mutating cell but often we don’t pick up the signal, or we override it, as it doesn’t seem as important as something else that has our attention. Think of the advertisements for cold and flu medication – take this and soldier on!
Persistent inflammation can lead to dis-ease. For example the “‘itis” illnesses eg tonsillitis, gastritis, arthritis etc are a description of that body part experiencing inflammation. Talking and eating with tonsillitis is painful. Opening jars when you have arthritis in your hands and fingers really hurts and becomes very difficult. These are cues from our immune systems saying ‘don’t do this you’re causing yourself pain and more damage’.
Our immune systems are self-correcting but we have to play our part.
We are being led.
Do we remember how to follow?
It is wise to listen to our body when it’s in pain and distress. It’s one of the ways that the intelligence behind life communicates with us. When we stop and listen, it will occur to us how to respond.
Our often ‘unconscious over ride’ can result in our system having an inappropriate response to mutating cells. In a way our system is interpreting our over ride as ‘this is fine, nothing to worry about’ and it accommodates the dis-ease. Often our reaction to daily life is frenetic activity, which tends to shift the focus of our immune system to maintaining homeostasis within our endocrine (hormonal) system. Commonly this is accommodating the huge demand we place on our adrenals, which become exhausted from our ‘must do more and more and more’ reactions. Meanwhile the mutating cells quietly replicate and “out of nowhere” appears a diagnosis of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis or one of the many autoimmune diseases there are.
We are all aspects of a huge ecosystem. We are micro ecosystems within the macro. When we are tuned in we naturally connect with our innate wellbeing and are in harmony with the innate wellbeing of the macro system.
So when we’re getting more and more distressed by our anxious thinking it’s a big clue!
Stop and listen.
We are being led.
Our systems always know, in real time,
how to follow the lead of universal intelligence.
Our job is simply to listen to our inner knowing. This gets easier once we recognise that creating more noise in our heads about whatever the thought or feeling is, is inflammatory, and actually takes us further into distress.
Observing young children can help us remember this fearless way to be. They can be happy one minute and distraught the next when something is presented to them that is difficult for them to comprehend. However once they’ve hung out in that uncomfortable feeling for a while they move on to the next moment.
In my experience as a parent this all flows with much more ease when I get out of the way and stop seeing their feelings as a problem…and mine to try and fix! This is applicable to all of our relationships and to every aspect of life.
There is a calm air of acceptance that comes with allowing hanging out in the present moment, however it looks.
Over time this way of coming back home to our peaceful centre is our automatic response. The situations in our lives that used to look stressful, just look like what they are: Tired kids. A big workload. Moving house. A head cold.
