Don't Believe Everything You Think

A bumper sticker that I had up on my kitchen cupboard for many years.

 

The wisdom of Pema Chödrön.

For many years following 9-11 I had a bumper sticker up on my kitchen cupboard that read "Don't believe everything you think." It remained there until I had deeply integrated this lesson into my being. This integration came to be reflected in the ongoing growth, openness and humility, mindfulness and curiosity, and commitment to truth that I embody and seek to bring to my daily life.

As I have spoken to and written before, it is my belief and my experience that we humans all fall somewhere on the continuum with ignorance on the one end and consciousness on the other. Growing in consciousness is synonymous with growing in our capacity to give, receive, and be love. And this evolution that we humans experience is not about "self-improvement" or being better than anyone else. It is not a competition. Rather, it is the experience of befriending ourselves and growing into the fullness of who we most truly are. And, at our core, what I have discovered is the beauty and sacredness of our true nature.

So many of us get lost along the way and develop a level of blindness to the Sacred. Certainly this has happened to me. And when I was stuck in harmful beliefs and perceptions, another way of seeing and experiencing was beyond what I could have imagined. I simply had no depth of experience with living open-heartedly. What I had learned instead was how to try to fit into an unhealthy family and an unhealthy culture. Living in authenticity was something that was largely foreign to me. 

Over the years that I had unknowingly been building fortified walls around my heart, more was happening than blocking out and disassociating from trauma and loss, fear and shame, rage and grief. I was also blocking joy and love, vulnerability and trust, belonging and grace, and deep heartfelt connections with loving community and our world. And there was a whole lot that I was believing that simply was not true... although it sure seemed otherwise.

Consequently, the anguish and loss of ruptured attachments and unhealthy relationships, of disassociated but bone-deep fear and shame, of addictions and distractions and old triggers, of being empathically impaired and instinct injured, of harmful perceptions related to trust and vulnerability continued to follow me and plague my life. Wherever I went, there I was. Yet, and unknown to me at the time, it was only the image managed surface of my being that I knew how to live from. A deeper, richer life escaped me.

What I have come to witness over the many years of my healing and gradual awakening is the deep importance of what we decide when what is often a crisis brings us to a major fork in the road... a fork which I believe we all come to. In her amazing and life-changing Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés identifies this as when we make one of the most vital decisions of our lives: whether or not to be bitter.

And, if we're not to grow in bitterness, then we must choose the path of courageously healing and opening our hearts. I have found no other way but through, not over or below or back, but through the heart of what we carry inside ourselves.

All around us and within us we see the impact of the choices that we humans make. Depending on the conscious or unconscious choices we make, the terrible costs or the great blessings which emerge over the years of our lives are moving us in one direction or the other:

• We're growing increasingly conscious — stronger, more resilient and expansive and kind, and living with ever greater truth and authenticity and discernment, vulnerability and connection and love, and wisdom and purpose and compassion and generosity.
  
• Or we're growing further away and disconnected from the heart of who we are — brittle and bitter, self-absorbed and separate, fearful and angry, blaming and shaming, projecting and polarized, contracting and disassociated from our heart-to-heart connections within ourselves and with others.

There are countless forms that our ignorance and illusions can manifest as. Wherever hatred, racism, addictions and resentments, isolation and fear and shame, unhealthy relationships and ruptured attachments, or us against an Other takes root within us, that is where our work is. That is where our untouched or unresolved grief is. And that is where there is something that we have come to believe needs to be seen, attended to, questioned, and ultimately worked through, transformed, and let go of.

It is through the doorway of our tears, our vulnerability, our reaching out and seeking support, our connecting with the loving and kind hearts and wisdom of others that we come again and again to choose the path with heart that expands rather than contracts us. It is this path of the heart which empowers us to recognize and ultimately let go of what impairs our capacity to love.

Today everything is part of my spiritual practice. This includes:

• my grief and my gratitude practices 
• creativity
  
• immersing myself in Nature and Wild Places
  
• recognizing and intervening on and working with triggers and old places
• owning and accountability for the ways that my own ignorance has caused harm
• cultivating the skills of the alchemist and transforming the ways that I've been wounded 
• working with the trauma and the gifts of being human
  
• fierce compassion
  
• expanding my circle of caring and what my heart is capable of holding 
• all forms of activism on behalf of social, racial, economic, political, and environmental justice
• researching, writing, sharing what I am learning
• channeling outrage in ways which help rather than harm
• standing up in any way I can to the forces which deplete, divide, disempower, destroy 
• seeking truth and absorbing inspiration 
• recognizing and letting go of what does not serve me
• being of service
• seeking support
  
• again and again and again returning to love

This is but a small glimpse. It is a good thing, I believe, to speak to our spiritual journeys and what it is that holds heart and meaning for each of us.

I just turned 70 last month. Growing older, which definitely brings its challenges and losses, also grows in its richness and extraordinary gifts — if we're able to root into our spiritual journeys and deepen our hearts and expand how it is that we carry ourselves in the world. At least I know that this has been incredibly true for me. I couldn't have come to the place where I am today, which is always shifting and changing and evolving, if I weren't diving deeply again and again into questioning what I believe and what it is that needs attending to within my human heart and the heart of our world.

Indeed, I've been repeatedly thrown out of the seemingly comfortable nest of familiarity and what I thought to be true only to discover new illusions. Trading in our illusions for the truth has meant living with the awareness that there is always another larger vista up ahead awaiting us. It's humbling, this journey through disillusionment and into the unknown and the amazing recognition of how many blind spots we humans can hold as absolute truth. And be wrong.

And this is the path which strengthens our hearts and helps us to know just how strong, how conscious, how fiercely loving we can be. And it is why I am drawn again and again to reach out my hand and my heart to seek and give support. Because it is hard to be human and to be in the world with our hearts and minds and spirits and souls open. It is hard, as e.e.cummings has wisely said, to grow up and become who we truly are. 

 

And that, I believe, is why we are here — to support ourselves and each other in living well, in loving well, and in letting go.

May we be at peace.

May our hearts remain open.

May we know the beauty of our true nature.

May we be healed.

 

💗 Molly