Show Notes
Welcome to A Journey to Inner Wisdom. I am Crystal Kotow-Sullivan and your host of this Podcast.
I am going to talk about the many facets of the Journey to Inner Wisdom. As with any journey, there are many ways to get to where we are going. In this journey there are many tools available to guide us on the journey as well as people who will guide and mentor us.
I am going to talk about the ABCs of the Journey to inner Wisdom…Awareness, Beliefs, Curiosity and Creativity, Discernment and direction, the Enneagram and energy, Focus, Flow, and Flourish and Gratitude, generosity and grace.
From time to time, I will invite guest to join the conversation and share their journeys and the tools and guides who journeyed with them. And you will hear about my own on-going journey.
I hope you will join me on this adventure.
Episode 4 Past present, present, future present, future?
Living in the present – creating the present from the future rather than the past.
I talked about our private logic last week or limiting beliefs, mistaken logic, subjective perception, etc. I’m doing two podcast because it is very important to work on our private logic, bring it to consciousness in order to travel the journey to inner wisdom. It is the first step to becoming aware of how we live a past present life.
I’ve noticed a lot of people are talking about limiting beliefs these days or maybe it’s because I am as well and so I am noticing it more. It is like buying a new red car and suddenly you see red cars everywhere! Our energy follows our thoughts. Which is why it is so important to know where our thoughts are coming from. Our thoughts give life to our private logic. Or maybe it is because it is so important to pay attention to our private logic and stop living from those beliefs.
I was thinking in images the other day and I saw a file cabinet with 3 drawers. The top drawer contained all of our consciousness- mental physical, emotional and spiritual Easily accessible, subjective and not hard to find. The middle drawer contains all of the stuff that we could access easily when needed – skills, habits, facts, memories, stories, emotions, etc. Ad then there is the bottom drawer. It has all the parts that we’ve filed away for a variety of reasons – not important, too painful, embarrassing, another lifetime, disappointments, failures, etc. You will also find in this drawer – conditioning files, family expectations, social pressures, religious pressure, media, rules you live by whether they make sense or not, etc. all impacting your private logic. Our private logic resides in this drawer because we are not even conscious that we have a subjective belief system that tints our perception of ourselves, others, relationships, our world, work, money, love, sex, parenting, - epic list!!!!
And it rules our day to day interactions, decisions, and attitude toward ourselves and the world around us.
As I said last episode, pulling this file from the bottom drawer to the top drawer is not always simple or easy. We deny that we have such a file – we justify the way we move thru life – despite stumbling and wondering – where did that come from!
Let me tell you something about my private logic. When I was in my early 40s, I did some work on uncovering my private logic. An early memory uncovered an interesting belief I had about myself. I was in grade 3 - 8 years old and the teacher gave us homework to write about how the tractor had improved the work of horses. I had no idea what the teacher wanted me to do. I even looked in the encyclopedia that my parents had gotten for us. I wrote one sentence. In school a few days later the teacher read the marks and I got zero and she laughed at it. I was so embarrassed at 8 years old. I must have been beet red and I was so warm. I wanted to cry. I decided then and there that I must be stupid. I recall the teacher used that word. So, I spent a lot of my life trying to prove that I was smart. Once I realized this, I was also able to see that this experience was also a gift as I love to learn and may not have embraced learning so vigorously except that I had this experience. Education was not a value in our family. My dad finished grade 8, my mom finished high school and went to secretarial school and briefly worked as a secretary. That is what she wanted me to do rather than go to university. So our private logic once uncovered can be full of revelations about who we are.
Best-selling author, Carolyn Myss, talks about being people being under a spell. A spell is a thought form, a perception, an illusion. She talks about each of us living in our own reality. This would be our subjective perception or private logic. We need to realize we are not the centre of the universe! So, ask yourself, what rules have I created in my life…they come from your private logic.
Most rules start with
I must… I must walk 10, 000 steps before I have a treat.
I need to… I need to take care of…
I need… I need ___ hours of sleep
I have to be… I have to be prepared for anything
If I don’t… If I don’t plan the family gathering no one will.
I demand… I demand respect…
Also, ask yourself what are your rules around money, work, leisure time, parenting, retirement, etc. These rules will reveal your underlying patterns of beliefs that may be holding you back in some area of your life.
I think you get the idea…
Let’s go a bit deeper with these questions if you are ready to recall, release and recreate a new way of being.
Ask yourself:
What do I believe about myself?
What kind of person am I?
What do I believe about men, women, relationships, work, money, love, sex, the world, parenting, play, religion, business, education, health, spirituality, etc.?
Notice the patterns as you begin to answer these questions. Dr. Joe Dispenza in his book, “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself”, states,
“When you think from your past memories, you can only create past experiences. As all of the ‘knowns’ in your life cause your brain to think and feel in familiar ways, thus creating knowable outcomes you continually reaffirm your life as you know it. And since your brain is equal to your environment then each morning, your senses plug you into the same reality and initiate the same stream of consciousness” p 43
Recently I came across the allegory, Plato’s Cave. I think it is a great example of how our perception and private logic keeps us hostage.
