Tag: truths

Shackled by ourselves

Posted on by philipdodson

I have over the course of a lifetime allowed my mind to dominate the real me, I have shackled myself with repeating thought patterns, made up in my head by the unconscious ramblings of others’ minds and the never-ending ramblings of my own.

I have created these so-called ‘truths’ about myself based on utter nonsense and then acted upon them. Thus actually creating the stories in reality. What we believe reality is, is what reality is. We always create and manifest our own reality. If we believe something to be true, then it is. If we believe we can do something we can and, of course, if we believe we can’t, then no surprise, we can’t.

I have felt shackled by those restrictions that I have created in my head and I have been slowly unshackling myself. However, I feel like I am slowly undoing a bolt or just starting to take the hacksaw to the chain and cutting slowly through it.

I feel that I want to jump into the water, but I just put one toe in, maybe a foot, and then I’m scared, the water is frightening, it’s cold, so I run back to the safety of the beach. It’s funny, that I am able outside of the nonsense of my head, to run straight into any sea, in any temperature and dive straight in, I have a cold shower, and during the winter months a fucking freezing cold shower, every single day and have done for 2 years. 

However, when it comes to getting on with my life dreams and allowing my soul to experience the things it wants to, the things I’d really, really, really want to do in life, then I am back to dipping the toe in the water and running back to the safety of the beach. Fear, as in whopping great psychological fear grips us all when it comes to the things we really want to do most in life. It is the fear of the uncertain future, that is just a concept in our heads as, of course, the future does not exist there is only now.

I am building the bravery muscle, as I want to stop just slowly removing the shackles, like dipping the toe in the water, I want to just dive in, I want to tear the shackles off in one go and be totally free of the restriction. 

I want to live a totally authentic life, where I allow the real me, my soul to experience life unhindered by the shackles of my mind and its thoughts and ego.

That means I have to face vulnerability and if you love Brene Brown’s work as I do, you’ll know that facing and rumbling (her fav word) with vulnerability isn’t a fluffy, cool and easy thing. It is like having to cross a river of molten lava in a flimsy dingy. Vulnerability, as in truly being our authentic and soulful essence is hard and requires true courage to ‘brave the wilderness’ (great Brene Brown book).

The hard things in life always bring us the most amazing and magical adventures and experiences, the very reason we are here and they get easier the more we brave it and build that bravery muscle, it’s all habit. The easy things turn sour, they bring us the suffering, regret, pain, internal pain, and eventually mental and physical decline. Easy gets hard and hard gets easy. But hard things require taking the shackles off, diving in and crossing the river of molten lava. But if life was plain sailing, no molten lava rivers, there would be no point to it.

Of course, our minds and egos don’t want any of this risk so it sabotages our attempts to be vulnerable and throw off the shackles. But at some point, when we are on the edge of that diving board looking down at the pool wanting to jump, we can either jump and become free or stay put, suffering a life of not achieving our true dreams living an unconscious mind-dominated life, whereby we miss real life now and spend it in our heads.

Take the shackles off and jump off the board.

Buried emotions that dance around the graveyard of my mind

Posted on by philipdodson

A lot of my life I have been deaf through talking when I could have chosen to listen, I have starved people of the oxygen to explain themselves and left them fighting to be understood. The fear of being wrong if I listened coupled with wanting to earn another badge of being right.

The attention was gained from hogging the mic, talking the loudest, I’m right.

This is part of the journey that is hard, this where I have been in the last few years, in an emotional dark hole inside me. Braving up to the demons, dragging those buried emotions out of the graves inside my head, where I thought they would all rest in peace and leave me alone. But they didn’t stay in their graves, they danced all over their graves and haunted me.

The last 6-7 years, maybe more intensely in last 2-3 years, and now, as an ongoing journey of rumbling with and digging deep into the emotions of the past, I have been unpicking the past and I have been re-writing the past, changing the narrative to the real truth, not some other ‘truth’ that I have been telling myself, that I have been conditioned to think by ‘them’. ‘Them’ being the others, society all the people who have no right to tell me who I am, how I should behave, think, act. I am now taking ownership of my story, I am now choosing to be the star in my own life film instead of being a frustrated extra.

That way I can become an even better listener and give people who matter to me the oxygen they need to be understood, to tell their story, to share their narrative.

In order to move forward, we have to go back and dig up the emotions that are buried in the dark places. We have to be brave enough to face them, understand them and write a narrative that moves us forward and serves us well. Talking badly to ourselves serves us and everyone else around us badly.

I have learnt to be kind to myself, empathetic to myself, to change my inner voice, to be brave enough to face the emotions and demons. I am still digging up more in the huge cemetery that is the dark corner of Philip’s mind. It is an ongoing journey and a big task as the body count has been high in my life, the corpses have piled high, like an emotional Battle of the Somme.

Was or is it easy? No. But it is a whole lot better than having those demons, untruths and emotions dancing around my mind and preventing me from being me and living my life.

You have to see pain and suffering with purpose, as Viktor Frankl did on an epic scale, and then you can face anything because the pain has a meaning.

Despair = suffering – meaning (Thanks, Chip Conley for these wonderful and simple equations).

The more meaning to the suffering the less the despair.

The dancing party for my demons and untruths is coming to an end, they are running out of songs.