How do we move past our "blurred lines"?
You know, the stuff that often makes us unable to see our emotional situations clearly.
If you want peace, equanimity, clarity, and access to wide-open spaces in your mind, you have to cut through the clutter, the white noise, and the mental static and step into the empty space that actually originates thought.
That can be a tad tricky (and mind-bending), but if you think of consciousness or pure mind as having non-locality and from which everything is created, it gives you an understanding that there is a space or a gap or a repose of silence between the thousands of thoughts we think. We all have access to it, but often don’t realize it’s even there.
Think of your left brain like a system of circuitry that is constantly being lit up by “calls” to the main switchboard. These “calls” are generally our self-dialogues that are caused by conflict, negative self-talk, judgments, self-criticism, fear, and feedback loops.
When our switchboard gets inundated with emotional data, we short-circuit.
Simply put: we lose our shit.
We get triggered emotionally and our corresponding behavior might be to scream or get defensive or hyper-reactive or shut down or get into a fist fight or bail or down a whole bottle of tequila.
But if we can learn to step outside of the emotionality of the event and see how our circuitry is often set on a “default” mode (i.e., react!), we can then learn to become more objective about our circumstances and not get triggered so easily.
We move from unconsciousness to awareness. It’s simple, really.
One way to make this shift is simply to remember to breathe. Another is to find a mantra or a healthy self-dialogue with yourself that gets you out of the constant looping in your head. You could say, “I choose to let this go” or “I’m OK,” or simply bless yourself and the person you feel is triggering you (which really has more to do with you and your reaction than anyone else anyway).
Because what life is about, truly, is to live in equanimity and peace. That’s what we’re all after.
Peace doesn’t exist somewhere “out there.” It exists in our minds. We have a choice. It’s sometimes as simple as remembering, “Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy?”
It’s not worth our being upset over trivial things – which is what we often do – and it’s simply because of the default setting that most humans are set on.
Blurred lines can become less fuzzy, less chaotic, less painful, less upsetting, etc.
Maybe the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you want them to.