Goggles

One of my all time favourite metaphors is the notion of goggles.

It’s something that comes up regularly with clients, because it’s something that’s happening to all of us, all the time, without exception.

(It’s another way of talking about our Thought System 📦 and the fact that we experience everything through its filter.)

But goggles is a really easy metaphor to get your head round, because we’ve all worn tinted glasses at some point, and we know what the world looks like through them.

If I go out riding on my bike, wearing red-tinted lenses, it’s a bit odd-looking at first, and then I get used to it. It becomes a ‘new normal’ and I just don’t notice it. At all. Even though I’m no longer seeing things clearly, but actually a bit red-tinted!

Crucially, everywhere I look and everything I look at is tinted this way. (Even though I no longer notice.)

And when I take them off, everything looks weird again. For a bit.

Here’s one of my favourite comic strips, Sufi Comics, expressing this in their usual beautiful imagery:

How does this relate to wellbeing?

• If we’ve got our overwhelm goggles on, everywhere we look, there’ll be overwhelm. (You know this, because you’ve experienced it.)
• If we’ve got our angry goggles on… there’ll be a lot to be angry about. (They call it ‘Seeing red’ for a reason, you know?)
• If we’ve got our grateful goggles on… there’ll all of a sudden be a lot to be grateful for.

Because that is literally the reality we are inhabiting in that moment. It’s everything we know, and it all looks true!

(Remember – just like the red-tinted lenses when I’m out cycling.)

To paraphrase Stephen Covey:

We see the world not as it is, but as our goggles are.

(He said it better, but you get what I mean.)

What to do about this?

Ok, I’m going to give you a very short list of things not to do, and we’ll see if we can answer this question.

1. You don’t have to change what it is you’re looking at (i.e. your circumstances) to feel differently. (That wouldn’t work anyway, cos it’s the goggles making things look as they do, yeah?)
2. You don’t have to “try and see things differently” (which is the direction the Sufi Comic strip goes with it) in order to feel differently, because that’s just swapping one story for another. (It’s also impossible to do, had you noticed?)

I think that’s it. Is there anything else you might be tempted to try and do?

As far as I can tell, all you need to do is be aware that this process is going on.

It’s all thought-based, and it all falls away when we catch ourselves, stop rewarding it with attention and very naturally come back to reality/presence/the Now.

That’s when the goggles come off, we see things clearly and reconnect to life, wisdom, common sense, intuition, inspiration, enthusiasm – our TRUE NATURE.

💟

Giles

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