Building A Supportive ‘Inner State”
Course Correction is about breaking the cycle. It is about getting out of our old routines, and loops. It is about getting out of the proverbial “hamster in a wheel” space, and have a different experience.
In essence, course correction is navigating new waters. It is treading new grounds; territories we have never been in before.
It is not possible to apply the same old instructions in a new domain. It’s the way you cannot use rules of transport on land to the ship on a sea. We can travel by foot on land, but try that on the sea and like Peter in the Bible, you’ll be drowning before you can say “Ma”. The engine design for an airplane is different from that of a ship because they operate in different environments.
Applying these analogies to our own lives, our internal “engines” must change if we are to move to different territories. We cannot carry on our wearing our “summer clothes” in places of frost-bite chilling winters. We would not survive for long in such a new territory before running back to whence we came from.
Past mental attitudes won’t help us in a new, different future. Our old psychological inclinations and judgements won’t support the new life we are trying to build by course correcting. Our past emotional states won’t support us in new spaces and experiences requiring a different emotional environment.
Hence the need for building a kinder, stronger and more supportive internal state.
If you have read any of my work before, you know that the primary shift we are making in Course Correct is getting back our power. My personal journey of course correction is born out of a very prolonged season of despair. A prolonged season of feeling helpless. As I have been delving deeper into my past internal states, I can see that the person I felt the most helpless against was “myself”.
My struggle has not been and was not against “people who were better than me”, or “spaces I couldn’t get into”. It was against this deep seated sense of despair, shame (feeling unworthy), and just feeling defeated. So no matter how many new experiences I tried to build for myself, I would end up falling to the level of my internal state.
I once fought enough that I got an opportunity to travel to Rome, which is something I had always desired, but I kid you not, my time there ended up being the most horrible emotional experience I think I have had so far. What do I mean? It is the time I felt like an impostor the most. I saw all these random people walking down the streets, and all I could feel inside was how small and unworthy I was as against them. I went to a gelato store and paid for my ice cream with my own card, but all I was feeling inside was that the attendant looked at me and saw a poor person. I saw this set of random teenagers standing outside a Zara store, and all my mind could feel and say to me was, “You are older, but they have a self esteem way higher than you.” I was by merit, but all I could feel was as if I had lied my way in there. Everything judged me. Because I felt unworthy.
We cannot rise above the internal states of our souls. This is my conclusion from the example shared and many more that I experienced. You cannot experience joy if all you feel inside is defeat. You cannot wholesomely experience victory if all you feel is defeat. I was already too miserable inside when I was in Rome, that the only experience I could have in such a beautiful city was a miserable one. I almost titled this article “Miserable in Rome.”
I hope that by now you caught the message of this article. I wrote about feelings in the last article because they are a critical factor in the experiences we have.
No number of “positive thoughts” I tried to have while touring the Vatican successfully broke through the melancholic and depressive state my soul was in.
This is why I am convinced that effective Course Correction will largely depend on ‘kinder inner state’. An inner state comprises of both thoughts and feelings. Our “inner voices” as we call them are basically the words that come out the internal states we are experiencing. Our internal states is where the things we subconsciously believe about ourselves are stored. Our “inner voices” are merely a reflection of the beliefs we hold about ourselves.
The question therefore is, how do we build internal environments that will support the new external environment we want to manifest.
This is what this entire blog is about. Every word written, and every experience shared is aimed at raising awareness of what stands in the way, so that we can face it head on. My therapist once said, “What you can name, you can tame.” We can only tame what we can name. We cannot combat an enemy we do not know. We would end up taking the right medicine for the wrong disease, find ourselves still sick. But the medicine was right, it was just not taken for the right disease. The positive thoughts are well-intended, but they alone are not enough to design the kind of coherent internal state required to carry us through the new kind of external experiences we want to have.
We shall end here today. I know I haven’t given the answer to the ‘how” we build a better internal state as yet, but I would like to challenge you to first examine your ‘internal health status’, and see what your internal state looks like. Is it that you don’t dream big enough, or is it that your internal state cannot support the kind of dreams you have. We shall discuss more and more how to build the right “inside foundation” for the “external building” we want to see.
For now, till the next article, Shalom.
Best,
Risper.
P.S Happy New Month! Also, the ideas in this article are my personal experience, reflections from my Journal, and from this Book I am currently Reading, “Breaking the Habit of being Yourself” by De. Joe Dispenza. I highly recommend it. See you!
