tdh

Some of you seem to enjoy reading my blog posts here, so I figured I would continue writing about the mind and things such as this.

I got into learning how the mind works, initially, because I wanted to fix myself. I went through a really rough childhood; abuse, neglect, narcissism, abandonment, etc and I found myself always thinking of suicide for a long time....then I went to a therapist that absolutely changed my life, because he showed me that the problems I was having were not because I was a bad person, but because I had been through bad things, and needed to readjust some stuff. Essentially, what he did was to get me to stop identifying with the problems I was having, and instead start to see them as separate from who I actually was....my problems did not define me; they were just things I was going through, so there was hope.

Some of you might be in a similar place, and it is to you, that I write this today - in the hopes of helping you to understand it's not the end of the world, and in fact, will eventually make you much stronger and wiser than you can ever imagine.

So, something I wish someone had told me back then was that the way to mental health does not necessarily mean that you have to dredge up all your painful memories. When we go through difficult things, our minds block those things off from our conscious awareness, because they are too painful for us to be aware of them (and their full ramifications) at the time they happen. This is really healthy and good, and it allows us to survive, even when it seems we have no hope, because the pain eventually begins to wear off, and we can concentrate on life again.

However, the problem is that these things are not actually resolved; just because they are not in our conscious awareness any longer, does not mean that they don't affect us. My dad abandoned me before I was born, and my mom was narcissistic, so I really had to figure pretty much everything out on my own. Even though my awareness of this was not present (when I was younger), it definitely affected how I perceived others to be. I was very angry, getting in fights just for the pure pleasure of it, because I was hurting, so I wanted to hurt others. Back then, I had no idea why I wanted to fight so much, I just knew I had a ton of anger, and I was ready and willing to take it out on others. So, that is an example of what I'm describing here.

As I got older, I got very into learning about the mind, thinking that if I could just "undo" whatever had been done to me, I would be right as rain. I started my journey thinking that I had to root out all the shit from my life, and replace it with good stuff instead.

So, I turned this same ferocity towards "fixing myself" as I had turned towards being violent in the past. I read any book I could get my hands on, I bought numerous tape series and stuff, and devoured it all. Yet, even though I did all this, I didn't find myself changing; I knew a lot of knowledge, but had no idea how to apply it.

So, this got me into the realm of the unconscious, and I devoured everything I could on that subject as well. I got into laws of the unconscious, how it works and how to reprogram it; I delved into self-hypnosis and had some good results with that.

When I started my journey, I couldn't even sit in a crowded place, without feeling all eyes on me, and thinking everyone was looking at me....I didn't even dare to bring my eyes up and look others in their eyes, as I just felt so worthless and empty inside. So, that gives you an idea of where I started from. I had many more things that I hated about myself, but this is not meant to be an exhaustive critique of my personal history; just enough to give you an idea of where I once was.

So, even though I studied the unconscious, and got some good results with it, I still felt that I had certain things that were not being resolved. I kept reading books, getting self-development programs, etc but I couldn't find the thing I was looking for.

Well, then I found mindfulness; I got into it originally for a whole other reason, but soon found that it had really desirable aspects to it for the purpose of mental health. For one thing, mindfulness stressed acceptance, whereas I had always been judging myself and desiring to be something different than what I was. This was a huge shift for me, because I immediately began to just accept where I currently was, and was just okay with it. Yes, I wanted to improve still, but as I'd begin to learn, you have to accept where you are if you want to get someplace different.

It's like when you view a map; if you want to get to point B, you know your destination - that's fantastic...but if you don't know your starting point (point A), then you have no direction for how to get there.

Our self-improvement is very similar; we can know where we want to get to, but if we don't accept where we currently are, we have no awareness of where we currently are and can't get to where we want to go. It seems almost counter intuitive, but it's absolutely true, that you must first start with acceptance of yourself, and then move towards your goals. If you move towards your goals without acceptance first, you will just go around in endless circles, without any clear direction of where you are going or what your true purpose is.

So, I learned (over time) that acceptance was key. Then I also learned something even more powerful, and that is how our problems stay stuck. When we just keep finding ourselves in the same situations in life over and over again, it is because we are operating from the same programming (beliefs, assumptions, mental attitudes), even if our external environment changes.

I was introduced to phrases like "perception is projection" and "what you resist persists, but what you accept you gain the power to transform". I learned that the path to wholeness is not in trying to eradicate all of our past memories and traumas, because by that very process (eradicating) you are exacerbating the problem itself by the way you are interpreting it; meaning, the way you see the problem is the problem. Instead of accepting what is, you try to change what is, judging it as undesirable, and thus causing it to persist.

So, I learned that the true path to freedom is in accepting things as they are, and being okay with them as they are (equanimity, as I wrote about in my previous post). It is our aversion for the parts of ourselves that we don't like that keeps those parts from resolving. When we accept those parts of ourselves, as they are, we begin to release the pressure of keeping those things hidden from ourselves, so that we can resolve them.

When I was younger, I was very angry, but I didn't know why I was angry. I acted out of my anger, and destroyed a lot of things, and my anger just ruled me. As I began to accept my anger as it was, my anger began to transform to compassion for myself, and this allowed me to start to see the very things that were causing my anger in the first place.

This goes back to something I said in the beginning of this post, that our minds will hide things from our conscious awareness when they are too painful for us to have awareness of them. When we begin to accept things about ourselves, and are able to just sit with them (accept them) as they are, we begin to release all the pain associated with these things, and our mind allows us to become aware of them, because we no longer need to be protected from having awareness of them (as we can now accept them as they are).

This is the key to mental health; when you begin to release the painful emotions (by experiencing them with equanimity), you begin to release all the hidden areas of your mind, and have greater awareness of your hang-ups, and can actually start to release these as well, through the same process.

So, if you take one thing away from this, let it be to accept yourself as you are, and to start to have compassion for yourself as you are. If you will start to view yourself in this way, you'll notice how things begin to open up for you, and you'll start to get all these "mini revelations" into yourself when you are doing other things, which will be the key for growing past your old hangups.

Hope you guys found this useful.