Yes: Of course! AND... absolutely not.
Because it is true. Because the opposite of that truth is true too. Because truth is not a thought; it's an experience.
Hello my caring friend,
How have you been? What feels new, unsettling, exciting, loving, intriguing today? And how are you supporting yourself through the shift?
Everything feels like everything for me right now. I’m slowly coming down from the high of the School for the Work (I wrote about it HERE) and coming up from the caves I visited there. I am full of old images and new hopes. I am knee-deep into deeply ingrained narratives, and covered in paint, as I change the colors of my inner world, one wall at a time.
As I was telling my best friend yesterday, I feel like I have changed so thoroughly, undeniably and forever. AND I feel like I haven’t changed one bit, and that change is impossible. That’s a strange paradox to hold inside one heart.
But I know my heart is very strong, wise, loving and resilient, because that’s the way hearts are! So I trust. I trust this, this process… this surrender. I trust what’s next.
ABOUT TODAY’S POST *****
And today, I want to write about our left brain, our inner investigator.
I want to write about how amazing the left brain is at its job. It scans the world for proof relentlessly and takes copious notes of everything that happens—even when we’re not aware that we’re building a case.
And it never gives up! Ten years in, it’s still collecting proofs. Even when the verdict has been made and accepted. It keeps on making sure we’re right, and that the hypothesis still makes sense. It’s a hoarder of so-called facts and has laser focus on what it has been told matters.
Those are amazing features for an investigator… The left brain is so trustworthy in that way. And so helpful! It’s dedicated and reliable.
And it’s also a terrified and parentified child, who should not be in charge of writing the conclusions alone.
* I know my heart is very strong, wise, loving and resilient,
because that’s the way hearts are!
So I trust. *
ABOUT THE LEFT BRAIN *****
The left brain gets the facts right. It is however not to be cast as a faithful narrator of the stories that the facts translate into. The left brain is amazing at collecting data but it is not good at interpreting it—no matter how confident (arrogant?) it is.
This is why The Work of Byron Katie is so life-changing.
As a reminder, she leads us through four questions after grounding us in a very specific situation. We study the thought we projected as a filter on what happened—certain that our filter was a faithful magnifying glass, and unaware that our filter was actually blurring 90% of the stage.
After questioning if it is true or not—and building a little space around the thought so that it can be evaluated from a distance, we look at the effect the thought has on us and on our interpretation of the situation. How it dictates our emotions, our behavior, our next thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves and everyone who will listen. We observe how the situation would look, feel and unfold without that thought as a postulate. We realize that the thought is at least as guilty, or probably guiltier than the person we are trying to crucify…
Then, we move to the turnarounds, where we open to the possibility that the opposite of what we think is actually as true or truer: and we find PROOF of that. Multiple proofs even (at least three…). And mesmerizingly, the proofs are there every single time. That’s the beauty of our confirmation bias:
What we ask our left brain to find, our left brain finds for us. It’s a loyal and fierce guard dog, it’s there to make sure we’re right. After all, the left brain only deals in right and wrong and links everything to our survival. Being right, we live, being wrong, we die. That’s great motivation to be right! Even if being right is ruining our lives, because it either doesn’t matter who’s right or not (most “matters” are only matters of opinions) or because we’re actually wrong.
An example of the first case would be who’s right or wrong on whether a movie or a book is worth existing or not… Well, it exists. That’s what is. It works for some: great! Let them relish in it. It doesn’t work for others? Let them be spared and focus on something else. Two things CAN be true: this movie can be the most incredible movie and the most boring one. It doesn’t depend on the movie so much as it depends on the brain and body watching it… [That’s the magic of our human experience, we get to like what others don’t and to dislike what others crave. The minute we can let ourselves be right in wanting something that someone else doesn’t want (and vice versa) we’re free! And that’s easier said than done, but it’s a worthy pursuit.]
