Change your Mind, Change your World
Have you ever experienced your mind as a prison? (raising hand) I have! Oh boy… have I ever. My mind has been a steel fortress, trapping me with an endless series of stories, denying me the opportunity to experience "what is" in life. Instead of simply perceiving life, it’s constantly evaluating, judging, critiquing and categorizing my experiences – and especially myself. (It’s really good at that.) Like most of us, I was taught to judge myself from a young age. In school, if I got a bad grade, I judged myself for not doing better. Instead of looking at what I did to get there, and make the necessary changes to create a different outcome next time, I got stuck thinking about the ways that I didn't measure up. If my grade was "bad," I must be bad. Of course, this put me in a tailspin: my picture of who I wanted to be didn't match who I was, so I lived with the constant despair of not measuring up – or, has my husband would ...