Do You Believe the Stories Your Mind Tells You?

Has this happened to you? Something happens and you get upset. Your boyfriend doesn’t call you back at the time he said he would. You get upset and before you know it, your mind goes down a rabbit hole.  You then can’t focus on anything else. Your mind spins and the story goes like this:

How could he be so inconsiderate? 

Doesn’t he think about me? 

Why am I more invested in this relationship than he is? 

This is never going to work. I am going to break up with him when he does finally call. 

Welcome to the land of stories! 

Something as innocuous as a misunderstanding or a miscommunication or someone just getting distracted and being forgetful turns into a battle. This battle could be righteousness and lend itself into righteous indignation.  We become fixed in our own perspective, lose empathy or understanding for another and cause annihilation. At the center of all this is our activation and our stories. 

You start projecting all these ideas onto the other person: why he said what he did, why he’s so careless, what must be wrong with me and why does this keep happening? 

And where does all this happen. It happens in one place: your mind. 

Inevitability you start to feel lousy in the stories. You may ruminate on it for minutes, hours and days, not being present to anything else that is going on in your life. Then you start pulling all kinds of negative energy towards you. As with any story, the mind starts to look for evidence for why you should be upset and you are no longer safe and cannot trust. It all seems so REAL – this place of stories that we’ve created and keep on visiting over and over. 

The Main Character of our Stories

The protective part – the self or the ego is just trying to keep you safe. Safe, on its terms means that you never get hurt, scared, or undermined ever again.  Unfortunately, it goes about trying to keep you safe in all sorts of detrimental ways. 

Say you fell in love with someone in college and this person broke your heart. Or your last partner cheated on you and you felt like a fool. Your protective part has kept a good score of the signs and will go to great lengths to keep you safe by never letting you get too close to someone. This way, the protector can guarantee you’ll never be devastated again. 

Or maybe you were not prioritized as a kid. You had many siblings and your parents spread themselves between you and your brothers and sisters while working to make ends meet. You were invisible and felt a lot of pain around not being attended to. This scar gets scratched every time someone doesn’t attend to you in the way you long for or wish for and the rawness stirs up the old painful emotion. 

At times, you thought you buried all this and dealt with it and there it is again. At any sign of “attack” your protector conjures up all the stories that were made up as a kid about your worth and lovability. 

Real Safety Isn’t in your Mind, No Matter How Much You Think

Being ruled by the protective part of you isn’t fun. It constantly perceives threat and creates a false sense of safety. 

This becomes your prison and fear takes over, tightening the Gordian knot. There is no real safety in this prison or in fear. 

If you’re always on the offensive, there is still no guarantee against outside circumstances. You have no control over what happens out there. Control is an illusion. 

You’re only true safety lies in knowing that you can handle whatever is happening. 

When you can interrupt the breaker switch that creates the stories, you are no longer expending energy in creating stories that are probably not even true and are only fueling the fire. 

You move from being in the negative past or projecting a chaotic future. You become more present and ultimately, more empathic to what is happening in real time. 

Your boyfriend might have just got caught up in something unexpectedly or ran out of juice on his phone and doesn’t have his phone charger. The story no longer matches the reality. 

Your Body is Your Safest Haven and it knows the Truth

When your mind goes into stories over a perceived slight or attack, you’ve essentially tuned out of your body. Your body is the only place where you’ll find the real story. 

The real story is that you are magnificent. And you are LOVE.

Your body, unencumbered by all the thoughts of your mind, knows this intuitively. It knows that that no matter what happens “out there”; the core of who you are is LOVE and cannot be touched. 

Your body has been trying to talk with you all the time. The soul speaks to the body, and the body speaks to the mind. But your mind has been drowning it out with its nonsense. 

When you anchor into your body, your mind is tethered and will no longer go into the stories that in turn generate fragmented energy that weighs you down, exhausts and you and keep you from living the magnificent life you were born for. 

See, your true self doesn’t worry, or fret or feel that the world is against you. 

Your true self simply is. And what is….is magnificent. 

In this magnificence, there is ease. Your true self knows that is it not defined by what anyone says or does – or doesn’t say or do. It knows that you are safe just because you exist and it also knows that everyone else is too. Your true self knows that if anyone is behaving a way that does not feel right, kind or safe, it’s because they are being driven by their protector or ego. 

But as long as you allow your protector to rule the show, you’ll be robbing yourself of everything you were meant to be and experience. You can’t be in protection and connection at the same time. 

How to Live the Magnificence You Already Are 

You really have two choices: you can go to the mind and keep trying to figure out why that person did this or that – and keep spinning – or you can take your attention to your body for a greater sense of self and the situation. 

By bringing conscious attention and awareness to what is underneath the mind, ie to shift your awareness from the mind to the body, you’ll not only feel calmer and not at the mercy of life. You’ll also free up all this space to start generating new ideas and solutions for your life. 

Your body is always trying to communicate with you – whether through a gut feeling or a lump in the throat, or the tinnitus (ringing) in your ear. These are all messages from your authentic self-saying: Will you please listen? 

So, here are 4 questions: to consider:

• Name the emotion you are feeling: (pick from these feeling words, anger, sadness, shame, guilt, love, fear, joy)
• Where do you feel this in your body: eg. stomach
• What is the sensation there? eg. tightness
• If this tightness could speak, what would it say? It’s time to take a break and rest

Keep on cycling through the 4 questions as different emotions and body sensations arise. By listening to your body, you are moving out of the madness of the mind. 

In addition, another body awareness technique is breathing. Breathe in and out of your nose. Breath in for a count of 2, exhale to a count of 4, breathe in for a count of 3, exhale for a count of 6, breathe in for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 8 and then breathe in for a count of 3 and exhale for a count of 6 and back to a count of 2 and 4. Allow yourself to feel calmer and have more space. 

With these 2 techniques, you’ll get more used to operating in this relaxed state – regardless of your external circumstances, so you are not like a leaf blowing in the wind, affected by circumstances. You stay grounded, no matter what’s happening. And that is the real story. 

Stay tuned for the upcoming Stress Detox course that will be provided in 2024. Happy holidays to you and your family and may you feel peace and relaxation this season.