(Vlog) Are your thoughts really yours?
We all have reactions and responses to life as it unfolds around us – thoughts, ideas, reactions, emotions, likes and dislikes.
For although we may identify with them, our thoughts and reactions to life can be from our past.
We picked them up when young from the opinions of the people around us as we grew up – our family, schools, religion, neighbours, friends.
And if we delve into them, they may not be really true for us, now.
Last week I was visiting a small village in Italy where a local was talking to me about growing up there.
He talked as though it was usual to know the same people all one’s life as he had in that village. To know everyone who you see on the streets.
His friends were from there, he married a village girl he grew up with, and he lives there still. It is his world.
Its a place where everyone in the village know each other, and from outside most of them seem to have similar views of life.
Now you probably haven’t a life like that. Most people now have grown up in larger towns or cities, and often have moved at least a few times to live in new places.
(Maybe, if you are like me, you have lived in many different countries.)… Yet, even after we move, we can still be carrying the voices of our past, our conditioning with us.
Then we can find still ourselves reacting to the world around us through them, and rather than uncovering our own true responses to the world…
My family began traveling and living in many countries and cultures from when I was 10, and I have continued this all my life.
Some of the places we lived were so foreign that they shocked me out of my past comfortable way of looking at the world (like very simply very living in Bali with a local family in the 70’s).
While also so beautiful, these experiences forced me to question my past assumptions about life and to open myself to very different ways of thinking.
So I began shedding some of my conditioning. Later I did workshops to continue freeing myself further.
For a big part of the journey of uncovering our true inner self is about de-cluttering ourselves from our past conditioning.
Yet its not easy to see it, as in villages where people seem to look at life in similar ways, so it does take awareness and patience.
Are your thoughts really yours?
Have you noticed reactions in you that are in fact not yours?
Where an opinion you have might actually from something someone said to you or taught you in the past?
maybe it was true for them, but isn’t for you?
And if so, how have you helped yourself become free from these voices of your past, from your conditioning?
I would love to hear you thoughts on this…
With love,
Cassandra Punita
