“I can’t do that “she protested, I just can’t feel the principles but I think I understand them intellectually”. “ I don’t know what it feels like to follow the feeling or to follow my own instinct, everything feels fuzzy and numb and I’m scared and I don’t know what to do”.
This was a sample of a conversation between myself and a coaching client this week. She was scared about the future, uncertain of the present moment and petrified of the past coming back to haunt her if she made yet another wrong decision again.
I didn’t realize she was a time traveler.
I love conversations like this. I sit and I listen. I watch and I hear the space between their words. Human facial expressions changing as thought flows through every fiber of their being. In conversations like this I can clearly see fear climbing all over people’s faces like a poison ivy strangling a tree trunk and taking over its nutrient supply.
And this is not an irregular occurrence.
Thoughts flow through our minds passively until we get a hold of them and add a wee dash of consciousness and then scare the bejesus out of ourselves. I know this to be true cause I still do it to myself from time to time as does every human being on the planet.
My client was stuck in a time machine loop that kept bringing her back to the same thought and the same reaction over and over again. She believed that just because it kept repeating itself it must be true.
You see she knew about the principles and she knew that it was only her thinking but then started to give herself a really hard time about it.
Those of you who know me and have been on my mailing list for a while know I am a wee bit naughty so you understand sometimes I do have to laugh when I see this happening time and time again….it reminds me of a tail wagging the dog….I know, I know…my bad!
Endless stories, endless loops of information, endless confusion and knicker elastic getting in a monumental twist. I have been there and done that.
What if….you were making it all up? What if the stories you had created about knowing the principles but not feeling them was like a huge big imaginary wall that you had erected to stop you from evolving?
But what if there wasn’t a wall? What if there was no difference between intellect and feeling? What if you had just forgotten what your gut instinct actually felt like but had been using it all along? What if the principles were not actually a thing? What if everything was just an illusion? What if you just dropped your attention on your thinking for a few moments….what if…what if….what if…..what if…….
The best thing I can do when I have a client spinning in front of me like this is to get quiet and consistently point them back to how their operating system actually works. The content of their thinking means nothing to me. That is not my department however pointing them in the direction of the nature of the principles is.
This is how I create flourishing mental health in my clients, listening to their backstories and their forward stories and their present moment stories can be quite juicy but to be honest I don’t like to waste people’s time nor their money. I go in for the kill….well not literally.
This client in front of me was killing herself slowly by stressing herself out about the difference between an intellectual understanding of the principles and living from this space. When we have stressful thoughts we trigger cortisol release. Once the alarm to release cortisol has sounded, your body becomes mobilized and ready for action—but there has to be a physical release of fight or flight. Otherwise, cortisol levels build up in the blood which wreaks havoc on your mind and body, and within a couple of minutes of this repeated cortisol release your body begins to become inflamed. That leads to all sorts of morbidity and mortality.
Our brains are great story-tellers kindly filling in the blanks and filing information to help us make sense of the world based on the memories and information stored within it. Storage is the more or less passive process of retaining information in the brain, whether in the sensory memory,the short term memory or the more permanent long term memory. Each of these different stages of human memory function as a sort of filter that helps to protect us from the flood of information that confronts us on a daily basis, avoiding an overload of information and helping to keep us sane. The more the information is repeated or used, the more likely it is to be retained in our long term memory(which is why, for example, studying helps people to perform better on tests).
Our brains are magnificent machines but our minds are powerhouses.
When we live in what we think we know we miss out on what we have not experienced yet.
This beautiful space of living is a blank slate, a playground, an empty ice rink, a pavement covered in snow waiting for us to create our own footprint fresh in the moment.
And there are no boundaries in our world only rules, regulations and laws that originated from someone using the gifts of mind, thought and consciousness to create something from nothing. Some protect us, some limit us and some are completely useless.
We create boundaries, rules and regulations in our minds to that limit and control us and only because we believe they are real. This is what my client was doing and as my understanding deepens this becomes more apparent in me too.
Once we see that we are the creator of our experience of life always from the inside out from our beautiful gifts of mind, thought and consciousness our stories become visible to us and the boundaries dissolve away leaving us with a brighter and more hopeful experience of life in every moment.
By the end of our session, my client saw more deeply how her stories of what she could and couldn’t understand and could and couldn’t feel were keeping her prisoned in her own mind. My advice is “ good you saw something now go and just live and don’t analyse your insight to death”
Make space for your own insights …live life in the moment…see through the fact that you are a thinking creature making harmless little stories up in your mind and for goodness sake if you every have stressful thoughts and cortisol is released in your body start running furiously to use it up so it doesn’t cause inflammation in your body. There is enough morbidity and mortality in this world.[/fusion_text][fusion_text]Until next time
Take care, be naughty and let life live through you,
All my love,
Jacquie Forde RGN RM
