How do we change things?
It’s such a conundrum, isn’t it?
When I work with people or they come on one of my courses, this ‘How?’ question underpins everything.
- How do I stop doing this, that or the other?
- How can I start doing something else?
- How do I stop feeling a particular way?
- How do I stop these patterns of thinking, or feeling or behaving?
- HOW DO I CHANGE THIS?
And the answer is so close to home, we don't see it. It's actually in the question itself!
Because we need to look more closely at the ‘I’ in each of those questions.
What is that? Where is it? What agency does it have?
Could it be the mind, creating an identity out of historical, conditioned data, and then pretending it's us?
🧐
It really looks like it’s on ‘us’ – that ‘we’ have to make these changes, doesn’t it? (I mean, that makes sense.)
But one of the first Key Messages from the RECONNECT Course that I run is this:
You see, when a mind ‘pretends it’s you’ it also immediately takes on responsibility for the job of change.
’Cos if the mind is YOU and YOU need to change, then the MIND has to do the change, yeah?
And this is where we find ourselves spinning our wheels.
- Trying to stop doing this, that or the other
- Trying to start doing something else
- Trying to stop feeling a particular way
- Trying to stop patterns of thinking, or feeling or behaving
- TRYING TO CHANGE.
But what if…
That idea of you—what the mind is saying is you—is not actually you, and in reality is not in charge of anything?
🤔
Well, then it would be off the hook. Then it doesn’t have to do anything.
How cool would that be?
[Whispers]
(Keep this between me and you, but it’s only when the mind gets out of the way with its incessant tinkering and trying and controlling, that change can actually happen. But shhhh 🤫 … it’ll get all twitchy if it knows we’re on to it.)
Minds don’t like this
They like to think they’re in control. They simply cannot conceive of anything happening outside their sphere of influence, so when some smart-arse like me comes along and starts questioning their agency, they can get quite upset.
I’ve had people (minds) get pretty cross with me in the past, incensed that the answer to their problems could actually be:
(I mean, as I type that, it just seems wrong – how the hell’s anything going to change if we do nothing?! 🤣)
But it’s not really ‘nothing’.
- It’s listening. It’s staying open. It’s unlearning.
- It’s clearing away all the crap we’ve been conditioning to think our entire lives.
- It’s stepping out of our heads and back into life.
- It’s first seeing the stories that are invisibly running our lives, and then it’s getting free from them.
And when that happens, that thing that’s bugging you, that you’ve been trying to change all this time…?
It’s just going to go away.
😎
Giles
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Giles P Croft
All this TRYING. But “trying is lying” 😂 - let's explore this funny little saying together.