For the second case, a good example would be when we believe (and most of us do!) that we’re not good enough. Not good enough at something or not good enough to even breathe—we all are affected at a different intensity by that sneaky disease. When we believe we’re not good enough, we spend our entire lives scanning our surroundings and each other's eyes for proof that we don’t belong, that we’ll never make it, that we have to hide our unforgivable weaknesses and compensate for all that our ego is urging us to hide about ourselves. It’s exhausting, it’s degrading, it’s unfair. And yet, until we find our way back to our essence and realize what we’re doing to ourselves, we’re under the spell of the left brain, who will proudly bring us new proofs to feed our belief, DAILY. No matter how hurtful. No matter how limiting. (It’s there to back the story up, not to question it.)
ABOUT CHOICE *****
We are storytellers and we are believers. Some of us believe mostly the stories others craft, and some of us only believe the stories we tell ourselves. The results are similar. And it’s not a character fault, it’s our specie’s design. The goal is not to change that—we can’t—the goal is to be aware of it and to remember we’re always in charge of the narrative.
That doesn’t mean we can change the world’s events. If it rains, it rains and if there’s a war, there’s a war. But we have complete control on what we make it mean, and what we make it mean will make us feel like dying, helping, raging, showing up, betraying, reaching out, putting oil on the fire or balm on our wounds. It will lead us to suffering or healing. It will separate us or reunite us, within and without, from who we truly are and from everyone else, or with the miracle that is the Earth and the miracle we all are.
Now, we can choose to be sad and grieve. Love does not deny pain, love does not choose to look away and focus on what’s convenient. Love leans in. Love celebrates our joy wholeheartedly. Love also sits still beside our tears, lovingly, and showers us with compassion and her warm soothing energy.
We can look at the proof the left brain brought home and say: “Yes, this is really hard and painful. Let’s take a minute to honor this sorrow and to understand what is changing”. What matters is for us to realize that it’s a choice.
We can choose to hug our sadness while still hanging on to hope or the appreciation we feel for everything else that’s working. We can choose to build little pockets of grieving time into our days, and to then let it rest until it’s time to visit that part of the story again. We can choose to fall into grief and sink in the darkness for a while, without looking up again until it feels right. We can also choose that it’s time to rewrite the narrative, once the healing process feels complete. We can decide that something that nearly killed us was also a rebirth—without making it mean that the so-called bad event was a blessing. We can see that truth is so much more layered and complex and sacred and beautiful that the stories we’ve been trained to believe. We can let our essence understand the narrative and we can stop letting the left brain write a terrifying horror story.
* Love does not deny pain,
love does not choose to look away and focus on what’s convenient.
Love leans in. *
ABOUT OUR REALITY *****
The bottom line is that whatever we believe in we will see—not because of some woo-woo dogma, but because that's how our left brains work. And the second we step into survival mode, the second we get triggered (which is whenever we buy into a fear… it doesn’t require a so-called big “T” Trauma), our bodies take us on auto pilot into a program that our left brains designed.
The invitation is for us to learn how to change those unconscious patterns that we learned as children—when we didn’t have any other choice—and to ground into more empowering and healing ways of being, thanks to embodiment practices and a spiritual reconnection.
Of note, spiritual does not have to mean religion and it actually mostly doesn’t:
To me, spirituality is the reconnection to our sense of awe…
Awe for the force that breathes us and created all that is in and around us. Awe for our ability to love and to walk the Earth. Awe for the overwhelming beauty of Nature, of Music, of this Universe, of the human heart. Awe for how deep our consciousness can take us, and how inspired one can be. Awe for what kindness can heal and achieve. Awe for the human mind that can create and destroy and create again, without ever giving up.
AWE.
That’s the definition of spirituality for me: Cultivating our relationship and connection to awe.
* Whatever we believe in we will see *
* Truth is so much more layered and complex and sacred and beautiful
that the stories we’ve been trained to believe. *
ABOUT OUR BODIES *****
And when we ground into our bodies and let our soul energy elevate us into the heavens, when we connect to our vertical integrity while evolving in this horizontal world, we realize there is a way to reparent the left brain. A deeply loving one.
Because the left brain will find proof for any story we choose to believe, but our bodies will always tell us what is true, IF we let ourselves remember how to truly feel.
I’m not talking about letting our emotions take over us, that’s not better than being ruled by our thoughts: that’s actually two steps of the same process. An unchecked story creates unchecked emotions that drive the unchecked behaviors that match our uncheck thoughts. That’s why some people fear their thoughts and others fear their emotions. We all intuitively know none of them should be dictating how we behave.
