Hello!
You made it to the final post in this blog series on cognitive bias!
Congratulations for sticking with me all the way thought this ?
Today I am giving you my final practical tool to help you begin or continue to live a life where you are more aware of where your cognitive blocks to seeing reality are, and how you can work THROUGH those blocks to find real reality.
This is ALL ABOUT you being able to get BETTER RESULTS in your life.
This is all about you learning to discern where you are being emotionally manipulated, where you are leaning into stories that feel ‘familiar’ but that don’t actually lead you where you want to go, and it’s all about finding your POWER in this world where there is SO much noise and information it can be incredibly difficult to discern what’s true from what’s false.
This work is all about learning to lean into the unknown, learning how to let our emotions and feelings be guidance, learning how to unite the feelings, emotions and body sensations with our logic and understanding - and using ALL of this to help us disconnect from ways of being that we *think* are going to get us somewhere - when in fact they are taking us off in a totally different direction.
These practices may seem simple and even unrelated at first - but I promise you that if you stick with them, if you give them time and if you give yourself SPACE to lean into the unknown, you’re going to find a LOT of freedom with this work.
So let’s dive into our last tool, and see how you can use your mind, body and emotions in a unified way to help you find the best path forward for yourself.
If you’ve not done so already, check out:
Now let’s wrap this up!
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Now that you have the first two practices from the last post under your belt, you’re ready for the BIG one.
Remember, there’s no rush to get anywhere.
Please take your time with this work.
Only do what your body and nervous system can handle - never push yourself into a state of overwhelm or into a state of feeling that you lose touch with being able to be grounded and stable.
One step at a time, slow and steady, just as much as you can actually handle - which may be less than you *think* you can handle.
It’s better to do less over time, than to push yourself and burn out.
Step Three: Questioning Beliefs That Feel Terrible: From here, the next thing I invite you to start practicing is noticing the difference between thoughts that feel GOOD in the body - thoughts that feel like freedom and lightness - and thoughts that may feel FAMILIAR or COMFORTABLE or ‘TRUE’ but that actually feel TERRIBLE in the body.
In this practice, we’re going to start learning how to use our FEELINGS to help us determine which thoughts/beliefs we may want to start to question and which thoughts and beliefs we are currently comfortable holding onto. We’re going to start to tap into our new-found capacity to WITNESS our feelings without assuming we KNOW what those feelings mean to help us start to FEEL the difference between a thought that aligns with reality and one that doesn’t.
Now before you attempt this practice, I do want you to get solid with your witnessing work - so don’t rush here. Let yourself take your time with your witnessing work, getting to a place where you can reliably come into the witness perspective without losing yourself in what you’re thinking and feeling. Really get your grounding with that, get comfortable with it - and THEN move onto this practice.
What we are going to start to learn how to do here, is feel into what the BODY is telling us about our thoughts and beliefs, so we can start to identify the thoughts and beliefs we may benefit from questioning.
The body is going to let us know where false beliefs are via showing us PAIN and CONSTRICTION when we think a thought. This pain and constriction may feel familiar, it may be something we have practiced over and over again and it may be something we have built up many, many stories around for a LONG TIME - so learning to see that when a thought hurts it may NOT be true is a huge step in and of itself. For most of us, we tend to perceive that the WORSE a thought feels the MORE true it is. We tend to perceive that the more familiar a thought feels the more true it is. We tend to feel that the more we have followed our thoughts into our loops and habits the more true a thought is. The more others believe something the more true it is, no matter how it feels to us.
We have been trained to see that ‘buzzy high’ feeling of a false or oversimplified promise to be what ‘truth’ feels like. We have been trained to sense that what seems fast, easy, immediately true, what makes sense to us right now and what STIMULATES or NUMBS us the most is the most accurate information - and this again is a HARD thing to start to reconsider.
But this is what this work is designed to help us do.
This work is ALL about finally giving ourselves NEW awareness tools. It’s about discovering that we have other ways of perceiving reality and finding truth than simply using our minds, looking at what others are or aren’t doing or otherwise leaning on hypotheticals and theory or what we’ve already seen and experienced.
This work helps us to tune into the parts of ourselves that have a deeper capacity to see and understand than our intellect has - because remember the MIND can be convinced of anything, and the MIND can be lulled into a false sense of security even against our lived experience and actual reality.
