You are not your Mind
At times our mind may help us move quickly and safely to the next task we have in mind. Or the mind may set up proximal behaviors to the self to continue to gain energy from resources that we desire or need to maintain our standards for living. Our minds are very important and all powerful. However remember, you are not your mind. You are more than that! The mind is a part of the whole you, as a person on your journey of living your most optimal life.
We all exist within a social setting or context and our mind makes every effort to assist us to maintain safety and keep our world predictable. “Watch out and be careful”, says the mind. Our mind is set to remain focused on resource acquisition with the “stuff” that fuels our soul and on a schedule of how we are accustomed to. As it does this over time, certain experiencing is embedded deeply in the caverns of our mind and gets layered over time. These fusions of private events from our past may be, for example, the symphony of our life that may drown out novel and new sounds as they come to us. In such then that a underlying negative feeling state may readjust our experiencing, in any novel moment, to make it fit with what our mind knows instead of having the mind learn anew based on the purity of mental processing in the moment.
A negative feeling state from past hurts may create emotional and perceptual difficulty in the aspect of sensory-perceptual experiences, leading to poor or damaged apperception formation. This may aid in the process of keeping us in a state of feeling or thinking like a victim or keeping us in mind to understand our world we live in as less than. In any significant event of the past we may also create verbal rules that are created on how to live and make choice in the world we are embedded within. These verbal rules are now a set guideline and can greatly limit our choice-making in the moment. The mind would rather you do what it says! It is trying to make your behaviors predictable so as to keep you safe. Thank your mind for that, even if sarcastically or in a joking way.
Often these verbal rules are learned from early childhood experiencing. I often joke with my clients and tell them not to worry since any faults that they may perceive to have are all not their own but rather their parents. In part this may be true, however I will also say that we have a choice to not be a victim and to rather be a survivor of our past and how our mind perceives it. Or at least understand that our parents problems were actually not theirs either but rather a production of their own parents. Transgenerational processes are dynamic to understand and perhaps you may be the first to make the family transgenerational change needed to help your family lineage over the course of its’ existence be most righteous.
Remember you are not your mind. We are more what we do and value and the energies that we have as a functioning whole person. The mind is just a part of who we are in totality as we operate in our World. One helpful tactic to not let your mind get the best of you, is to create a dialogue with your mind and develop a relationship of change with it. Often one of the first imagery exercises I use is to have the person hold their mind in their hands and describe it, shape color etc. and begin to perceive the mind as something to hold and care for in our hands and not something to be afraid of or obey or any other negative relationship we may have with our mind. Once we are able to imagine this then we build the dialogue with our minds and begin the process of acceptance of private events and opening up to experiencing from a en-heightened sensory capability with various techniques to ground us and hone in on our focus.
In our minds there are private events. These are intrinsic thoughts, feeling states, urges, and images that our minds have. Often good therapy work involves aspects of acceptance of private events even when we meta-cognitively perceive them to be a negative force to daily living and wellness. Meaning that we learn to accept our private events and not let them determine our teleology or choice-making dependent of our negative private events such as for example a low-feeling state from past social events that become mentally infused into negative energies within our mind. In this respect we might, for example, become more reactive to our emotional state (not feeling state as they are different concepts) which may lead to choice-making that is not sufficiently in line with what we desire in a potential outcome or simply not making the best, most informed choices. Which is again why acceptance in coordination with opening up to experiencing is essential to optimal human functionality over time. Being accepting allows us to focus energy and mental dynamics on not pushing out unwanted thoughts or other private events. This is exhausting and most often only works temporarily! We are expending our “selves” when we avoid or push out unwanted private events! Acceptance allows us to make mental room for present tensing and being in the here, right now to make the choice we make with more salient information gained from our context that contains value concurrent elements about what we care about.
Acceptance takes great practice and time to achieve at a level where you can fully work it well. Assuming you have that ability you may then open up to your World and gain the new and novel within it or grab elements in line with your values that are most value congruent. Your percept formations may now be assimilated and accommodated into your working mind as you act in line with what you care about most in this moment. Humans perceive and what comes before perception in the act of opening up is sensory experience. The more open we are to sensory experience the better potential for proper percept formations which become perceptions.
We sense elements from our social context to form percepts in our sensory experiencing. For example, At one time, a long time ago, we did not understand that an upside down smile was a frown and that the frown we perceived on another person may limit the social interactions held together or change our interactions dynamically from the moment. The frown was then learned newly, just as the fast moving four wheeled thing moving down the street in front of your house and making a vvvvvrrrmmmmm noise was told to you that it was a car by your parent. As we open up we must be willing to learn anew and not be readily dependent on our mind to make reactionary decisions. As we open up in coordination with acceptance we then are perceiving from a more pure sensory experiencing and less from verbal rules and other private events embedded in our minds from past experiencing. In this way we auto-correct our new normative nominal experience and new homeostasis of being mindful and mentally dynamic in accordance with how we truly want to live our lives with values that we hold dear. We may now with proper supports from our self and others gain a new way of living in our world we choose to make our way in. Our mind can learn to perceive in a new light even when set and coming from the darkest crevasse of our mind. Having the power to make a choice become an action and not to be reactive to our minds is a key in becoming who we want to be and living how we want to live.
https://contextualscience.org/the_six_core_processes_of_act
whiteoakinstitute.net 