“I don’t think…”
“then you shouldn’t talk, said the Hatter.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Part II
The other side is when you’re thinking clearly. It’s when you can take any situation and come up with several options to deal with it. If you can do that you are being flexible in your thinking and creative. We often trip ourselves up because we decide there’s only one way to do something or only one perspective. When you are stuck in being right you are being one dimensional in your thinking. If you can not come up with a few alternatives you are still having strong feelings. You need to backtrack and notice yourself! Sometimes our thoughts are like a whirlwind or we just can’t seem to get them in gear at all. If therapy is working, you see how you trip yourself up and you begin to take things easier and lighter because you have any number of ways you can go with it.
If you are in a tornado of thoughts it is because you are trying to get control of your emotions by pushing everything down. It doesn’t work. You need to walk through it slowly and really examine your thoughts to get to what are you feeling that is getting in the way of your thinking. (Whew! read that a couple times; it really does make sense!).
If everything is blah or you don’t know what you are feeling, the way out is in. You actually need to look at what the experience of not knowing is. In this case the blah feeling is not knowing what you want, losing interest in life. When you can accept that and know this is what is happening and relax into it, you will find you get curious. When you are more relaxed and curious you can walk through things with the therapist. As you become more curious you explore and things start to get interesting again. Then you have the ability to look at what you want.
When you begin to want things again, life gets more interesting. You are not just feelings and thought; you are also a body. And whether you notice it or not, your body is giving out and sending all kinds of messages to you and to the world.
Some people can read themselves and others very well. You think of them as empathetic or sensitive. What I know to be true in therapy is, a good therapist can teach you how to be aware of your signals and how to sense others’ signals.
When I talked about feelings before I said that there was a moment right before when you can see the wave coming at you. When that moment happens, it is because your body is sending you a signal. It is saying “hey look up; there is a Tsunami out there!!” Your body speaks to you all the time about what is going on around you. You just may not be aware of it. You can learn how to hear your body talk.
So lemme hear your body talk.
We covered the heart, the mind and the body. Is anyone out there asking about the soul? Are you asking that question in your head? Go ahead have a conversation; talk amongst yourselves. Now can some of you do that? I mean it, really where you can have an argument about something you are going to do. And it can go around and around.
Is there a listener and answerer?
Who is answering? What is that voice that talks back to you? Don’t worry you don’t have multiple personalities. But there is something inside us. You can call it intuition or whatever you like, but when you learn how to listen to it regularly, life gets a lot easier.
This is when you learn to be still. The noise and the clamor take a break and it’s just you. That is what happens at the end of therapy. When your mind, body, heart and soul get equal play. You get to be you.