But when we allow ourselves to really tune into our bodies, how things FEEL and to the actual outcomes we are experiencing - we can get a glimpse into the future so to speak - feeling how things are GOING to go even before we walk them out - AND we can learn how to trust our EXPERIENCE even when that experience contradicts our minds.
Because the truth is - ANY thought that is in alignment with reality is going to have an ESSENCE of FREEDOM. Even when we face realities that are objectively hard, heavy, unpleasant or not what we want, there is STILL going to be an element of feeling free in knowing this reality, because in knowing the truth we have the MOST power. When we understand what reality is - even if that reality is heavier, darker or harder than we wanted it to be - we are then going to have the MOST power to find a way forward that works the BEST for us out of all the possibilities that actually EXIST.
I know this can be hard to believe and hard to wrap the mind around. This can be really hard to trust in our world where we have been trained to deny our feelings, to prioritize what our minds say, to go with what we’ve always done or to follow what others are doing even if it’s objectively not working. I know this can be hard to believe because of COURSE we are going to have negative thoughts and feelings about genuinely hard things, and of course it’s hard to trust that we can trust ourselves in general!
But the more we practice this, the more we give it a chance, the more we learn HOW to feel our feelings and how to interpret our feelings in a way that’s aligned with reality, the more we are going to discover just how much of a superpower this can start to become.
This work takes us out of living in fantasy and into living in reality. Which at FIRST can feel limiting when our fantasies had us believing that there were ways of moving forward that were simpler, faster and more in alignment with what we currently think, believe and are comfortable with - but overall it sets us free because again it helps us find the ACTUAL path forward vs. leaving us continuing to pursue a path that never existed in the first place.
When we are living in fantasy, we may have an idea about a way forward that ‘could’ be good or that would be amazing - but if it doesn’t align with reality, it doesn’t ACTUALLY exist. Which means we are then putting our efforts towards solutions that aren’t solutions, which is really just trapping ourselves in what we are currently in!
When we figure out what reality is, even if that means accepting limitations we didn’t want to accept - this still means having the MOST power to figure out the BEST way forward that actually exists vs. staying stuck in delusion and thus stuck in trying to make life feel better from a place of fantasy.
We have to realize that when we see reality for how it is, we don’t ACTUALLY lose anything. It might FEEL like we are losing what we THOUGHT we had/what we THOUGHT existed - but we have to remind ourselves that in true reality, that other path NEVER actually existed! It was never a path we could have taken. It was never an actual solution or answer. It didn’t ever exist. Now we know. Now we are actually empowered.
Seeing where our power ACTUALLY is and letting go of the fantasy of where we thought it was is ALWAYS going to bring freedom. Even if it sucks and even if it’s not what we wanted.
Second, when we use this technique to get into our belief systems, when we use this technique to help us break out of the thought patterns that are holding us in our bias’ about ourselves and the world around us, we are going to again, be giving ourselves SO MUCH ROOM to just feel better in life!
This work is always going to be about starting with our inner world - the ways that we perceive ourselves, what we’re worthy of, what we’re capable of and what we deserve - and from there we are going to find that we can then expand into seeing the world around us differently.
We are going to find that the more we work on the internal dialogue we have, the internal belief systems that currently run our actions, the more our external actions will NATURALLY change to match our new world and self view.
We won’t have to ‘force’ ourselves to be different - rather we will naturally GROW into people who live and behave differently as we change our bias’ to be more in alignment with reality.
We start with how we see ourselves, and we allow the process to blossom from there.
Step One: For this practice, you are going to take a thought that you think on a regular basis that you take for granted as being a true thought.
This can be something like:
“I am unlovable because I am unattractive.”
“I’m not successful and never will be.”
“I have to keep doing this or that thing in my life.”
“I am only doing life right when I do THIS.”
Choose a thought that feels ‘obvious’ to you, that feels ‘true’ in the sense that you deeply believe it is reality and you believe you have LOTS of evidence to SUPPORT this thought.
Step Two: When you think this thought, notice all the other thoughts that come up along with this thought to justify its correctness. Notice the stories attached to this thought. Notice all the ways in which you believe you have evidence to support this thought. Notice everything the mind does to convince you that this thought is pure reality, and that there could be nothing else. Also notice if there are any contradictory thoughts. Notice if you have thoughts that tell you something different. Notice everything that comes up in terms of justification as well as contradiction and anything in between. Notice all the ‘evidence’ you have. Allow it all to be there and see if you can simply WITNESS it without REACTING to it.
