There’s a thing that happens a lot, and it’s in your interests to be wise to it.
It’s the mind, raising what I call “legitimate concerns.”
(Legitimate, to it, naturally 🙄)
How the mind responds to presence
I was coming towards the end of a really great session with a client. We’d spent 90 minutes or so out in nature and realised some profound truths about the nature of the condition they’d presented with.
An edifice of belief, innocently built up over a lifetime, was crumbling, right there and then, in front of our very eyes, to reveal the well being that had been there, all along.
Insight in action. It was quite something.
This had happened in that space of quiet reflection that is our deepest essence; a place I’ve devoted myself to helping others reach. Because that’s where the answers are found.
So we’d been silent for a bit, walking side by side, resting in presence, where everything made total sense; where life was seen as it is.
And then the mind started raising legitimate concerns:
“The thing is Giles, while I don’t disagree with any of this at all—I’m absolutely, 100% on board with it all—I know what I’m like. I know what’s going to happen the next time I…”
…and a good five minutes were spent revisiting all the patterns of the past; every single one of them meticulously reasoned, explained and mapped out with precision logic.
(Like I say, they are always legitimate concerns, to a mind. There’s nothing unreasonable about them in the slightest!)
But it’s because the mind doesn’t understand the well of being that sits at our core (it’s got nothing to do with it). It can’t conceptualise something that’s beyond conceptualisation, and, at the end of the day, concepts are the currency of the mind.
Legitimate concerns are all conceptual. They’re all future based, using past experience.
By definition they’re not true, because they’re not NOW.
They’re a fantasy, built on the back of a fairytale.
📦🦄🧚🏻♀️
I’m paid to listen and it’s amazing how easy it is for me to get sucked into these stories too, in fact it usually makes me laugh when I spot it.
Thankfully I knew my client has a great sense of humour (as do all humans really, when resting in their true nature). So I feigned surprise:
“Whoa, whoa… hang on a minute, I think we might have found a genuine sticking point here! Blimey! I think you might have spotted a flaw in this entire Innate Health thing. I think Syd might have been… wrong!!”
😆
Why the mind raises legitimate concerns
I jest, but we need to be wise to ego dissolving (because it’s not needed), us feeling at peace as a result, and then ego feeling all left out and coming back in a different outfit.
It’s the most natural thing on earth, and it’s not a problem.
It’s doing its best and we need to be kind to it (= “self care”).
And yeah, I get it – it’s the hardest thing to spot.
Because, in the absence of knowing anything of presence and being-well, the mind genuinely believes that it is what is dealing with stuff, as it comes up, moment to moment; that it’s keeping you safe.
When it’s not. It’s just observing and commenting.
It’s not in charge and when you consider that the mind is, to all intents and purposes, a concept-machine, well, them ‘not-being-in-charge’ is something that it finds to be literally “inconceivable.”
So that’s why these “legitimate concerns” arise.
A mind, doing its best. Trying to help.
Dragging you away from the very thing it’s trying to achieve.
🤦🏻♂️
Giles
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Giles P Croft