Our minds are both the tool that can enable us to achieve the seemingly impossible, and the very tool to shut us down and keep us feeling stuck! I am always interested to see what stories our minds are playing to us and how we can re-program the show reel when we are feeling triggered.
This week I felt pulled into healing my story of "no one ever invites me out". It is a theme that comes up every now and then and you'll notice with your own stories that if you track them there will be a patterning around when they surface. For me it's when I'm swamped with housework, kids etc and lacking connection outside of the home. So, my mind started the process of filtering and sorting through all the experiences or lack thereof to prove the point "no one ever invites me out" to be true. Thoughts like I'm too serious, or I'm not fun enough or maybe it's that I'm not much of a drinker surfaced. Luckily, I have done significant work on re-framing, so I knew shortly into this episode that it was merely my perception and an old story re-running.
The key to catching the mind out is in the language. Look for the use of "always, never, anyone, no one, everybody, everything". They are all one-sided statements. Words that are fixed like that are a key sign that your perception is one sided and your mind is filtering what it chooses to see, to prove a point.
The danger of the mind being this way is that not only it messes with our perception, it also then messes with our ability to manifest the opportunities and experiences we want. We then start to manifest the very thing that is paining us. So, if I had chosen to fix on the idea that no one wants to go out with me then I would attract more of that and thus the thoughts and perceptions set in deeper and deeper. When I challenged those unhelpful thoughts and re-framed to find the other side, I could of course find many examples to prove the opposite existed.
Language and self-talk are really a feedback mechanism. We have become so accustomed to listening to the mind thinking it is the logical place to think and act that we have lost our ability to see the whole parts of ourselves, others and the experiences and opportunities we have. Pay attention to how you speak and notice when you are seeing the world through one lens and see if you can challenge it. It does take practice and I still get moments where I get it wrong because I am human like you but you will find like building muscles from exercise, the more you practice the better and faster you get at catching your mind out.
Julz
xx
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