You are the placebo.

Ahh an interesting read, to be sure. I wish I had read this back when HoneyBadger was still someone I spoke with. But despite the history behind it, I read part of it last night, and while it does resonate with me, I am already aware of it's concept. It is the fundamental principle I follow with mindfulness. Oh.. used to.

And will again. Now the distractions of ghosts dead to me are no more the poltergeists in my mind, I am free to remember the way things were, and forge a future from the molten steel left behind.

But as with all things, every revisit is an opportunity to take something new. And this I have.

I spoke with someone on Friday last week who reminded me that to most people, the concept of "Fake it till you Make it" is a viable thought process. In some ways, this ignorance is bliss, as it provides someone with an avenue for change. But even when people I thought knew me, would repeat it to me, it merely came across as patronising. I am not brand new, beginners concepts do not work.

Yet in it, I had forgotten a simple truth. The mind is just the computer running the programs we have established over the culmination of our life's experiences. Every nuance, every cyclic thought process that keeps us seemingly trapped in emotional pain, without apparent reason.

We enforce our unconscious behaviours through repetition, even if we are not aware. We do this on Automatic pilot, and this concept I know all too well. That place in my mind that I am only a witness. Watching as the mechanical body animates to reckless or abusive actions..

We are hard wired to suffer. We react to the unknown with apprehension and distrust, because at one point in our evolution into this self-proclaimed intelligent creature, we relied on our wariness of things unknown to survive. We had to flee the predator, not pet it. We had to kill to eat, not pay a man behind a glass counter for a chunk of flesh.

We had to survive, and we didn't do that by relaxing under the shade of a paradise forest.

Now we don't fear the bear or the leopard or the elements.  Instead, we fear rejection, unemployment, loneliness. We fear being unable to pay the rent, or afford petrol for our car. And this is all automatic - it keeps us alive, we are hard wires to seek the cause of suffering, and alleviate it in order to de-stress.

Conditioned by evolution, yet now in a world where we fear the things we create.

If we can identify this, then we can change this. Instead of fearing an outcome, pushing it to the back of our minds, trying to not dwell on things, and simply creating a larger thing to fear, we need to allow these things to be present, without judgement, and with practice we notice the things we feared, that made us feel sick, that we dared not think about, have lessened, seemingly shrunk to nothing. We have regained our power over it. The unknown is what we are afraid of most, so we must know it.

Instead of catastrophising about a possible outcome, we can seek a way to alleviate it, bring it to our conscious mind and see it for what it is. We won't die if we miss the rent. We won't starve if we don't buy lunch. The world will not stop if we cannot refuel the car.

If we can consider things we find hard to think about consciously, we often find them less than what they initially appeared. And we can mindfully consider our options, and what actions to take, to positively move forward.

I know this is true for me, as I have done this before. And I know I will again.

But I have learned a truth about myself. I struggle when I am completely overwhelmed. And that is what I need to work on.

Ahhh.. my energy is negative still, I can feel it, the turmoil inside of me. I want to get right again, and need a path. Perhaps this week will reveal a new thing to me.  It is after all, the start of a new life.. again...

The sunset of the old brings the dawn of the new.