Sunday, June 17, 2018

The Power of the thinking Mind.

Our minds are working all the time. It’s very useful that they are really. We need our minds to keep working. So let’s appreciate our brains and minds.

But how is it, for someone when what they see is not what is actually there. One of my jobs is working with children with learning difficulties and I am really aware of how frustrating it must be when what you see is not what’s there. For example, if you are learning maths and read the number as 42 when really it is 24. (How many numbers can be reversed?) So how does one learn when what one sees is that confusing   - well not confusing to start with, because the child thinks it’s okay and it becomes confusing when the answer doesn’t work out. Or reading words and see “was” as “saw”?  How does one make sense of the sentence? See the possibility of growing feeling of failure? Then the strategies to avoid this feeling? The strategies of avoiding being a failure? Be a clown, act silly, become labelled as disruptive?

As adults, how often does this happen for us, in different ways. Do we see things as they are, or is what we see, veiled by some idea we have in our head.
As adults, how often do we think we hear someone say something, and then find out later that that is not what they said? That we interpreted what they said into something else.

Are you aware of this, in you? Or is it too much like being a failure?

I had a realisation along these lines the other day. I was reminded of someone I worked with a several years ago, and this lead to a memory of how she was and what she said. Then, into the gap while thinking, dropped the realisation. I remember that she told me to do things, that she was bossy. I remember the specific commands. But what I got now though, was that maybe she was asking me to do things and I interpreted what she said as telling.         Oh, s…t. You mean I have been carrying round the uncomfortable memory that she told me what to do, when actually she was asking if I wanted to. That I was carrying round the uncomfortable feeling of being bossed, when actually she was asking. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. You know, I think I may have interpreted other people as commanding me to do something when they weren’t really. Maybe I had a veil of sensitivity to this sort of asking, having experienced something early in my life which created a mind job of interpreting questions as commands.

And this sort of thing can lead to an inability to say no, to a sense of having to do what someone asks you to do. I certainly felt that I had to do what this person asked. What do you reckon?

Funny things, minds. Have a look at what yours is doing.

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