Those of you who are following along at home, I’m still reading “Stop Doing that Sh*t” by Gary John Bishop. I’m slowly reading through the primary section of the book, the three saboteurs.
The first thing, as you may remember from the previous entry, was the idea one had of themselves. This strikes me as both the hardest and the easiest place to start. The hardest because in all truth, the consideration and confidence one has in themselves is the core of everything that they do and thus the one with the most defenses. The easiest because it is also the one over which we have the most control. His discussion starts with the hard part, at least in my mind, trying to get to the root of how we feel about ourselves.
Let’s remember of course the subconscious with which we are primarily interested is a feeling entity. It doesn’t care about logic or evidence really, only how something felt to us long enough ago that we’ve forgotten where we even learned the idea, but we’ve got the idea stuck in our head now. Jen Sincero calls that inner personality, the subconscious, the Little Prince. I don’t know if she intended the reference to the children’s book, but it could be so. Where Bishop says we started out as magical little sponges, Sincero discusses that we all start out as the Little Prince as children. The subconscious never grows up. As such, the Little Prince never grows past the ability to care about its own safety. Bishop looks at it from the idea that we are creating and recreating a life which follows our subconscious biases so as to both make the problem and save ourselves from it. It’s an interesting thought.
Think about it: how many times do you have deja vu about your life? I know I have it fairly frequently when I’m dealing with certain people, as if I’m having the same conversation with them over and over again on different days. Unfortunately, there’s no magical way to get out of the time warp. (Insert Rocky Horror reference here.) As it stands, regardless of how you characterize it, the subconscious, your inner feelings, the Little Prince, the interior of a magical little sponge, you are brought into the world with a set of wiring that gets pretty set in stone awfully fast. You start out knowing nothing, then you learn things, but you don’t learn them on the level of the conscious but the level of the unconscious. Therefore, you have to get down DEEP in order to even touch it. Getting in touch with your inner self takes some doing. I intend to hold a conference with my little princess.
Firstly, I’m going to start listening to that internal monologue going on in my brain whenever I make a mistake, but not just to listen to it. I’m listening for understanding. That’s different, difficult, and somewhat painful really, but it has to be done. One cannot counteract an attack they doesn’t see coming. Therefore, I need to get intimately familiar with the thought processes which hamstring my life. Right now, I’m working on my weight. I’m not fat by any means, but I’m carrying too much excess for a woman with a family history of arthritis and joint replacements. Therefore, I want to work on getting my weight down. However, I have a tendency to eat what I see. Thus making it incredibly hard for me to avoid things I shouldn’t be eating unless I’m in complete control of my environment. Something I have noticed since starting to take stock of the invading thoughts of my little princess is that she makes me feel like I can’t do better. Sincero in “You are a Badass”, points out that the subconscious is only trying to protect you from the world. Which is possible. My inability to control my urge to eat, fueled by the constant stream of ‘just one won’t hurt’ and ‘you know you want to’, could very well be trying to protect me from a world which auto-rejects based on looks. I’m not the most beautiful girl in the room most of the time, so there’s that.
However, if I take the same idea from Bishop’s standpoint, my subconscious is hijacking my desire to do right by myself in order to set me up to have to save myself from my own terrible habits. I’m not going to say either of these approaches are necessarily right. I do buy the idea that the subconscious is primarily focused on its own survival and thus the survival of me as a person. However, where I find the rub is, that my survival, at least in a pain free lifestyle way, would say I should be working toward my goal not against it. Truth be told, the idea of a separate entity from myself living in my head makes my head hurt. For those of you who know my history, you will probably understand why. Yet, when you get right down to it, there is something which is sabotaging my best efforts. I’ll get to the weekend after having been good all week and I’ll order a pizza, then eat the whole thing. Not precisely what I should be doing if I want to not weigh exactly the same next week. So something’s got to give. Someone has to be right. Whether that’s Bishop, Sincero, or any of the other shelf-help gurus I’ve followed along with over the last few years, I don’t know. What I do know is that it starts with my subconscious. If it starts there, then it is ultimately within my control because it is me who is making the mess and then making me clean it up.
The question: How does one get a hold of the subconscious and reformat it, so to speak. It is below the level of the consciousness the same way the deep sea creatures are beneath the level of the ocean. The way things are currently working, it could be considered a deep sea monster something nigh on impossible to kill like the mysterious kraken said to sink sailing ships out beyond the edge of the map. For all I know, I might not be able to do anything about my subconscious. It desires what it desires and because it is a feeling thing rather than a thinking thing. It is only interested in the survival of the body. I think it was Eckhart Tolle who said the mind chatters so much because it has to justify its own existence. That said, I’m going to keep reading and perhaps I will learn something which will help me in going forward. My brain, in as much turmoil as it normally exists, could use some good news.
That’s been my continued reading of “Stop Doing that Sh*t” by Bishop.
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