If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place. —Lao-Tzu
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a decision is being placed before you and your mind is in complete disagreement with your gut? Ultimately, did you discover that indeed your instincts were correct?
These moments of “intuitive knowing” shine an important light on one of the major limitations of maintaining a dependence on the mind’s perceptions and decision-making faculties.
For many, it is a given that their interpretations of people, situations, and events are a true reflection of reality. However, if this were indeed accurate, how does one reconcile that two people can experience the same event and have completely different perceptions of what occurred?
Our mind’s interpretations of the external world are significantly driven by our life experience, especially our early life experience. The first decade of life are the years in which we will come to develop our values and belief systems, understand how safe or unsafe the world is, what love looks like, how we should expect to be treated, how to treat others, and how to navigate and control our emotions. The information we gather during this time will greatly inform how the mind interprets the rest of our experience.
The mind is also a creature of habit. Just as water flows to a source along the path of least resistance, likewise the mind perceives and responds to external stimuli along the most established neural pathways. It is this efficiency in information processing that creates habituated behavior and accordingly can lock us into behaviors that may not ultimately serve us.
The more attached we are to our mental constructions of what is or should be, the less adaptable we may find ourselves. If the mind becomes the primary interpreter of our experience and driver of behavior, we are potentially restricting our ability to problem solve, since we may find ourselves locked into a limited spectrum of responses. This would help explain why many people stay stuck and continually choose ineffective reactions to the same situations over and over again. They are habituated in their decision-making.
Can you share an example of when it served you to trust your instinct or powers of discernment?
Please feel free to leave a comment. What you say could be helpful to someone else!
Special thanks to Aimee Eckhardt at Creatrix Design (www.creatrixdesign.net) for her skillful interpretation of my desires and responsiveness throughout. My gratitude, friend.