Learn to Trust
“Pay
attention to your judgmental thoughts. For one day, write down in [a
journal] every time you have one of these thoughts, what it related
to, and if it stopped you from doing something or thinking or
behaving in a creative way.”
Marcia
Emery, Ph.D (Power Hunch: Living a Intuitive Life, p.74)
I don't know about you,
but I'm a judgmental person. I observe, analyze and make judgments
based on my own criteria. My judgments have nothing to do with the
person or situation I am observing. They have only to do with me. I
am programmed to judge. In order to stop doing it, I have to override
my natural instincts. Those neural pathways were laid down in the
first few years of life and facilitated for much of the rest of my
life. I wonder if this applies to you, too.
Some of us grew up in
households that were not always stable. Sometimes, things erupted,
people yelled, and stayed angry for days. There may even have been
violence, but whether or not there was, it felt dangerous to the
child. What happens in such situations is the child becomes vigilant,
always on edge, waiting for the next eruption, the next argument.
That becomes the most facilitated neural pathway, and pretty soon, an
argument is not needed to cause the child to be hyper-vigilant. They
maintain that state all the time. In many ways, this is
adaptive—maybe even life saving for a child. But over time, it
becomes problematic. It interferes with relationships in teenagers
and adults, and in children, may lead to acting out, low school
performance, low self-esteem.
Behavior that once
protected us later becomes an impediment to living with a sense of
freedom and safety. We learned to always scan our environment for
trouble, and to control ourselves well enough to stay out of harm's
way. We made decisions based on fear—and rightfully so at one time.
To do this, we constantly assessed the people and places we
encountered, avoiding the ones that felt threatening, and being
cautious about where we went and what might happen there. You can see
how this interferes with being open to new experiences and
spontaneous meetings. It makes living intuitively and in the moment a
near impossibility. Because it limits our thinking and our actions,
it also limits our creativity.
I don't believe we ever
completely overcome the activation of those early neural pathways,
but we can learn not to live from them. We may not get over feeling
fear in new situations and with new people, but we can act in spite
of it. The definition of courage is not to be without fear, it is
feeling fear and doing what you need to do anyway. Keeping tabs on
judgment is one way to get an accurate read on just how much fear we
have. Becoming aware of when and under what conditions we jump to
judgment, can be instructive. We all have “old tapes,” another
word for facilitated neural pathways, that are automatic. But we
don't have to listen to them. In fact, we can simply tell them to
“shut up” and keep going. We can learn to trust, even if we're
older. We can unleash our intuition and creativity at any age.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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