Step Three: From here, see if you can slowly shift your awareness to what you are feeling in your BODY as you think these thoughts. Again, notice any labels you have for what you’re feeling - things like ‘anxiety’, ‘fear,’ ‘joy’ and again notice the THOUGHTS that come up to explain these feelings, to understand these feelings, to contextualize the feelings. Notice any thoughts you think about how these feelings make what you are thinking TRUE, notice all the ways your thoughts use your feelings as ‘evidence’ that you are seeing things clearly or as evidence for anything you may be thinking. Notice what your mind automatically assumes about your feelings, and notice the stories your mind automatically starts telling as you feel your feelings.
Step Four: See if you can allow yourself to release the stories - not forever, you can promise yourself that you are allowed to return to your stories whenever you want, you are just going to take a little BREAK from them for the purpose of this exercise - and then see if you can shift from making meaning out of these feelings, from telling stories and from assuming you know what your feelings are trying to say into a state of just OBSERVING what you are feeling in your body. Can you first identify just WHERE the feeling exists in your body? Is it in your chest? Your hands? Your head? All over? What is the location of the sensations you are feeling? Next, can you shift into noticing SENSATION instead of creating MEANING from the sensations? Can you describe your feelings in terms of sensation words like hot/cold/light/heavy/solid/dense/contracting/loosening.
Step Five: See if you can hang out and simply NOTICE the sensation without telling yourself stories about the sensations. What is it like to suspend judgment? What is it like to suspend stories? How does it feel to simply allow yourself to observe the FEELING without making it MEAN anything? Can you allow the feeling to exist without needing to be attached to any kind of story? How does that feel? How does it feel to just OBSERVE?
Step Six: From here - can you start to open to the idea that ANY thought that FEELS heavy/dark/constricting/contracting or otherwise ‘bad’ in the body is alerting you to a thought or story that may not be in total alignment with reality? Can you open to the idea that any thought that feels light/freeing/liberating/grounded/expansive is alerting you to a thought or story that is more in alignment with truth and reality? What would it be like to get CURIOUS in this way - to open to the idea that just because a thought feels ‘familiar’ or ‘true’ in the sense that we have thought it many many times and have stories to back it up - that if it FEELS heavy/dense/not good in the body, there may be room to QUESTION it? What would it be like to open to the idea of being curious about a thought that feels liberating, freeing and expansive - even if that thought doesn’t feel familiar, if that thought goes against what we currently believe and if that thought contradicts the reality we seem to know to be true? What would it be like to simply get CURIOUS in this way? If it feels terrible, are you willing to question it? If it feels good, are you willing to explore it?
Step Seven: From here, what I encourage you to do is to remain OPEN. To just let yourself be CURIOUS as to where this opening takes you. If you continue to open to the idea that anything that feels heavy/terrible/uncomfortable/buzzy in your body may not be total reality - how does this open your mind to seeing what you may not currently be seeing? Again this doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING about the thought your thinking is untrue. It doesn’t mean that the OPPOSITE is true. It doesn’t mean that we want to throw that thought away and look for something totally opposing. It may not even be the base thought that’s incorrect, but the STORIES we have ATTACHED to the thought that need to be changed - and that’s why this is a first STEP not an END step. What is it like to simply remain open and curious? Same with good feeling thoughts - what can you allow yourself to open up to, to see that you may not be seeing, to be curious about that you may not have considered if you are to accept that if something feels freeing, liberating, expansive or grounding in your body that there’s at least an ELEMENT of truth there to be discovered?
Can you just OPEN to this exploration?
Fewf ok, that was a LOT about cognitive bias and false beliefs! I hope this series has served to make you feel more aware, and more empowered that we all have bias and we will all have bias for the rest of our lives - but this doesn’t mean we have to be TRAPPED in our bias’ forever, and it doesn’t mean we have to be victim to them.
Allowing yourself to just consider where your bias’ may exist and how they may be affecting you is a HUGE first step that I want you to celebrate in yourself. The other tools are bonus.
Know that just by opening yourself to this, you are starting a process that will likely take on a life of its own. You don’t have to push or force it.
One step at a time.
<3
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