Truth Bomb Tuesday: How to free up energy in your mind
We are not designed to make peace with our past.
Exactly the opposite actually. We are designed to learn from it.
It’s part of our basic programming. We make a mistake (we put a sharp thing in our mouth), and then we learn from it (don’t put sharp things in your mouth.)
We take the process for granted, but it’s actually pretty miraculous. There’s a part of our brain that takes the incredible complexity of our lived experience, and distils it down into generalised life lessons.
So impressive.
However, sometimes there just isn’t a reason for things, and there is no life-lesson to learn.
Sometimes bad things happen to us, and there’s just no explaining them.
Our mother was absent and uncaring. Our brother was violent. Our boss had temper issues and took it out on people. You’re loved one just wasn’t ready to be in a commited relationship.
Bad stuff happens. All the time.
But then I think we can find ourselves spending a lot time trying to figure out these experiences, and learn from them.
That’s a noble thing to do, but what happens if there just isn’t anything to learn? What if it was just a random piece of bad luck? What if you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the wrong bed with the wrong person?
We end up twisting ourselves in knots, trying to figure it out.
And then there’s two traps that I think we can fall into here.
The first is that when there isn’t a readily available external logic to go to (my boss was a bully because his boss was bullying him), the lesson-learner teams up with the self-reflective part of the mind.
What was my part is this story? Did I call this in somehow? Is it my fault?
Having a strong instinct for self-reflection is a good thing – a great thing. But we have to be careful it’s not blaming us for things that are just not ours.
But this can happen. When there’s not an obvious external explanation, we can go looking for internal explanations.
You don’t have to do that.
The second thing that can happen, I think, is that when we can’t draw a clear lesson from the experience immediately, we let our conscious mind move on.
BUT!! We also cleave off a part of our mind and say to it, “You stay here, in the past, and try and figure out what this experience was all about. Get back to me when you’ve got an answer.”
And so there’s always a part of you ‘living in the past’ tyring to learn from these painful experiences, in order to help you avoid them in the future.
But when there is no rhyme or reason, then that part of your mind just gets stuck there, rolling it over and over.
If you opened up the Activity Monitor of your mind, how many of these lesson learners would there be, just running as a back-ground task, chewing up memory and energy?
And how good would it be if we could just switch them off, and give more of our mind to our present?
I think it is possible.
And I think it starts with acceptance. It starts with just telling yourself. “It’s ok. That was just some random stuff that happened. I don’t have to learn from it. I don’t have to blame myself. It’s just what it was. I can accept it and move on.”
(This is a process that is probably best done in therapy.)
But I guess I just want to say that is it is possible to let these lesson-learners come home, and move a little more lightly in the world.
Not everything is a lesson.
And its not your fault.
DB.