This is a shorter than normal post for me, but I hope it’s just as helpful.
I had a conversation with someone recently that has now given me a new perspective on how I see the things that had contribute to holding us back from doing the tasks and activities we know we need to to succeed at the goals we set ourselves.
There is a lot of talk and focus on mental health these days, which can only be a positive thing. Long gone are the days where we just need to push things down into a dark place where no one could even find them. But I also want to go on record as saying, to me mental health is mental freedom. Being free from the prison of your own mind. I’ve been there myself, and I know it’s a dark place, but I also know when you see what is creating it, you see a way out.
I learned the lesson hard way. When stuck in these negative trances our whole being spirals downhill. We get ourselves into a place where it’s hard to be productive, or it feels like a waste of time. I’ve been in that situation on more than one occasion. While I was there it was all-consuming and didn’t seem like it would end. But like the fish that doesn’t know it’s swimming in water, or the person that’s wandering lost in the valley, sometimes it only takes a moment to pop out to the high ground to gain some perspective.
Life, as we know it is one long trance of concepts. We call these beliefs, values or culture. They are kept firmly in place by familiarity and persistence. Seeing through it is what allows us to get out of our own way and make progress on the targets we set ourselves in life.
I used to believe that things always had to be hard, no specific thing, ‘just things’, and that I was a slow learner, but is that really true? Things are how they are, If I buy into them being hard, then to keep myself aligned with that belief I’ll find a way to justify that. As for being a slow learner, I now see that learning only takes a moment of clear understanding, full assimilation may take a little longer.
Over many years of experimentation people have found a way to change the form of the particular trance they are living in. Tools like Hypnosis, NLP and CBT are some examples of methods that have been tried and found some level of success. But what if you could go to the next level? Instead of trying to modify what is essentially made up you could see it for what it is? Something more fluid than fixed, more changeable than rigid, in essence see that, ‘Thought creates a trance that we then call reality’.
When we get caught in a negative thought storm we create a negative trance. One that tells us what we can’t do, that we’re less than or we have no control. This is the type of mindset that stops us from doing the very actions we need to do to achieve what we want. We don’t need to fix the trance by changing beliefs, we need to see it for what it is, a temporary reality that will shift as soon as we wake up to it and stop holding on so tight.
In short, we need to see through our own trance so we can get out of our own way and move forward by doing the things we know we need to do.
