The Importance of Acknowledging the Mind’s Stories & Spiritual By-Passing
Do you know what fascinates me?
How we (as human beings) give meaning to things. “Things” can be anything. Anything that enters our awareness through the subtle gates of the senses, thus creating a “feeling” inside, a resonance, which in some individual ways “touches” us. And based on these resonances, the mind uses that input to create a meaningful “story” (you could also call it a “coherent interpretation” that makes subjective sense based on where the focus of the experience was laid and how previous experiences have been happening).
I got to understand for myself that resonance happens without us having to do anything. Simply me BEING THERE in every moment, with everything I bring to the table (the complete setup of what makes me “me” in a given moment, all the beliefs, the body conditions, the emotional and mental state, the past stories I lived, etc.). No agenda is needed, no control or defence mechanism can really make it happen on purpose or keep it from me THAT something is felt and resonating. It’s a whole being experience. Like a natural law. And whatever comes to a conscious connection with me creates an individual pattern in that interaction.
This is where it becomes interesting for me. Let’s take an examle: A car accident. 10 people are involved. The seemingly same situation everyone is in, but the feeling and the reality (and therefore the memory) each person creates is in most cases (as far as I can speak from experiences) different for every person. The policeman taking the eyewitness-accounts of what happened can be quite revealing for this, as descriptions of the “truth” of what happened (i.e. what people witnessed) can be quite different in the details.
What is remarkable is the fact that these resonances (seeing them as energetic processes) do not always leave people after a situation has passed. Emotions can stay in the body (the well-known “frog in the throat”, the “stone in the stomach pit”, “the tears never cried”,…) and if not properly metabolized and released might lead to beliefs being formed, which are closely related to how one feels about “oneself” or about other people or situations.
While having accompanied people in different situations, and also having seen and being part of entrepreneurial environments as well as spiritual environments of people creating the life they want and becoming “truer/better versions of themselves”, I came to realize for me that these interpretations of what happens to us (many people call it “the mind’s stories) play a crucial role when it comes to finding the freedom, happiness and peace in ourselves that so many people look for.
What I found valueable in that regard is that we must be conscious HOW we relate with our stories if we want to come closer to ourselves and develop the skill to live freely (“free” meaning being truly free to choose our own response to a situation we experience — a response that is leaving us feeling “good” inside, i.e. a behavior that is aligned with our core being) without being unconsciously attached to only a few options of response, for example how to respond to your child if it drops your favourite coffee cup on the kitchen floor and you have to pick of the pieces?).
I saw two extremes over the last years which are in my opinion not helpful. The first you could call “spiritual by-passing” our stories by saying: “Whatever the mind creates is illusionary and should be disregarded. I must not listen to them. Listening to the mind keeps me from “waking up” “.
The second extreme does the opposite: It listens to everything the small brother mind creates, and we get entangled in emotional rollercoasters and lose touch with our own presence. By being exclusively identified with all the stories we tell ourselves (although their base energy is that of an attachment to some sort of lack belief we have), our mind feeds itself and receives all the energy we can muster. The result often is a stressful life, no space and time for ourselves anymore, feeling of personal alienation, feeling stuck,… add what you feel fit.
From what I found to be true for myself, stories are in the forefront of the mind because of two basic reasons:
1. Telling stories (i.e. giving meaning to experiences in a coherent way over time) is a NATURAL FUNCTION of the mind, because the mind is basically a tool of consciousness that creates an output from sensory input, giving its best to help us to survive in the environment we are in and to give structure to the manifestations we create through action. Because of this, however, “bad” mental habits are easily formed and we become unconscious of them, since habits/behavioral patterns are nature’s way to run on energy-saving autopilot. Habits are good, as long as we choose them consciously.
2. If I did not resolve experiences from the past in a way that emotions were able to be felt, expressed (btw: emotion comes from the Latin word “e-movere”, meaning “to move to the outside/express”) and un-tense, I begin to establish descriptions and definitions of my reality that do not serve me, because they take away from my freedom to choose my actions freely and attach me to one specific or only few options of action, although in fact there would be many more.
This means: The more body-attached emotional energy and trapped tension and the more un-aligned beliefs I carry inside of me, the more active the mind becomes, because any situation causes lots of friction in the system, as deep inside I KNOW that this is not how I want to live and feel.
Therefore I choose two practices:
1. Consciously going into my stories that make me feel not good. I ask myself the nasty questions the ego initially doesn’t feel comfortable with, and I uncover the deeper beliefs and emotions that govern my stories and actions. Often it comes down to some form of issue with self-trust, self-love and self-worth, which my mind projects on others and creates big drama around it.
Allowing myself to speak the relative truth of what I believe, thus evoking the feeling it carries and expressing that through the body. This opens the way for deeper healing and release and gives me the possibility to let go of stuck energy and find a new description of this part of my reality and therefore the option to rewrite my story. The result is that I simply feel better in myself, because I embodied a bit more of my own truth.
What I realize as an important is this: You cannot expect to change your life by ignoring what is a truth for your mind. It is necessary to look at it closely, allowing it as a transitionary fact, giving space for it and through facing it like that coming home to yourself because your essential truth can heal this false truth in the light of awareness. The way to make this happen is giving it loving, un-judgmental attention and listen to to it closely without identifying. Ask “WHY” and “WHERE DOES IT COME FROM”.
2. Giving space to myself and coming back to presence (call it mindfulness practice if you want). In this I use the realization that all my reality is merely a very intricate construction of the mind powered by the input of the senses. Anything that I seem to “see”, “feel”, “hear”, “smell” or “taste” OUT THERE, is in fact only projected there. By tracing it back all sensory information is merely a feeling in my consciousness. A simple moment to moment flow of information, in itself without any meaning.
Seeing this, I can see that all that remains of what I call “ME” is only AWARENESS. The “I” that my construction-obsessed mind-friend wants to make me belief I “am” is the container itself that looks at all the input from the senses without the need to do anything with them.
Paradoxic? For sure. But isn’t that the beauty of it? Coming to my senses literally means “resting in peace”, the peace that emerges once I let go of the urge to “make something” of the information I get from my senses. Yet that doesn’t mean I deny the relative existence and importance and effect that stories, emotions, energy and beliefs have on my mind-body.
I find there’s truth in the realization that in order to live freely, I have to embrace both the subjective reality I created in my life until now from all I perceived and made of it AND let myself drop in to the mere presence that I AM.
Basically, we are free to believe in ANY story we want and any perspective we desire. However, we are only actually free to choose freely, if we are not emotionally attached to some specific story that part of us prefers to believe in instead (even if it makes us unfree). We have to feel and embody our own truth first before we can make empowered choices that set us free.
In this flow of ALLOWING LIFE and creating from what feels true for me I am reborn to live really freely.
The strict limits I set for myself for many years are my self-given rules. By questioning these rules I discovered that I am capable of much more than my mind wanted to belief.
What changed in my life by acknowledging my “stories” and all that is attached to it?
I feel love for myself. I am better able to let other people have THEIR perspective on things while feeling good in keeping and honoring my own without the typical bad conscience of feeling inappropriate. I am more centered in myself and trust myself more. I get a sense for the fact that we live on one planet together, but this planet holds many different worlds and spaces for everybody — and this is wonderful. I came to understand that there is a big love for other people behind all stories that try to seperate us from each other, and allowing others their space doesn’t mean that I lose mine. I feel peace inside even when I am surrounded by business. And I look forward to create joyfully what I want, because I know that I am the only one who can give me permission to set myself free from any expectations.
What do you choose? Conscious freedom or unconscious attachment? Your stories hold the key to the first.
