How Do We Heal Psychosclerosis?
a meditation journey with elephant to soften the mind
I’ve posted some of my shamanic journeying meditation messages with Elephant before. I am by no means a shaman and all of my meditations are novice attempts, but the messages all serve me. Maybe this one can serve you, too.
It always begins with a question. Today I asked How do we heal psychosclerosis?
Start by recognizing how your own mind has hardened around certain ideas. Everyone has experienced this in some way.
You call them constructs. But they’re all constructs. You believe you are a “me” for starters. Your ideas and beliefs hold you in place and there’s a comfort in feeling held. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. Certainty is stabilizing, but it is an illusion that can become a prison. See if you can make space for uncertainty. See if you can make peace with discomfort.
Ask yourself “What if everything I believe is wrong?”
And really sit with that question. Any resistance that shows up in response to this question will help you identify the calcification that is already in place. Where are the “walls” around you mind? What ideas do you cling to to keep you “safe”? And what would happen if those walls came down?
What are the challenges that make you angry?
With anger comes inflammation and inflammation left unchecked will consume all the flexibility in your thinking. Once that suppleness is dried out and rigid, your thoughts will harden and your ideas will become fixed beliefs. And those fixed beliefs will be the lens through which all new ideas are filtered. At that point only ideas that reinforce those beliefs will stick. That is how the walls around your mind and heart will grow and isolate you with your ideas.
If you are truly interested in breaking down those walls, be curious..
…and make room for challenges to your belief systems. Notice the moments of resistance and see if you can soften in those moments. This is how you can begin to restore flexibility to your thinking.
When it comes to possibility, STRETCH.
Practice the yoga of the mind. Bend your ideas a little. Turn them upside down. Look at ideas from different lenses and in different light. Laugh at them a little so you don’t take your own ideas so seriously. Notice all the ways your thinking has become “crusty” and humorless.
And always apply love.
As you soften you make more room for love and love will always shine a meaningful light on things. Everything looks a little different through this lens and your mind will become expansive. There are more solutions than you think there are. And more importantly, some of the things you believe to be problems are more likely opportunities to seize. There are gems of joy and connection woven into the trials and tribulations that plague you now. Don’t miss them. Each tiny breakthrough serves as a crack in walls of your current thinking. Be curious about thoughts that arise when new lights shines in through those cracks. Are there new silver linings? Are there new shadows to explore?
Lastly, don’t let shame get in the way.
Shame will be one of the shadows that surfaces each time light shines on something new. You will see something you’ve failed to see before – embrace this new success and forgive yourself for what you’ve missed up until now. Mistakes and misunderstandings are part of the growth curve. You cannot embrace growth and learning without making peace with the things that limited you in the past. You’re not alone. You’re never alone.
The only way to be truly alive is to remain on this learning curve. The moment you step off of it, you begin the process of becoming a fossil. A relic. A statue from a fixed moment in time.
If this was helpful, here are some others (also just me trying to do some organizing):
Love this, very helpful, ties in with things I have been exploring recently,
Feeling like you have to be sure, you have to be certain your not self is telling you there is no room for doubt. That can be paralysing in the world we live in, we live in a world that prioritizes rational, logical, mental processing, that is what the not self is going to tell you need to do. It will tell you that you are just wrong in general, wrong for even existing if you are not sure about something, if you have doubt about something. The not self is never anybody’s authority, there is no need for anybody to be absolutely certain of anything, what the not self tries to tell us is a lie, it tries to convince us of something, it says you need to be certain. I don’t need to be certain, I don’t need to eliminate doubt, learn to get comfortable with doubt.