Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 89
It's one of the things I hear a lot when people tell me of a difficulty that they're trying to navigate their way through quite often, when I ask people what's going on, they will give me a bit of a story, a bit of highlights, and the low lights of a particular circumstance. And quite often, when I'm listening, what I'm listening for is who they're talking about. This is something that I watch quite a lot in myself, and I try to check myself when I'm talking about any particular situation.
Quite often, we get down to a lot of like he said, she said, they said, they did this, or when we were doing these things, they spoke in this manner, or they said these words, or I can't believe they said these things to me, or why aren't they doing this thing? And very, very often, many of these thoughts point outward towards the other person. What are they doing? Where are they going wrong? Where am I being harmed by their behaviour or their words, or their actions? Or I wouldn't do something like that, so why are they doing it?
And when we do that, there's an old Buddhist analogy philosophy thing. There's an old Buddhist thing I don't know the right word for, but it's useful on a podcast. But when you point at somebody else, like if you imagine if you raise your hand out in front of you and you do a pointing action that you have three fingers pointing back to yourself, personally, I also have one finger pointing up into the universe as well. It's my thumb. But when you have that pointing action, you're pointing back at yourself. And we don't often clock when we exclude ourselves from the stories we tell, other than including ourselves as a passive victim, really often I say we. I'm clearly talking about me, but I listen to a lot of other people doing it as well.
I think it can be really useful. When we're trying to unpick stuff, especially the stuff that feels really hard and tricky and sort of grates in our belly and the things that keeps us awake at night, we can't let go of asking yourself, where are you in the story? How can you bring this thought back to, I did this. I felt that I didn't enjoy when they did that. Where is your agency in this story?
Because if you're not talking about yourself, why? And quite often, it's because we have this slightly weird delusion that we can control other people. Or if we just tell ourselves how wrong everyone else is, then it will make us feel better, but it doesn't. It feels rubbish. What we can do, under any circumstances, work out how we feel about things, what we want to do about it, and how we want to continue this in our world or not, whether we want that interaction to continue, whether we want this thing to perpetuate, build, grow, bloom in our lives, or whether it's something that we want to put down or leave behind.
We can't do that when we are lost in pontificating about how terrible everybody else is and why they did all these things wrong. Like, what are you doing? What are you doing wrong? What are you doing right? Maybe one of the things that you're doing wrong is tolerating this shit, but we can't even identify that. If we're all so caught up in what they should and shouldn't have, it's genuinely, most of the time, irrelevant.
As soon as we're lost they should or shouldn't have, but they probably did. So now that that is done, what is your role in this? Where do you want to go next? Where do you go from here? Now that this thing has been done or has been said, or they've done the thing?
Giving yourself back, your agency is one of the grandest prizes I think you can give yourself, and I have yet to see an example where it isn't a huge key to a sense of liberty and a sense of feeling like your life is your own again and like you're not at the whims of other people's decisions, choices and actions.
So just a little brief one this week of inviting you to pause and think, who am I telling this story about, and how can I bring it back to myself? I'll speak to you next week.
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