Beyond Psychology
Beyond Psychology
I was chatting with a friend last week who was excited to share with me her experiences delving into her habits of thought and patterns she sees as running her life. She found a lot of freedom in recognizing why she might be attracted to the same type of guy over and over, who was never good to her. She told me how much she enjoys “getting to know herself” and fixing these patterns.
While her newfound freedom is fantastic, I paused at her description of “getting to know herself”. And how much time and effort seemed to be going into this.
We (and neither is she) are not our collection of habits of thought. While they may appear to “run our lives”. They can’t and don’t.
We run our lives.
Perhaps more accurately, we flow our lives. There is a space beyond all thought, beyond all psychology, and even beyond all emotions. (I distinguish sensation as different than emotion).
We are that space.
We are the space in which all things arise and fall. All emotions. All thinking and habits.
All arising and falling in the moment.
By localizing our identity in, say, our patterns of behaviour, e.g. I’m just someone who gets anxious at parties, you limit yourself. Even if you perhaps don’t enjoy loud, crowded parties, it’s not who you are. You are the space in which you experience loud parties and don’t prefer them.
You are the space beyond psychology.
Where it gets really interesting is that all we actually need to do if we want to change something we notice about “ourselves” is to notice it, realizing it’s ephemeral. It comes and goes within the space of you.
You are the space.
In trying to change or fix something made of thought, it only continues to keep it alive. In order to fix it, you have to keep looking at it and keep creating it.
I hear a lot of times, “I can’t let it go. How do I let it go?”
Stop poking at it.
When you stop giving it importance, it’ll dissolve back into nothingness, which is where it came from.
Tune into the space beyond or before your thinking and see what happens.
I like questions. The one that comes to mind for me here is “What’s before this?” See what comes. Then “What’s before that?” See what comes. Until you are in the before before or the beyond beyond.
Marvelously, when we identify with this spacious expansiveness, we find ourselves there more and more of the time in a nicer and nicer feeling. When habits arise from this space, it’s really, really obvious that they are just that, and they lose all traction with us.
Over time, they disappear as if they never existed at all.
With Love,
Sara Joy
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