by pressablealiassolutionscom
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Welcome to Insights and Implications!
We received a question after last month’s newsletter and would like to address it. We love your questions, so please keep them coming.
All the best,
All of us at Insight Principles
How Do I Do It?
After last month’s newsletter (Our Design for Success) we received an interesting question, one which we’re asked often.
“What habits or steps do you do to help you consciously monitor your thinking and its impact on your feelings?”
This question pinpoints the most difficult part of our work at Insight Principles. Over the years, we’ve made countless innovations in our programs to help people digest our message. We’ve found various ways to say that the human mind works only one way (from the inside-out) and that the human mind has a built-in design for success. It’s a simple message. Most people grasp it intellectually.
But then the questions start about how to “do” it.
Expressing and hearing the message is the easy part. Realizing the message, which is what transforms the message into practical understanding (the how-to), is a very different story.
Realization is not something we do. It happens to us, within us. We have been having realizations since infancy. Most of the time we hardly notice. We miss the significance and power of what just transpired and simply incorporate the new learning and go on with our lives. Another word for realization is insight.
When we realize how something works, we have new options and new things to do which are invisible or unavailable before our realization. For example, many years ago, my 5 year old cousin got a superman outfit for Christmas, jumped out his second story bedroom window, and broke his arm. He had not yet realized gravity! It took several lessons before I finally realized how to turn my downhill skis in the direction I wanted them to go. I have argued with my spouse with great conviction, only to realize later that I was wrong.
Realizing how our perceptions and feelings are generated each moment via thought is one of the most powerful insights we will ever have, yet it is easy to completely miss.
And even if we realize how it works, we will always have moments where we forget.
Remembering the truth of how the mind works when I’m caught up gives me the space I need to notice something is off. I take another look at what’s really going on: I am experiencing Thought in the moment, the only way experience happens. My blaming, justifying thinking seems to fall away, the built-in wisdom of my mind brings me something new, and my experience changes. These are not steps that I intentionally “do”. Instead, they are manifestations of my realization about the way the mind actually works.
Of course, sometimes there are things to do. It makes sense to calm down in a crisis. Clearing my head before I make an important decision works well. When I need to have a sensitive discussion with someone, I wait until I feel settled. However, these “doings” are the by-products of my realizations. Without the realization of how experience is crafted via thought, they are just good ideas that need to be worked on by me.
Knowing how my mind works takes a lot of the effort out of life, and I’d rather not add to my work load. Luckily realization is a powerful and reliable tool that adds nothing to my to-do list.
-Sandy Krot
©Insight Principles, Inc.