1/4 mile walk - this is apparently my new distance.
you know what's frustrating, the fact that i think i have my shit together and i feel centered and focused and good about myself and what i'm doing and then.. it's like i'm in a silent room and i can hear this really thin piece of glass break, it's an emotional thread, a bit of sanity and when it goes.. i mourn it's passing. there went another piece of me, for whatever reason why. i just can't put my finger on it. all of the stress and shit that i thought i let go and pass just comes slamming into me like a brick wall and i feel insignificant and there's a figure looming over me, telling me i'm not good enough, i have no business being happy, trying to make myself better. i have no business being here. in the land of the living. the cool kids table of life. i don't belong. i think there's a gremlin in there.. throwing wrenches in the cogs of my brain.
i have no idea where i'm going with this. life is such a mixed bag of emotions.
does anyone know how to let go?
We live life in Narratives - stories that make sense of the world. We don't see the world as it actually is - that's far too much information for our brains to take in, so we filter it all the time. And depending on the narrative/ the story we are in/ the filter, it has a profound effect on how we experience the world.
ReplyDeleteIf I tell you to think of Red. Concentrate on Red. Now look round your room and note everything that is Red. Now leave the room and on a sheet of paper, write down everything that was red in your room. At the end, you would probably find you had a pretty good list and would have most of it there. However, if after leaving the room, I said, "now write down everything that's blue in your room", you would struggle like mad, and only get a fraction of the number of things.
Quite simply, when you instructed your mind to focus on Red, it filtered out anything that seemed irrelevant, and that included blue, green, yellow, etc.
The room is the same, but your experience of it changed because of the instructions you gave yourself.
The whole of life is like this. When we feel low, all we can see, think, feel and connect to is stuff that makes us feel low. When we feel really good, we aren't thinking about what makes us low, and we can easily recall many other times we felt good.
The thing is, we don't live in just one Narrative - we constantly move between many different ones. But we are so good at doing it, we don't even notice we are. So we think everything we experience is really real in that moment. But we are only experiencing it according to our filters at that moment.
Change the filter, change the story, change the Narrative - and we fundamentally change the experience.
So when we feel crushing depression, we are not seeing the world "as it really is" - we are seeing it through that particular filter.
Once we realise this, it allows us to begin to recognise when we are experiencing things through a particular filter. We can also learn how to change our filters and even construct new ones over time.
It's not necessarily that easy, but it can be done. And it can help hugely.
Does any of that make sense, or am I just rabbiting on again?
i believe we had this conversation a couple of years ago. i wasn't ready for it then. i feel ready now, to create my own narrative. =)
ReplyDeletethanks Kim, for being such a good friend.