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When the mind can't explain something.....
Susan Grandfield • Sep 30, 2021
.....we have the opportunity to get curious and (possibly) transform our experience.
Picture the scene:-
- Undressed from the waist down
- Legs in stirrups
- Watching a doctor pick up what looked like a metal medieval instrument of torture
- And the words “pre-cancerous” in my mind
That was me a few weeks ago when I went for a gynaecological procedure at the hospital.
Why am I sharing this with you, you may ask??
And I’d say that is a very good question!
My answer is that this experience offered me so much wisdom about how I create my own reality and how I can shape my own experience, even in the face of what might be described as a frightening situation, that I had a sense it may help others in whatever their own difficult situations.
I won’t go into graphic detail but allow me to offer a bit more context…..
The scene I set out at the start described my return to the hospital for a procedure following a biopsy which had found abnormal cells on my cervix. That is not an unusual situation and (if you are a female reading this) you may have experienced this yourself. If you have, you’ll probably be able to relate to the feelings that arise when you read about “high grade pre-cancerous cells” and “significant changes detected”. If, like me, you find yourself unable to fight the urge to Google what “CIN3” means you’d find out that this means the cells (undetected or without treatment) can develop into cervical cancer.
I was in panic mode. The C word had been mentioned and now I had to go and have bits of my cervix cut out! Eek! My mind was showing me images of a horrible, painful, embarrassing and frightening procedure. I was aware that I had been hi-jacked by my fear response and was visualising the worst possible experience and the worst possible outcome. Understandable you could say but not very helpful. This lasted for a couple of days.
And then something shifted.
I can’t explain what it happened. I was like another part of me woke up and showed me that there was a different experience available to me, that I could choose to have a different perspective on the situation.
What happened over the days and weeks until my appointment was a growing sense of allowing, acceptance, surrender and connecting with the part of me that knew it would be ok. I can’t explain how this happened and even with the years of mindfulness meditation I had done and all the personal development I’ve done on getting to know my mind better. Something different was going on here.
It was like a sense of calm and peace arose from within me and I was able to step out of the disaster movie and into a space of ease and relaxation. As the day of the appointment came closer I found myself more
relaxed rather than less and, strangely, I became quite curious about what the experience would be like.
On the day itself it didn’t go perfectly, and that is an important point. This wasn’t a case of thinking positively and everything will ok, there was something else going on which my mind couldn’t explain.
I had to wait for 40 minutes to be called for my appointment and instead of getting worked up or irritated I was able to just sit there. I felt relaxed and at ease. Then, when I was up on the couch, legs akimbo, the doctor spent at least 20 minutes trying various pieces of equipment before she found one that “fitted”. What followed was a comedy moment when the doctor and nurse were both fiddling around between my legs trying to get the suction to work!! Instead of getting frustrated, angry or more tense I found myself smiling and laughing inside at the comedy of it. Such a different way to experience the situation.
And the post-op experience was also very different to how the mind in panic mode had imagined. It had believed the guidance that said there could be significant discomfort for up to 2 weeks. What actually happened was that I woke up the next day I had no discomfort at all and I haven’t since.
The rational mind can’t explain it. Something that it would label as painful, distressing, worrying, embarrassing, even terrifying was at worst neutral and at best a curiously interesting experience.
It showed me that the mind has a tendency to run away into worst case scenario planning, it’s what it has been programmed to do. But by pausing and asking “how would I like to experience this?”
I was able to shift mode and move into a space of curiosity, choice and freedom from that programme.
The mind is more malleable than we might think.
Whatever we point it towards we get more of, so pain and worry brings pain and worry, ease and relaxation brings ease and relaxation.
Will my experience and this different perspective change the outcome? I don’t know and there are still a few weeks until I get the results. I do believe that all the abnormal cells are gone but if not yet, then it means I have more opportunity to practice allowing, accepting and surrendering to enable the body to heal itself.
What I DO know is that by not fighting against the situation and trying to control it I was able to be with the experience as it unfolded without expectation of how good or bad it would be (and I ended up being very pleasantly surprised!).
So, how do you want to experience the situation you are in?
What do you need help with?
Part 4 - the way forward In this final part of the series, we are looking at the way forward. What does this awakening mean and how do we stay on the path that we’ve started to walk down?
This is an invitation to be curious about the freedom that comes from finally letting go of the need to fit in, to embrace how you see the world and how you want to approach life and the ripple effect that can have on the lives of those around you. It is all about self-acceptance and allowing.
The struggle of an idealist in a world of pessimists, pragmatists and realists is that at times it can feel very lonely, like we’re sitting on the edge of the crowd not being invited into the conversation. Everyone is looking in one direction and when we point out that there is another direction they could look in we feel dismissed, not heard and ridiculed for romantic notions about the world. But it doesn't have to feel that way.
Idealist: “Someone who believes that very good things can be achieved, often when this does not seem likely to others”. Rather than hiding away, agreeing with others, making myself wrong for holding a more hopeful view of the world or criticising myself for being naïve I backed myself and stood behind my beliefs.
We are under the misapprehension that we need to push ourselves outside our comfort zone if we really want to experience life and be successful. But that is not true. Finding our way back to our comfort zone is a vital part of experiencing life with more ease, enjoyment and freedom.
The reality of life is that we forget and fall into the predictable traps of the ego and its susceptibility to the outside world but that finding our way back to inner peace and stability comes from remembering that our experience is created from the inside.
We are incredibly talented at creating fictitious stories about ourselves and going through life without editing them, updating them or realising we can actually re-write them. Discovering how quickly life can change when you start to pay attention to your stories.
We begin this adventure of a lifetime as wide open, expansive, creative, loving, curious and innately wise little beings full of possibility, potential and optimism. But through our experience of interacting with others and the world around us we, unconsciously, wrap ourselves up in patterns of behaving and thinking which serve to protect us from the perceived risk of following that childlike energy. Now is the time to "unwrap" those protective layers and reconnect with who we really are.
Experimenting is fundamentally about trying things out and not being attached to a particular outcome. It is about giving things a go and learning from whatever happens. There is a real freedom in approaching things with an experimental mindset and I believe it can be brought to all aspects of our lives.
Like me, are you also someone who tends to plan moments of bliss rather than allow them to happen?
Ridiculous as that may sound, I realise that when I am in my familiar environment doing familiar and routine activities I tend to plan for moments of bliss or joy to happen sometime in the future, when all of the things I need to do have been done. I am discovering the possibility of experiencing moments of bliss at any time and without the preplanning.
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susan@susangrandfield.com
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