* Our bodies will always tell us what is true. *
What I mean by relearning how to truly feel is learning how to connect with our emotions and bathe into them, until we can feel the wisdom they bring. The goal is for us to study our lives and witness our thoughts and emotions so openly, compassionately, humbly and lovingly that we can understand them. Where they come from, where they lead. How some pieces of the puzzle fit together, how some pieces are part of a different puzzle that needs to be dealt with separately. How our unhealed wounds are impacting our narratives. How our deep knowing is actually always accessible if we focus first and foremost on building inner safety.
Feeling safe has nothing to do with thinking about our security. It’s not about the lock on the door, the group that validates us or the money we make. Feeling safe is about reconnecting to our agency, our presence, our ability to breathe and be. Feeling safe can only happen in the here and the now, because that’s the only moment that ever exists. We cannot feel safe in what is not anymore, it’s gone; and we cannot feel safe in what isn’t yet, because it’s a fiction.
It’s so obvious when we let ourselves experience this, instead of trying to think about it… isn’t it?
We’ve all forgotten that it’s the truth. BUT we also know it’s true.
That’s why Eckhart Tolle speaks of the power of now. That’s why we focus on this one breath, and only ever this one breath, in meditation. That’s why embodiment teaches us to reconnect with our five senses—because our five senses can help us anchor in our experience and realize that, underneath the jabble of our minds, there is always only a body hosting a soul on Earth.
ABOUT TRUTH *****
We can only know which “truth” is true, by feeling it.
By witnessing how this truth (that has been thoroughly backed by our left brain) and how the opposite of that truth (that now has also been thoroughly backed by our left brain too (!)) each feel inside of us.
The true truth will feel liberating, expansive, energizing and loving—no matter how painful it is, no matter how much responsibility it puts back on our side of the street, no matter how fiercely it unties all our links to denial and magical thinking.
The “true” truth will feel true, and I cannot describe to you how that feeling feels in YOU, but I invite you to experience it:
Choose a lie you know you tell often, something you’re trying to convince yourself to believe (such as being interested in an activity you hate because it looks clever or cool or like something you should love doing) and then compare that to how it feels to say that you love your favorite person or pet (or song!).
Compare how it feels to try and convince someone that the earth is flat or to remember that it is round.
Or use Martha Beck’s golden trick! Compare how it feels to say “I love doing the laundry” (assuming you don’t! Otherwise switch for a chore you don’t enjoy) to how your body answers when you say “I am meant to live in peace.”
* The true truth will feel liberating, expansive, energizing and loving. *
ABOUT US *****
Underneath the story, inside the body, all that remains is unconditional love. That’s who we truly are. That’s our essence. And that’s who the left brain needs to be introduced to, as often as it takes for that parentified child to realize that it doesn’t have to save us from the wolves of our childhood anymore: We made it home. We made it here, we made it now. We’re SAFE. We’re loved and made of love. We’ve got this.
And one gut wrenching story at a time, we can rewrite our world into heaven—a world where kindness is the narrator and where no one loses or wins, everyone only… loves.
* Underneath the story, inside the body,
all that remains is unconditional love. *
ABOUT YOU *****
And if you can’t believe this yet? That’s completely fine, my dear friend: just EXPERIMENT.
Ask the left brain if it can find some proof and then let go, wait patiently… and see what happens next.
Care.check: Think about a series of events that convinced you that something is true about you. For instance, that you're bad with technology, or that you only meet a certain type of person in one area of your life (professionally, romantically, in friendships, at the hardware store… trust what comes up).
Watch the evidence that the mind eagerly presents to you. Witness how true it feels. Witness how obvious it looks. And then open the door for proof that there might be another way to look at it. Just open the door and let it rest.
Give yourself a week to revisit this. And make an appointment with yourself to fact check your story in seven days:
Observe what changed. Observe which pieces of the puzzle your mind presents to you by then and if the image it creates has changed—even if ever so slightly, and perhaps… quite drastically.
The goal is to observe, not to expect. The invitation is one of curiosity, nothing more and nothing else.
I’m looking forward to learning all about it if you feel called to share!
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo