An Innocent Misunderstanding

How seeing the truth about  an innocent misunderstanding of the mind can shift your entire experience of life.

It was one of those days. All was going smoothly one minute, the next I’m sitting on my couch with tears rolling down my face. The cute, blue hat I’m wearing can’t even fix this mess. 


I’ve learned better though these days. I didn’t need a reason to be feeling sad. To me, emotions are just emotions. They are energy moving through us, period. The human mind likes to say, “I’m feeling sad because….” and then search the surrounding environment for an answer. But we make up our best guess as to “why” we feel a certain way. In truth, we are simply experiencing what we are experiencing moment to moment. And if we let go of the “because” then our thought experience can flow through uninhibited and free like the flowing river of energy that we are. 


So in this moment, I had a sense to allow myself to enter a quiet, eighty degree, hot summer room, take the cute, blue hat off and allow this energy to flow. As I sat quietly in reflection, without needing to search for why I was feeling this way, an insight occurred to me. 


I realized that my mind had made a mistake. A mistake many of our minds make. I realized I was under the spell of an innocent misunderstanding.


Images of my childhood flashed before my eyes. I saw all the places where I thought safety lived. I thought it lived in things like my childhood home, my mom, being sick and getting attention and having just enough money.  


But then in a flash I saw the truth. 


Safety can’t live in those things. Safety is a state of being. Safety can’t live in anything in the outside world. Because we live in an inside out world. We experience our reality via thought occurring within us moment to moment and we look out into the world and think it comes from there. We innocently think that something out there happens and it causes a feeling within. But we are always feeling our own thinking and experiencing that as “reality” moment to moment. 


My childhood brain thought, “Mom makes me feel safe. My home makes me feel safe. Having just-enough-money-and-no-more makes me feel safe.” 


But here’s the kicker to show you that those are just subjective thoughts and not “truths.” I guarantee there were times my mom didn’t make me feel safe, or my home didn’t make me feel safe or having just enough money didn’t make me feel safe. So it was never the money, the home or my mom making me feel a certain way. It was me always experiencing my ever changing thoughts about my outside world and picking certain ones that were familiar to me and then labeling them as truth, which in turn became a habit in my brain. 


And I didn’t know to question it back then. But I know better now. And I’m sharing this with you so that you, in your eighty degree summer day apartment with your cute, blue hat can find relief from the biggest misunderstanding on the planet. 


What was really occurring all along when I was young, was that every time I had a nice feeling, I was experiencing my own inner state of being. That nice, safe, warm, cozy feeling was me feeling my inner world. It was me in my natural state and because no one taught me these principles of life at a young age, I innocently thought that warmth was being caused by my outside world so I innocently gave my power away and continued to do so until my crying episode on the couch. 


Love, safety, compassion, forgiveness and the like are states of being. They aren’t contingent upon the outside world being a certain way. They are accessed when our mind settles. And our mind settles by nature. On its own without our input. Like a cut heals. On it’s own. Sometimes our wisdom tells us to help it along, but more often than not, the intelligence of the system does the job just fine on it’s own.


Because I thought safety lived in these things, my mind would try to control my world to stay safe. This meant; leaving mom, not safe. Being away from home, not safe. Having a lot of money. Not safe. And the list goes on. But the only reason I’d think those things weren’t safe would be because I’d have a lot of thinking about them. Then I’d feel my thinking about them. And then I’d think those things were causing my feelings. And I’d be innocently swayed by the illusion that these things were making me unsafe. 


Just remember, your safety doesn’t live out there. It lives in here. It’s a state of being. So you can let life be as life is knowing that you simply experience a whole lot of ebbing and flowing thought through the vessel that is You. It comes and it goes. It eventually settles and passes. And so you are free to let your life open up, free to try things your wisdom suggests and free to finally live your life with uninhibited, wild abandon.