Over the last few days I have been in a very dark place. Caused by obsessive thinking. I know that outside circumstances don’t cause our stress, but I was totally identified with comparison-to-others-thinking which spiralled into all my default destructive conceptual thoughts.
Whilst I was going through it, even though I had the awareness that it was my thinking that was causing the distress, I still believed all I was saying about myself. It took a lot of determination – or surrender – to accept that I was creating my own despair and to know that I had the wherewithal to make different choices.
In an effort to escape from myself I resorted to voracious reading of texts and books that I thought had the answers, consuming information from website after website in a desperate bid to feel calmer.
Finally, I was so overloaded with other people’s thoughts and advice and suggestions that I went into information overload and had to let it all go.
If there was a message in all this (which, actually, I no longer believe there is but continue to find!) it would be that this process was echoing my innate knowing that, for me, I had become too bogged down in content.
And thinking that content was the answer. It was similar to how I felt as a child. There were times when I wanted – no, needed – to know all the facts in the world in order to feel in control, or to be loved and approved of. Of course I didn’t have that awareness then, I simply felt driven by some impulse to learn everything, an impossible task.
And even currently in my life I am still driven by this need to amass and hoard and collect information. Information that I think may be useful for the future. For others. So I print it all out, and store it all up, so that one day I can put it all together in a Life Manual which I can release to the world…
As if!!
I realised during this last bout of bleakness that I have to let this thinking go. Both the excessive thinking itself, and the concept of collecting information until I am ready to make sense of it.
To hold in my insights, my evolution, my ideas will only prevent further knowledge coming through. And writing about what struck me months ago would only be stale and stagnant. And wouldn’t actually make sense anymore as it would have been incorporated into my way of being in this moment.
This is a frightening reality check for me – a further pointer towards the imperative-ness of living in each moment without having the back-up of old and outdated identities and without knowing what the future holds.
Yet I know it is the only way ‘forward’. To have less security (an illusion anyway) and more faith. And a knowing that I don’t have to hold on to anything as all that I need will be given to me as and when it is right.
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