Where is frustration prevalent for you right now? This is my client’s story (she gave me permission to share). She’s a Sales Director and we’d had a few sessions by this point. Through her previous sessions, she’d had significant insights into the constant truths of where our experience is really coming from and who we really are. This is the story of an in-session exploration that uncovered more. Have a read and see what occurs to you.
It started with an email from a colleague that made her fizz with frustration — or at least that’s what it looked like at the time.
She didn’t reply. She recognised the fizzing — this was her first realisation for this particular example, right in that moment, fresh thinking—‘don’t reply right now’.
But she still felt caught-up, stories whizzing around her mind and being believed about ‘this person — again! Always this person, how can they be so frustrating, why have they sent this email??’. Immediately the email became a fixed and definite problem, the other person a fixed and definite ‘always frustrating’ person.
It feels like it’s true because it feels so real. But it’s not true. We’ve been taught as children that, if we feel frustrated, look to the outside world to find the cause. But there was never a cause. We’ve learnt to correlate our inner experience to an outer happening. We’ve been taught to blame these feelings on something out there.
By now we’re so practiced at this that the correlation is instantaneous and the stories get believed immediately. To make it a really convincing 4D production, even the voice in our heads is perfectly edited in to say ‘yes, you’re right, it’s them again’.
What’s really true is that the fizzing feelings are a wake-up mechanism to the fact we’re lost in a story, out of alignment with who we really are, out of connection with life. Caught up in the Content of the story.
The only thing our feelings can tell us about is our thinking, they have no idea about the outside world — how else could we have scared feelings about a virus when we’re safe and well in our home?
Thankfully our default setting is to have fresh thinking, realisations, and insights and so, in that moment, the chink of light was there for that fresh thought to come through and not send the email.
But the same Programming (that which created the fizzing) still went to work trying to solve it. ‘How do I fix this, change this, change them??’.
Fundamentally in this, we’re asking, ‘how do I make myself feel OK again?’ — but we’re coming at it from a misunderstanding that it was the email and the person that caused the uncomfortable feelings in the first place and that therefore the person and the email need to be changed.
We cannot solve our problems from the same level of thinking that created them.
~Einstein
When we’re trying to solve an imagined problem with the very same conceptual imagination that created it, it’s like a dog chasing its tail. Endless.
In truth, change happens through realisation.
We’ve just not been looking towards that and instead have kept relying on the conceptual mind’s stories — those limited ones that spend their time playing a game of ‘match’ between inner and outer in an attempt to keep us ‘safe’. Correlating a vaguely similar situation to a vaguely similar past-narrative and then applying an over-used fix-it strategy. Fizzing round and round all at the same level of thinking.
Change happens through an upstream realisation and we’re not in control of when realisation comes. Think of it for yourself, when you get a fresh idea. Notice how they appear by themselves, naturally, with no choice from you to make them appear. But it is these that shift us out of the same level of thinking that we’ve been fizzing round and round in.
When we look to what’s really going on — instead of to what we think is happening — we see the workings of the system for ourselves, the fizzing looks less convincing and we find ourselves lost in confusion less of the time.
So, back to my client.
That evening she went for a run. She finds it a useful time to just let her mind wander. She dropped back into the quiet before thought, into innate brilliance. The upstream space of nothingness from which fresh thinking, realisation, insight and ideas spring.
The email came to mind…and suddenly she was laughing about it. The illusion had popped. What had looked so compelling and terrible and fixed and definite in the moment, now looked like no big deal. She saw how she’d been clinging to an idea of how he should behave and how he should communicate and how he should back off from ‘her’ turf.
In an instant, all the confusion disappeared, and she could now see multiple possible responses to the email — all of which felt adult and grounded in clarity.
“How had I made such a big deal out of that?”
Of course ‘she’ hadn’t ‘done’ that. The conceptual mind is not who we are.
It’s a program running that we didn’t choose the programming of, and we don’t control what it pattern-matches a particular situation to. It’s in the belief that we are doing this and that we need to do something about it that in fact causes more confusion.
The more we see the truth of this the less we have ideas of needing to make it be different, and the easier our experience becomes, as the very feeling of connection the conceptual mind has been scrambling around to find is innately revealed in its absence.
The more we look to what’s innate, to what’s true, the more the stories programmed into the conceptual mind get dissolved or left to run with no effect on our experience. And all with ease. No effort needed from us to ‘do’ that.
Truth is never found in the conceptual mind.
Truth is found by looking to what’s constant, ever-present, and reliable. By looking to our default settings.
So look towards the fact you have realisations, fresh thinking and ideas — from nowhere.
Look to the fact an experience changes the moment thinking changes.
Look to the fact it was never the outside world causing you to feel anything.
With love, Helen
This is an example of the kind of exploration I go on with clients every day: they talk about current situations from their life and we explore the truth of what’s going on. It’s a back and forth conversation of sharing and questions, with me pointing towards the truth of the way life works, and them asking about the parts that don’t make sense, connecting the dots of their experience and having penny-drop realisations about where they’ve been caught in belief — out of connection with the moment. Through this clients reconnect to their innate brilliance and rediscover the security, balance, and happiness they’ve been looking for. Find out more here.
