Superstitious thinking

“If you chase a pigeon away, it will come back and poop on your head!”

Wisdom related to me by my daughter, stated as fact. It happened to a friend, see? She chased a pigeon away and it came back and pooped on her head.

As a 50-something grown up, with a lifetime's experience of being around pigeons, I must admit, I was a tad skeptical.

“You don't really believe that, do you?”

She paused, to give the notion due consideration.

“Not really no, but it did happen!”

No doubt. And so begins the wearing in of a little neural pathway.

🐦👐🏻💩🙀🧠

It's taken root in her mind enough for her to relate it to me.

I bet it's taken an even stronger hold in the mind of her friend – whose head actually got pooped on!!

And this silly little tale contains a salutary lesson for why it might look like your life's currently falling apart.

😳

Myths and patterns

I don't know if I've said it before (😉) but the mind is a truly wondrous thing. It's so powerful and it's so goddamn earnest, that if we just let it run riot, without awareness, it gets up to all sorts of mischief.

So in this example, it could quite easily:

1. Observe something happening that it doesn't like, or that came with a strong negative emotion (e.g. pigeon poop on our heads)
2. Try and figure out why it happened, using the very limited data it has at its disposal, at whatever tender age we are (e.g. 📦: “Oh, it must be because I chased the pigeon away!”)
3. Create a story, and then treat that story as fact, in order to avoid it happening again (e.g. 📦: “I should be wary of / not chase pigeons”)

It will then spend the rest of its days looking for confirmatory evidence of this trauma, to prove itself right.

🤷🏻‍♂️

It's pretty straightforward behaviour for a mind, and easy to see how these little personal myths (we call them ‘beliefs’ in the trade 😉) can become a real pattern.

But Giles, it's only pigeon poop! Why are you going on about it?!

Because we're talking about Principles here, and the exact same process has happened with all the superstitious beliefs that are holding you back.

So it's no different from:

1. The mind observing one school presentation or performance that went badly
2. Concluding it's to do with a lack of confidence – something you're clearly lacking
3. You spend the rest of your life terrified of public speaking, or just speaking up full stop. It becomes ‘just the way I am’ 😔

Or…

1. The mind watches something going wrong for you, and you then being told off, or warned that you should “think these things through properly!” by a figure of authority
2. It confuses common sense (and good old fashioned gaining-experience-through-making-mistakes!) with hesitance or a need for a feeling of certainty before taking action
3. You spend the rest of your life ‘being sensible’, playing small, not taking risks, planning obsessively, or just waiting in general… 😫

Or…

1. The mind observes you performing really well after a period of intense stress (exams, maybe – there'll be the ever yearned-for parental praise in the mix there too, won't there)?
2. It makes a fallacious connection between stress and performance
3. You can never properly relax, and you find yourself always leaving things until the last minute, to rack up unnecessary time-pressure, ‘in order to’ perform 😮‍💨

Or the classic…

1. The mind examines your emotions following a change in circumstance, cherry-picking the ones that suit its narrative (e.g. 📦: “I did well to leave that situation, only good has come of it!”)
2. It goes absolute gangbusters on the outside-in illusion, firmly pinning your feelings onto situations and people and stuff – basically anything other than the Principle of Thought
3. You spend your life running away from anything that doesn't feel great, changing careers, partners, houses, even countries in an endless search for happiness outside of yourself 💔

(Or just numb it all with booze, fags, sex, shopping, gambling, exercise or meditation 😉😂)

I could go on all day because this one little thing—superstitious thinking—lies upstream of all the beliefs that are holding us back!

(And trust me, I can only tell you these things because I've been there. We all have. And to one degree or another, we all still do this—me included—it's what it is to be human!)

How to break the cycle

This may seem a bit like an episode of Giles-does-therapy, but I honestly think that when you pair these little childhood links up with an understanding of the 3 Principles—that Thought creates our very reality, moment to moment, and is totally harmless—then awareness is the key to unlock change.

Because in all of these scenarios above, it's important to see that:

• None of this is ‘on you’ – it's not like you're doing any of this deliberately or anything
• There's no malice to the mind's responses – it genuinely believes it's helping, otherwise it wouldn't be doing it
• There's seldom much, if any, truth to any of these beliefs – they arose out of one moment, long, long ago, where the mind did its best from where you were at, way back then.

You don't have to go delving into any of this stuff to try and change your superstitious beliefs, or replace them with different/better ones.

No, you see that these stories were never fact in the first place.

Big love for you today.

💗

Giles

Related

Trauma and triggers

Deeply understanding the nature of our trauma responses is the end to their hold over us ❤️‍🩹

The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft