It’s so easy to get into mental ruts.
It can be hard to separate our stories about a situation from the actual situation. A lot of the time, the issue is really the story we’re telling ourselves about what is happening.
One trick I’ve found that works smashingly well to separate yourself from your situation is to look around your room and imagine you just walked into it. Look at all the things as if they weren’t yours, but a stranger’s. Try to disassociate any sense of ownership to the things.
This can be a groundbreaking practice if you do it often, and it won’t be long before you’re looking at everything differently.
We briefly touched on this on Monday when we decided to relabel our problems as challenges, and today, we’re going to look at our challenges differently.
Write down one of your challenges and spend some time (like five minutes) looking at it in a new way.
Here’s what I wrote, and it follows up on yesterday’s challenge:
The issue is my resistance to a God beyond words.
So much baggage comes with the word God – people have killed for God, completely missing the point of what God is!
I’ve got my mother’s borderline-fundamentalist ideas & teachings about God rattling around in my mind. I wonder why I never think to blame my dad – he was a deacon in the church, after all. Maybe it’s because he was passive, or maybe because he never threatened us with going to church as a punishment. I remember my mom getting upset about something &, as punishment, said we were going to church the next day. Then she slept in, staying in bed most of the morning. Maybe this was depression.
Maybe people with mental health issues shouldn’t reproduce until they get their shit together.
Maybe I’ve been looking @ God thru the filter my parents put in front of me. Maybe they never had the Self-awareness to question what they had been taught. I’m grateful to be breaking that cycle.
What’s something you’ll look at differently today, dear reader? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
One thought on “look at things differently”