Nugget – Openness to Experience
“All the while slipping down a rabbit hole where questioning my relevance ignites a trepidation that consumes my motivation…and I find myself stuck in a holding pattern, where I’m discrediting my ups, magnifying my downs. Wrapping myself in a tattered quilt of doubt made up of patches whose very purpose is to distort my notions of belongingness, worth, identity.” Tom Evans
Isn’t it funny where our thoughts take us – kind of like doom scrolling through endless TikTok videos or the Twitter feed. This paragraph from Tom Evans’ patch grabbed me as my own experiences are so very similar at times.
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As Evans suggests though these thoughts can become things other than the products of our minds. They hook us and take us in “unworkable” directions – directions that move us away from our values. These thoughts become almost biological; reproducing like bad bugs and, in doing so, sink their hooks deeper into our day to day actions. One doubt about one thing begets another and another and so on until we are wrapped in an overwhelming quilt of doubts. Some have likened this to driving a bus with a bunch of unruly and overbearing passengers who try to take you off route. Joe Oliver has developed a nice little depiction of the bus of unruly thoughts in this video.
In the patch, Tom Evans goes on to suggest, acceptance and self-kindness are keys to being with these experiences in a way that allows us to live a values based life – easier said than done. Openness to these experiences is an ongoing process grounded first in moment to moment awareness and being aware of your ‘self’ as the context of your ongoing experience. Becoming enmeshed with labelled identities creates rules for how life should be, which if not me send us down these rabbit holes of thought and feeling. And, it’s not just about acceptance of these experiences, but a willingness to let them be as mental experiences that will pass and move into a mental space where we can actually become more curious and aware of our internal experiences and how we relate to them. Wrapping up this nugget, this video by Russ Harris uses the metaphor of a sushi train and offers a simple exercise for unhooking from thoughts and feelings and living more how we would like.
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