Think of how a 6-year-old would feel if they suddenly had to be the teacher, know all the answers and be super responsible all the time. That wouldn’t go well. We expect our left brain, cognitive mind, to do the work of all of our intelligent systems, this is why we get so overwhelmed.
The Problems with Living in your Head.
You wake up.
For a brief moment peace is still available in between slumber and waking, but then, your ‘mind’ wakes up.
To-do’s, activities, duties, and digital reminders infiltrate the peace and space that was there only brief moments ago. Where did that space go?
Well, it’s actually still there. We’ve just become so accustomed to noise and stuff and busy, we don’t know any other way is possible. So the chatter creeps into our mind, and we simply accept this as “normal”.
“We can’t change what we’ve learned to tolerate.”
I call this Mind Dominance.
The term I use to describe living from the Mind, the left-cognitive mind, is Mind Dominance. Literally, we live dominantly from our mind as a learned state, it’s simply the default intelligence we use, not the entire intelligence we have available. This term helps me to teach others there’s more to our intelligence than our thinking, strategy, analyzing, doing self.
Jill Bolte Taylor, riveted her Ted Talk audience describing her first-hand account of what the left-brain is for, and what happens when it has a stroke!
When the left brain is not dominating, is so much more.
There is our Heart intelligence.
Our Body intelligence.
And our Energetic/Spirit intelligence.
But here, we are talking about Mind Dominance. In particular, why mind dominance is so sneaky because we don’t even know we have options.
I am very careful when I first work with clients who truly identify with how much they get done as how successful a day they had. I call this ‘the societal checklists of success; which is making each second productive by checking off things we need to do that we never considered whether we want to, or need to or not. We do them because ‘that’s just what people do.’ We also use these things as a measurement of our worth.
This is mind dominance because we don’t access our soul, body and heart when we are driving forward constantly and chasing ideals that might not even be OUR ideals. It is a busy life, and it is a noisy life. Surprisingly, always needing to be DOing leads to a life of feeling perpetually behind and never good enough. I was there, and am so glad I learned other possibilities. Who wants to race to end only to still feel like a loser?
I didn’t want to spend more time in that rat race, hamster wheel. It simply didn’t make sense as I explored in Spirituality, Psychotherapy and Transformation to find there IS another way and we all can access it. That way is accessing all of our selves, and therefore our Being.
Resting, pausing, and anything other than doing will evoke a mild growing anxiety at first until you start doing again to appease this programming. When you start weaving in times of leisure, pleasure or inactivity consciously, not lazily, you can allow your whole self-intelligence some space to really get things done in the subconscious mind. This part of us can process millions of bits of information per second, compared to the measly 7-12 bits per second the cognitive mind is limited to. Therefore, it is actually more productive to have more space in your mind and you life.
How did we end up like this?
We as a collective we all got on board with caring more about the external approval of “them” than our own inner truth. We also as a society started to value perfectionism and grinding to be successful while abandoning our natural human needs.
Now, back in the day disapproval from others might have meant being exiled and therefore death, so it’s not totally whacky from that perspective that we feel we need to keep up with society’s idea of success. But now, we can make different choices and have the ability to live a more evolved life. We can be successful, present, and get lots of the right stuff done with a clear, confident mind.
We do not have to be busy for busy sake, we don’t have to live by other people’s rulebooks.
It’s really friggin scary to start. But it is completely worth it. Think about it:
Who are you if you aren’t…
what you do?
your identity?
your job?
male/female?
your culture?
your reputation?
Who are you?
Phew, big questions. Take a break. I can feel the steam piping out your ears from mental overload. Why? Because our left cognitive mind was NEVER built for these parts of our lives.
Think of how a 6-year-old would feel if they suddenly had to be the teacher, know all the answers and be super responsible all the time. That wouldn’t go well. We expect our left brain, cognitive mind, to do the work of all of our intelligent systems, this is why we get so overwhelmed. We were never meant to operate this imbalanced way.
Creativity,
Possibility,
Originality,
Satisfaction,
Innovation,
Soul-lead living,
Approaching the unknown and not being phased…
These areas are the realms of our WHOLE intelligent being. When we only live from the thinky-thinky mind we are so limited and rarely fulfilled.
What does this all mean?!
You are most likely reading this from the mindset of Mind Dominance that I’m discussing in this article. So these airy-fairy words and concepts just kinda plunk off of the metal sheet in front of your head. “NOPE, that sounds dumb or confusing I’m going to disregard it entirely and stick with what I do know.” is what your mind would say.
I get it!
I’ve taken hundreds of people through this process.
So many people have experienced the freedom of not being valuable because of what they do, but who they are.
You are worthy because you are breathing, your heart is beating, you aren’t flying off the face of the earth because gravity loves you enough to keep you snug as a bug, safely on earth.
What would that be like? To not have to prove your value or worth?
To already be good enough, and THEN choose what you want to do with yourself and your life.
Whole Being Intelligence takes time to re-connect to and develop. It is actually our natural state when we are in harmony with ourselves and the world.
Takeaways:
You don’t have to DO to be worthy.
You can choose your life based on what is aligned with your true nature and CHOOSE your actions from there; from wholeness and a sense of unconditional worth.
Your mind left cognitive mind, is only ONE aspect of you. Peace is possible. You don’t have to always be thinking thoughts! The mind can actually be a peaceful sky with clouds floating around when you live as a whole intelligent being.