It Could Be

'It could be' was something I heard many times during my time in therapy. It could be this thing which happened in your childhood or that thing which happened when you were small or maybe this other thing you experienced a long time ago. I see now that it led to confusion. Literally poking around in the past in the hope that we would find something which sorted it all out. It was the 'could bes' which were creating the confusion. I knew there must be something simpler and there is!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today's title is It Could Be.

I remember spending a lot of time in therapy after I burnt out doing counselling and other things and it felt like looking for a needle in a haystack actually.

That's a great metaphor because it seemed to be so complicated and as a result felt really really difficult because there was this it could be thing hanging over the whole conversation all the time.

Well it could be this,

It could be that,

It could be this thing that happened in your past,

It could be that thing that happened in your past,

It could be this relationship from your childhood,

It could be that relationship from your childhood.

And as well as the time actually talking through this with somebody in therapy,

It was then on top of that going into it myself like oh could it be this,

Was it because this happened or that happened or and that seems really now disempowering to,

Well it was disempowering to me at the time and I feel is disempowering to people now who are going through these conversations week after week after week trying to pinpoint some event in the past or some series of events or something they learnt about themselves in the past that is now creating their moment by moment experience of life,

Their mental illness perhaps.

And where I am pointing to now is such a different place because you know for many many years psychology you know as they were studying all their models and theories and made up stuff about why we are the way we are,

Some psychologists for example William James in kind of the late 1800s were going there's something missing here,

He wrote a book called The Principles of Psychology but he kind of pointed to the idea that once psychology has principles i.

E.

Something that works for all people all the time that will be transformational,

That will allow people to have a completely different understanding of their psychological state and he didn't quite get to them but he knew that they needed to be there and then psychology went on for a much well nearly another hundred years before psychological principles were uncovered and they're the things that I share now.

Because the problem is if we're really saying that the past has damaged us in some way,

That the past has taken away our well-being,

That the past is why we are right now,

Then what the heck can we do about that?

I realise there are therapeutic modalities where you can go back and apparently resolve deep within your subconscious mind,

Resolve the issues but having this is my personal thoughts on this that I having done that over and over and over again crying horrible snotty inner child sessions under hypnosis which kind of seemed to put me in a better place for a little while probably because I decided they would because I believed in them at the time and then the stuff I was trying to deal with,

The stuff I didn't want to experience just kind of gradually came back again,

Didn't stay away and so I had to keep going back over and over and over again.

All well-meaning,

This is not a criticism of the people doing this stuff but it's coming from a misunderstanding about where feelings actually come from.

All scientific areas of study have,

Well they've found principles and when they've found principles that's given them a bedrock from which to help life move forward,

You know,

Without the understanding of gravity we wouldn't have flight without,

Well without the understanding gravity and the other principles of flight we wouldn't have flight,

Without germ theory and people would still be drinking their sewer water from the Thames and dying of horrible diseases.

There are principles in life,

There are just some things we can know about how life really works and when I discovered those it just put a halt to everything I was doing to try and fix myself.

Suddenly so many of my stories just fell away and really what the result of that was was a quieter mind which I think is what most people actually want,

They maybe don't know that because I think a lot of us are so into the busy mind that we don't realise there's something nicer available in a quiet mind.

Without meditating,

I mean that's significant if you're meditating every day because you think you're not going to be okay if you don't,

Then maybe there's something else to see because this is not saying you know don't enjoy meditation because it's lovely,

I still occasionally do a bit of meditation because it's just a nice experience but thinking that that's a tool to fix yourself comes from a premise that you're broken in the first place which I don't really believe to be true,

You're not broken,

You can't be broken by the stuff in the past.

Excuse me,

Just a little sneeze there which I attempted to restrain so that I didn't deafen you by sneezing really loud.

Principles make things simpler,

It doesn't matter what's happening in life and what you think you're experiencing and where you think that experience is going from,

It's only ever really coming from one place,

You're always feeling your thinking in the moment,

Now,

So guess what,

If you think about something that you think was horrible in the past then you'll feel horrible,

If you think about something scary that you think might happen in the future you'll feel scared,

If you think about that one time when you were something you know something that was not a nice experience and you're thinking about it in the context of I'm looking for why I'm broken and then you think about that horrible experience from the past and you feel terrible and broken and uncomfortable then that's coming from your thinking about the past,

It isn't coming from the past.

If you never ever thought about those things in your past that you think have hurt you and damaged you,

The things that weren't nice,

Nobody's saying they were pleasant experiences,

If you've never thought about them again what would happen?

Well you'd just not feel the thinking of them ever again and then you'd just have a nicer experience of life because you wouldn't be thinking about horrible things from the past.

For me this has been just revolutionary,

This awareness of the absolute ridiculous stories that I have about the world and about myself and about people's tones of voice and how people are and how I am and you know just starting to see them for what they are,

Just starting to see those stories is just nothing other than exponentially transformational,

Unbelievably transformational to the point where all those things I used to think I needed to do every day to be okay,

Meditating,

Gratitude journals,

All the kinds of journals,

Tapping and affirmations and all those things have just gone and that saved me a lot of time apart from anything else and I feel better most of the time and when I don't I don't really care because I know I'm caught up in my thinking and it'll pass on its own,

I don't have to do anything.

So you don't have to go into the could be,

You can stop looking,

You don't have to look anymore,

Imagine that,

Just knowing that you're okay and that sometimes you'll have a human experience of being caught up in your thinking and that's okay too.

Thank you so much for listening,

There's nothing to do now but bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life,

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been The Calm Cast with Clare Downer,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.