Finding a sense of peace when our minds are playing tricks
Feel Good Factor
I HAVE a beautiful aubergine suit in my wardrobe, I was planning to wear the jacket, with a lovely dress I had found, to a family wedding back in May. But the wedding had to be postponed due to Covid- 19 until April next year. I caught sight of it this morning and I wondered whether I would ever get to wear it, whether the wedding would go ahead as planned, or even if I would be able to go.
The landscape that we live in has changed beyond recognition. Back in March, I don’t think that I was alone in thinking that life would return to a more normal by the autumn.
We all knew that the future was unknown, however, in the main, we believed that mostly it was known. A future event would go ahead, if planned that way, unless something unexpected and seemingly unlikely happened. There seemed to be many certainties when looking ahead, with a few variables, and now the tables have turned, with the future looking mostly uncertain and very few certainties to rely on.
This morning I became aware of just how much sadness I was experiencing as my mind began to wonder about all the things that would now probably not be. Of course sadness is absolutely okay, it’s a natural human reaction, one that doesn’t need fixing or getting over, we can simply let it be and it passes on its own.
However, I also noticed the source of my sadness, the nature of that which lay behind how I felt. Our minds are incredible. They are particularly incredible at creating experiences for us that exceed any Hollywood movie studio. They can create the most compelling, realistic, feeling- inducing experience. As I sat in my experience of sadness I noticed that I was no longer in my bedroom, it was no longer this morning, but I had time travelled to a future time, a time after I was due to wear my outfit and I was looking back at it unworn. It was that experience of that future event that was the source of my sadness, my own imagination had created a loss, and that loss felt so realistic I was experiencing it as though it was happening right now.
As I noticed what my mind was doing, it had the impact of making it a little less compelling and I found that I was back in my bedroom, in the present moment. That is the beauty of our true psychological system, we naturally wake up from our own personal daydreams. There was a time when I wouldn’t have noticed that natural pause that noticing creates. Although I would have come back into the moment, I then would have innocently gone back to my realistic ‘ daydream’, focusing on the loss I had ‘ experienced’.
Believing that my daydream was an accurate prediction of what was to come, I would have maintained a reaction to it, causing me to suffer even more. But in that pause that noticing created, I could see the peace of mind that existed in being really present in this moment, and whilst I felt compassion for myself for feeling sad and for momentarily time travelling, I could see that was all it was, an innocent trick of my mind.