After a lifetime of using my mind and thinking as a way to navigate life, I am learning the art of nothingness. One of my teachers challenged me to close my eyes and imagine myself in a pitch dark space with nothing in it and to stay there as long as I can. And when a thought arises, to notice it and let it go.
Pretty much like a meditation practice in silence but with the added challenge of putting myself into pure nothingness. And to extend the practice into the rest of the day, to let action precede thought rather than letting thinking guide my actions.
I am not going to say that this is hard because such would manifest exactly that, that it’s going to be hard but I’ll say that this is a completely new way of being and that it’ll take a minute (as my coach likes to say) to get acquainted with it, to make it a new way of being or at least to see where it takes me.
Another therapist challenged me to wake up in the morning with amnesia and let my body guide me on what to do next. She said if it’s masturbation then do that. I have put myself on a regimen to contain my sexual energy and to exactly not do but that’s for another time. The idea here is similar, to follow my body’s intuition rather than the rational mind.
Not to do what I think I need to do but rather what I feel to do intuitively and to learn to live like that, to let myself be guided by my higher self, by my intuitive, natural way of being. They are basically all telling me the same: To find back to my true self, I have to let go of thinking before doing and instead be and follow what organically comes up rather than controlling, survival-driven acting that comes from the mind and that I have been educated and socialised into since early childhood because this is how Western society works. All that needs to go.
We are thinkers first then doers. And I am realising that that is one of the causes of our skyrocketing depression and mental health issues. We are trained from early on to remove ourselves from us by thinking rather than naturally being. It took me a long time to get to this realisation despite having been seeking a more whole way of being for years.
Unsurprisingly, I have been looking for that way of being through the mind, through knowledge and intellectual understanding. But what I actually want is to live from a place of wisdom which is embodied, intuitive knowledge rather than intellectual, thinking knowledge.
Spending time in pitch black nothingness is about reconnecting with who I truly am detaching from the egoic self construct of the mind that has been created through upbringing, conditioning, education and excessive thinking.
As my healer put it: My mind wants a fucking break from thinking, and so does my soul. I am, and we as a society are abusing the mind for something it was never created for and as a result, we have created a mind-abusive world and then we wonder why we are all suffering from one form or another of mental disturbances whether they are stress, anxiety, excessive worrying, overthinking, mental health issues, depression, you name it.
I’m sure most if not everyone is familiar with at least one of those disturbances to an extent where they say that it is negatively impacting the quality of their life. And so here I am, learning not only to do nothing but to spend time in pitch black nothingness to break up the egoic construct and its pathological behaviour of overthinking and to reconnect with my true, higher self, one that is guided by intuition, trust and love and thereby rides on the wave of the beautiful unfolding of life with ease, how it is meant to be.
It’s going to take a minute to be comfortable to flow without thinking and worrying about the future and I am confident once I do, it will be a new, beautiful way of being and everything will flow from there.
I know that this place exists. I feel closer to it than ever before. And I feel surprisingly confident that I will eventually “get to it.”
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