Briefly and redacted…
Some people were in a cave and they thought they were trapped. They were facing the back wall of the cave and there was a fire behind their backs. The saw people moving on the back wall…their shadows…they were frightened and would not take their eyes off the wall for fear of being hurt. Just behind them was the opening of the cave but they would not look and so they could not see that if they changed their perspective they could walk away.
I think you can see how subjective perception keeps us trapped. For centuries we believed that the earth was the centre of the universe. Galileo was excommunicated when he made it known that the Sun is the centre of our galaxy. And how many more times have we had to change our perspective as Science reveals more truths about the universe, like Quantum Physics!!! More later!
I want to read you an excerpt from Owen O’Kane’s new book “Ten Times Happier”. I just found this today and it is a great example of a modern-day Plato’s cave. Our life unfolds depending on where we focus our thoughts and energy.
“It was week four of a twelve-week group programme for ten very depressed clients. I was a newly qualified therapist in the early days of my career. I had a nice circle of chairs set up and a scented candle burning, and I was even wearing my therapist cardigan. What could go wrong? In short everything! All of the clients in the group were angry, frustrated and disillusioned with everything, and that included me. I was stuck and they were stuck. The only comfort in the room was the wafting smell of the lavender and ginger candle.
Suddenly one of the participants, Angela, a recently divorced mum of two young children, declared, “Therapy is Bullshit, all we do is sit and complain.”
There was a rapturous applause from the group and there it was, my therapist light bulb moment.
I had an intuitive urge to ask everyone in the group to stand up, which I did. In truth I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with them, but I knew I had to do something. I had to think on my feet, knowing that the ‘Hokey Cokey” or a group hug wasn’t going to cut it in this instance. Trust me, ten angry, depressed clients are not an easy audience and I momentarily felt like I was in the lion’s den.
Then something quite magical happened. As the group stood up they suddenly quietened and a new mood of curiosity entered the room. Doing what any therapist would do, I commented on the change of atmosphere. A reply soon followed from Angela: “Well, at least now we’re doing something to get us out of this mess.” It was the doing something that opened the door to new possibilities.
More quick thinking was required on my part. I realized the only props I had in the room were a window looking out onto a nice view of some trees and a dark, crumbling wall on the other side of the room. I decided these polar opposite views would be my tools. The window would represent a future that looked more hopeful and the dark wall would represent all the difficulties in the past that helped maintain depression.
I asked the entire group to form a line while I explained to them what the window and the wall represented. Then I asked them to turn towards the side of the room that represented what they would like therapy to focus on. Almost perfectly synchronized, they all turned towards the window. There was silence as they looked out onto the trees and a tangible sense of calm entered the room.
I then asked them where they felt their attention was focussed most of the time in everyday life. Again, perfectly synchronized, without hesitancy, they all turned towards the wall. None of the group said anything as they continued to stare at the wall. After a moment’s silence, I asked a simple question: “What do you think might be the problem with spending a lot of time focussed on the wall?”
This time the reply came from John, a twenty-four-year-old who rarely spoke in the group.
John’s career as a professional sportsman had ended suddenly after an accident caused serious injuries. He felt hopeless and was struggling to move forward with his life. He gently said, “If I stay stuck looking at this wall, I have my back turned to the future.”
And at that moment, amazingly, everyone independently and unprompted turned back towards the window, some slowly, some reluctantly, and some more deliberately. This was to be our focus for the remaining weeks.
…
Each week the atmosphere in the room lightened, laughter increased and at the final session everyone in the group brought an item that would remind them of the process. I was struck most by one woman, Jean, who brought a blank white page. She held it up and said, “I’ve brought this today because I have a chance to write a new, more hopeful story.”
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I want to comment of manifesting because this is about creating your future reality. One of the reason’s manifesting exercises may not work is because we have not cleared our subjective perception, our private logic in order to create a new subjective perception or a new playbook. When we clear our private logic, create or reinvent our subjective perception, we can then look toward the future and create our transitions rather than reliving them.
Be careful here because there is also the pitfall of focusing so much on the future that we miss the moment, the now that I spoke about in episode 2 is fleeting but where we want to be. That is what mindfulness is all about…being in the here and now. Our default is to plan so much because we want to be in control. But can we ever be in control…it is an illusion! Joe Dispenza talks about living in the future present, which is where O’Kane took his group. They lived in hope of the future by being present to the moment, the now. Living in the future keeps us detached from the present moment and the experiences it gives us. So let’s begin to transition from past present living to the now with a future present guiding us.
In the next episode, I will focus on…curiosity…and creativity. We will explore how curiosity can assist our journey of awareness and help us uncover our private logic. And, I haven’t talked about wisdom yet…so I will delve into that topic as well and put all of this into a bigger context. And we will continue to see the interconnectedness of all of our ABCs of a journey to inner wisdom.
Thanks for joining me.