See your bondage to and unquestioning belief in them

The previous practice point asks us to engage with the concept that everything we are, everything in our mental and emotional experience can be challenged. Not only that, but they are all limitations in some form or another, and can be transformed or transcended. You can absolutely go beyond anything that exists in your mind because everything is subject to change.

 

There’s not a single aspect of ourselves that can’t be improved upon, cultivated or eradicated. The mind is a malleable thing that can be trained in any way we see fit. This is a scientific fact and has become common knowledge in recent times with the understandings that have emerged in regards to neural plasticity.

 

This practice point of seeing our bondage and unquestioning belief to our ideas, thinking, feelings and so on comes after we start challenging ourselves. This is because we need to start working with ourselves first in order to see what’s actually going on. The practice of ‘seeing into’ is a more receptive activity, whereas challenging is a very active and dynamic one.

 

So, as we start to question our beliefs and thinking and stretch ourselves, seeing outside of the box, we can start to see how we are held captive by our mental and emotional processes. By running headlong at our static ego identity and breaking through our limited views, we get to experience what that bondage is, what it feels like, the part of us that’s holding on to our comfortable selves and staying small.

 

In fact, we don’t even know how small we are until we entertain the idea that our mind and what we can do with it is potentially limitless. It shows us how we have been sailing through life passively accepting all that we are, never realising that it’s a cosy little cage we’ve been living in, safe but very small. I had a pivotal experience just like this which impacted me significantly and relates specifically to this practice point.

 

I have a nature reserve near my work that I walk through most days after eating lunch. This day I was walking through the bush and feeling quite negative about a past experience that caused a great deal of mental pain. I was thinking about how this had somehow permanently limited me, that I was stuck with the traumatic effects of the experience. I felt a low, negative and flat feeling associated with the whole situation. But then this idea came, like inspiration or motivation to push through that narrative. It was almost like something said to me ‘No, you don’t have to believe that’.

 

In the place of that low and limited feeling was now this sense of the infinite possibility of things, and that this alternative view was just as valid, if not more than my previous negative one. The former thoughts and feelings were entirely replaced by positivity! It hit me, the fact that it is up to me to believe and aspire to anything. Why not choose the greatest possible thing to believe in, the thing that affords us the most freedom of mind, then let go of anything else that doesn’t serve that vision.

 

From this point forward, I have never stopped checking and challenging my own limiting beliefs. Not only that, I’m now very conscious of how much I hear other people telling themselves what they can’t do, hearing their negative self-talk, all the things they say which they are convinced are somehow true. 

 

This highlights an aspect of practice that is part of how we undergo personal growth. Insights like this arise for many reasons, and part of that is about creating the conditions for change. Firstly, we have embarked on this adventure because we want to, we desire change so part of us already has the courage to become something new, something bigger.

 

We’re also ready to see things that we have previously avoided, we are up for it, we want to engage in the process. Along with that, if we are applying as much awareness as possible to our ongoing experience, if we literally want to see it, that faculty of mind will ‘see into’ things. If you are also meditating which greatly increases this faculty, it all creates very positive conditions in our mind for insight to arise into the nature of our own experience. When these insights come, they change us forever.

With continued mindfulness practice, we can see how attached we are to our own self view and egoistic agendas, how utterly invested we are in thinking and being a certain way. It is so ingrained, it’s as if there’s no other way we could possibly be. Yet, the more we see, the more we start loosening up around this solidified self. There’s a way in which the constant application of awareness to repeated behaviours will eventually see into it in a way that changes it forever.

There’s this metaphor of someone striking a huge rock with a pick axe. They hit the rock twenty or thirty times, yet it seems like nothing is happening, the rock is completely resistant to breaking. Then on the thirty first strike, the rock splits in two. Was it just that final blow that cracked it? No, all those other blows (moments of awareness) were putting micro fractures through the rock, but on the final blow, the rock splits apart, the moment of fully matured insight occurs.

 

 

When this happens, there’s an irrevocable positive change in our psyche, we see the whole world in a different way, sometimes profoundly so. It becomes easier to let go of the attachment to our ideas and become more actively engaged, instead of passively accepting everything.
 

We see how much energy it takes to be our beliefs, to fight for them, to be our career identity, the persona we’ve spent so much time carving out of stone. Letting go of all that, seeing its superficiality frees up a lot of energy which we can then reinvest in our practice of awareness and seeing through our habitual selves.
 

As we start to see into ourselves and get some understanding of our inner workings, we also see the similarity in others, the superficiality that we live because we don’t know any better. It’s like a caricature of human-being, everyone dancing with each other’s public persona. The shallow way of existing becomes more obvious and less palatable.
 

We become more grounded and genuine, acting more from our integrity rather than the idea of ourselves, and as we do this, it gives other people we interact with the courage and comfort to be more themselves. That’s a real gift in a world that is all about posturing and self promotion.
 

From the challenge of ourselves comes the seeing, they aren’t separate things but two sides of the same coin. Until we try to give up something unhelpful or attempt to cultivate a new positive habit, we don't even know what we’re dealing with. So engaging with the practices on any level is to wrangle with the self and reveal valuable insights into what we are. Life becomes a rich tapestry of discovery, change and possibility.