I know that educating people about the 3 ingredients that create human experience is a powerful pathway to increased feelings of wellbeing, clearer decision making and creativity/wisdom in living. However, that understanding is a radical shift in how we have learned to think about ourselves and life.
Whilst everyone has experience of what I point them to (because it is true for everyone), the way that we use thought (focus and content), gets in the way. I know the presence of the latter by its feeling – flat, fearful, low, anxious, busy, overwhelming, arrogant, angry, hesitant, timid, and more. They are created from our learned use of thought.
As sessions progress and people feel safer, their learned thinking wanes and their minds open to the understanding I bring. Safety allows thinking to calm. As it calms, we come home to a more natural state. Warm feelings, wisdom and clarity unfold and navigating life becomes way less effortful.
People generally enter sessions seeking a calmer and happier state of mind. That can’t be achieved with the thinking creating the busy and unhappy state of mind. The mind needs to slow down if insights, realisations and common sense steps are to be recognised.
I like to write in a journal. In my journal I have learned how to calm my mind and how to reap the treasures that lie within.
One journal activity I have found particularly useful to calming the mind is a strategy taken from Positive Psychology. I initially read about it here. It emerges from the observation that people tend to focus on the negatives in their day and/or create negative interpretations of the expressions of life manifesting around them.
This brief journaling technique turns our attention in the opposite direction to our learned habit. The instructions are simple. ‘Spend a few minutes at the end of the day making a list of 6 – 10 moments throughout the day that you appreciated for some reason or another.’ And when you wake up, try and remember as many as you can. After a week or so, increase the number to 12 – 20.
The purpose of the activity is not to test your memory. It is to change the habit of how you use attention and thought. In the process you will also experience the truth that your body feels what you think and that our external circumstances do not create our feelings, even when they are tough. The practice changes the wiring in your brain breaking the strength of its learned automaticity. It also has the potential to create a change in your awareness of how your experience is created. And … in the move to feeling better, you create the conditions for you to experience more of your innate intelligence, wisdom and creativity. The warmer our feelings, the closer we are to living from ‘home’ – before our conditioning.
If you are consistently feeling low, I offer this idea as something to try. But if it doesn’t appeal, then ask yourself ‘what can I do to slow down and come home’. The natural wisdom inside you, inside everyone, will guide you in your own unique way.
Image courtesy of @lucaupper Unsplash.com
Some time ago, in a mentoring session with a client, the client broke down at the thought of a family member’s unthinking remark. What I initially brought to that moment was what I have seen about the innate existence of wisdom in us all and how it played out in that scenario. The activity of innate wisdom is my slice I have seen deeply. Other West Australian practitioners most probably would have responded differently based on their own deep insights. 
Decades ago, when I was first exposed to the inside out understanding of how we create our experiences, my very first ‘different’ way of thinking about things was to see my thinking as ticker tape crossing my mind. I was doing the dishes at my kitchen sink and could see my thinking moving across my mind as ticket tape. It was the first time I could see my thinking separated from ‘me’.
Listen to that intelligence and you jump the boundaries of time. Listen to that intelligence and you don’t have to wait for hindsight to gain wisdom. Listen to that intelligence and you gain wisdom immediately. I once knew a man who had a friendship that did not serve him well. The friend undermined this man’s family life and his words contributed to the dissolution of this man’s marriage. A decade of experience with this friend later, the man could see what he had ignored a decade earlier and ended the friendship. The sad part is that wisdom was knocking on his thinking all those years ago but he ignored it. He ignored it and then needed a decade more of chaos before he accepted wisdom’s words. Because wisdom (the formless) is always coming up against our formed thinking – an operating system devoid of acknowledgement of gifted Divine intelligence. It is the repository of original sin – an absence of awareness. But once we wake up to the very real presence of wisdom streaming through us everything changes. As we listen to it we no longer need so much painful experience in order to learn, we jump the boundaries of time.
Georgina Mavor 