THE ART OF UNLEARNING
If you’re like me, there’s a whole list of things you learned while growing up. How to walk, talk, laugh, read, and write. Everything else follows. Until you reach a point in life when it’s time to clear away habitual patterns that no longer serve you. A few years ago, I discovered it was time to jump into the joy of unlearning. It’s a practice and a process. Unlearning, undoing, disbelieving, remaking, unbecoming who you became and never wanted to be, not even for a single second. Along the way, a part of you was frozen in place. While new pathways were waiting to be opened. With many stops and starts, you were on the road to becoming your truest self. A barely recognized being who you knew was always there, hidden far back inside the subterranean sanctuary all along. Once you understand the value of untangling deeply embedded behaviors and ways of being, you can never go back to living your life on autopilot. It’s tragic how unlearning isn’t taught in school. Because, by the first grade, we should be taught not to believe everything that’s been dumped into our minds during those first impressionable years. Looking back, the list of all you must let go of, turn your back on, refuse to be held back by – starts early and is effortlessly filed away in your subconscious. Do it later, the voice in your head tells you. In this case, later just keeps getting later and later. Decades pass. Before you know it, another, barely recognizable version of you stares back from the mirror. Then, a shift occurs. Events and experiences come along, words and signs pop up, nudging hidden parts of your mind. At first, these signs are whispered words you hear on the wind or in dreams. Eventually, the volume gets turned up, and whole sentences and paragraphs begin forming. Countering all the social and cultural programming you’ve unwittingly carried around since birth. The intuitive messages become more vivid and essential as time goes on. You discover how your flow of thoughts can be upgraded by jettisoning faulty beliefs and wrongheaded internal messages. You find out you’ve had the keys to opening the door to wide-open spaces inside your mind all along.
Ohhhhhh.... so good, Russell. This is so powerful I have to work with it a day to create the collaborative article. This resonates highly with the community I formed and chose to serve for the rest of life. It deserves better than a restack.