Is Our Thinking The Best We Can Do?

We each go through our daily lives thinking this is the only way to think, feel, and exist. Some of us are working on auto-pilot and never give a thought to what's going on inside our own minds. We each create the thought processes inside our heads that seem to be normal for us, or at least what we believe "normal" to be. After all, isn't that what we want.....to be "normal"?

"YEAH!!!!! Then we would fit into other people's beliefs!"

I've learned in my lifetime that there IS no normal. "Normal" is merely a name attached to a judgment we have placed on a scale, to check to see if we "fit in" with society. As we grow up and take in the world around us, we learn how to adapt in a way the world tells us we should be. We "should" be smart, attractive, wealthy, thin, kind, married, have children, etc., etc., etc. If our life doesn't unfold the way society says it should, then we move into unhealthy thoughts, not only about ourselves, but about others. We learn to start judging, and blaming, and condemning others to fit into the molds we were told all of us are supposed to fit.

How do we know whether our thinking is where it's supposed to be? Good question....there is one key factor that alerts us to where we are on our own personal litmus test. That test is measured by the amount of pain or discomfort we may be feeling at any given time in our life. How many times during the course of your day, do you flinch, stop breathing, have anxiety, suddenly feel a little bit nauseous, get upset, blame, flip someone off in traffic, yell at someone, get tightness in your chest, neck, or shoulders....or want to beat the living daylights out of someone else?? Hmmmm....that may be the first clue that you have something you might want to address. These little alerts let us know we have something to heal within ourselves.

Yep....PAIN is a message. Pain alerts us to the fact that there is something we need to look at inside ourselves. It's not about fixing another person. Often times, we choose to "kill" the messenger, thinking someone else "made us angry", or someone else "messed up our day", or someone else "made us late for work, school, or the doctor's office". It's no different than if you had a tack in the bottom of your shoe, hurting your foot. If you felt pain there, you would know that something needs to be corrected, so you would then take off your shoe and lovingly, remove the tack. Why? Because you deserve to walk around without having pain in your foot. I'm sure you would agree that it would be a little bit insane to leave that tack in you shoe creating constant pain in your foot. You serve yourself well, by removing the tack.

Sooo.....it only makes sense to serve yourself well, by removing what doesn't belong in your mind that may be causing discomfort there. Pain isn't always an outright physical "ouchie". Sometimes we don't even know we are having pain, because we have learned to numb ourselves out and not feel anything. Addictions of any kind is what keeps us from realizing we are having pain. Those addictions come to us in the way of drugs, both street drugs and presciption drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, sex, reading, TV, chaos, drama, controlling others, working, etc. These are all things used to anesthetize ourselves to keep pain out of our conscious awareness. We think what we cannot see, doesn't exist. If we don't feel it.....it's not there, and we are F I N E.......I learned years ago what the letters FINE stand for, and I decided then, I was no longer going to be fine.

So, how do we recognize what pain is, if we are numbed out too much to feel it? I was hoping you would want to know the answer to that question.......We don't always recognize it as "pain" when we experience it, because it's not usually a physical pain we are experiencing. Pain can be any action or feeling that doesn't belong in our system. Pain alerts us in many ways, and two of the most common signs are FEAR and HOSTILITY. Pain can be anger, fear, embarrassment, shame, guilt, blame, sadness, despair, aloneness, depression, rejection, abuse, neglect, abandonment, chaos, drama, physical illness, controlling behavior, and destruction of any kind to yourself or to someone else. Pain is "acting out" in unhealthy ways. It's a way that we internalize what we can't express or what isn't in our conscious awareness. Pain can sometimes turn us into becoming a victim. It can put us into that "woe is me" victimhood mentality, and because we don't understand what's really going on, we in turn, blame those around us for what we are feeling. Pain is actually a great friend. We just need to get to a place that we can realize that, and truly embrace the friend that it is. When we learn how to take responsibility for our pain, then we can do something about it.