Are you tired??

Books meant a lot to me as a child (they still do). Roald Dahl, Louis Sachar, Beverly Clearly…the worlds they painted took me away. Perhaps the author most impacting at that age on me was Shel Silverstein. His book Lafcadio: the lion who shot back captured me with its absurdity and wit and remains a favorite. Today I still have two Silverstein books from my childhood in my library. One is Lafcadio and the other is my first copy of A Light in the Attic. Reading through it today I was reminded of a poem that speaks a truth that’s always good to hear.

Are these feelings shadows or real?

Here is this post summarized in three sentences:

1. Our brains are prediction machines using the past to predict the future and un-healed past events cloud those predictions and can cause un-adaptive emotions.

2. Slowing down and reflecting using non judgement and lots of self acceptance helps us suss out whether our feelings are adaptive or not.

3. Working on our past helps our present be clearer.

It’s popular to say that you won’t let fear drive your life. While that’s maybe an important counter balance to living too much in fear or giving away your personal power it’s also a misnomer. The goal shouldn’t be to get rid of any core emotion, instead it should be to slow down when we are sped up and automatic so that we can listen to what we’re feeling (this might take a lot of self acceptance and be alarming to do). That is how we start to be truly adaptive. Remember what we feel is going to be based on both the present moment and your past. So it takes some time to suss out whether your intuition is adaptive emotions to the present moment or out of date feelings from the past being put on the current moment. Our brains are prediction machines. Their job is to efficiently predict what will happen based on the past. When the past is incomplete then we inaccurately predict. So in order to be more present we need to not only slow down we also need to process and complete or re-complete the past. Fear is important, without fear we would be much more vulnerable to being taken advantages of. That said, unnecessary fear keeps us small and under selling ourselves.

So to recap once again in those three sentences:

1. Our brains are prediction machines using the past to predict the future and un-healed past events cloud those predictions and can cause un-adaptive emotions.

2. Slowing down and reflecting using non judgement and lots of self acceptance helps us suss out whether our feelings are adaptive or not.

3. Working on our past helps our present be clearer.