Brianna Wiest - The Mountain Is You_ Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (2020)

214 BRIANNA WIEST
With all this talk of how we have to “come back” to our
place of inner peace, it brings up the question of why we
ever got disconnected from it in the first place. This is important
because understanding why we lose it is fundamental
to finding it again.
When we grow up, we adapt to our environments. We
adopt the beliefs and ideas of those around us. We alter
our personalities so that we become safer; we believe the
world can’t hurt us. When we are children, we are more
vulnerable than ever, and it’s during this time that we pick
up what can easily become lifelong coping mechanisms.
If we are not instructed from a young age to connect with
our inner sense of peace, we will instinctively begin to
trust the voice in our head. This is where we really get lost,
because the thoughts that we have on any given day are
largely the product of what the Buddhists would call the
“monkey mind,” or as a neurologist could explain it, the
process of different receptors firing off and making associations
with things that may or may not have anything to
do with reality.
When we begin to trust our thoughts, we let them inform
our feelings. This becomes a cycle and ultimately traps
most people who aren’t aware that it’s happening. They
have a weird or scary thought, have a subsequent strong
feeling, and the combination of the two makes the situation
feel real when it’s actually a misunderstanding of your
neurological process.