I thought I was smart.
I had good grades in school, a good amount of common sense from growing up on a farm, and an extremely logical brain… it all led me to believe my brain knew the most.
So my brain would work overtime trying to figure everything out.
This causes all sorts of tension in my body because my head is constantly telling the rest of me how to feel.
My inner talk sounds like, “you can’t be sad/angry about this, you chose this by doing x, y, z”, or “that person has it worse than you, so you have no business being upset”, or “you don’t have time to rest because you have too much to do”, and a million other things.
While all of those inner lectures held merit in some way, I was making three mistakes which were causing so much struggle and turmoil within myself.
The first mistake was that I wasn’t acknowledging how I felt, I was forever telling myself that what I was feeling was the wrong thing to feel, that I shouldn’t feel that way or that I deserved the consequences based on previous choices.
The second mistake was that I was believing everything my brain came up with. Every story, every assumption, and every connection to past events, which usually made the story more logical, but lots of times worse than it needed to be or
The third mistake was that my focus was all on me. The stories I was coming up with were all about how I was left out, or how I didn’t want to do this or that, or how I wasn’t being treated properly. The more I focused on me, the more I caused my own suffering.
Since I came across the Mark Twian quote , “It ain’t what ya don’t know that’s the problem. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”, I have really backed off on believing everything I think.
So much of the tension has left my body it’s incredible.
My vessel has become more of a place of peace than a battle zone and I’m able to accept the moments, feelings and situations for what they are, rather than what I wish for them to be.
Who knew it was going to be good to find out you aren’t as smart as you think?