Mindfulness Can Help You Slay Your Dragons and Come to Terms with It…
Dear John:
A short snippet from Michael’s Interview:
I was having breakfast with Supercoach, Michael Neill the other day and we got to talking about our thought-experienced reality among many other things. And I remembered this great story which came out of his interview for the movie and wanted to share it with you:
“I had a client once, business client, and he said to me, I think it was two weeks before the first session and the second session, and he came back for the second session and said – what did you do to me? I said what do you mean?
He said, I have been biting my nails for 20 years, I have tried hypnosis, I have tried CBT, I have tried all these things, I am not biting on my nails, I can’t even get myself to bite my nails, what did you do? I said, well we can agree that I didn’t do anything because I didn’t know you bit your nails, you didn’t even talk about it. I said but I can tell you what probably happened, and I said imagine there’s a world filled with dragons, like evil nasty dragons. And the bite or scratch of a dragon is toxic and will make you ill and stressed and feel horrible. And so you would naturally build castles to try and defend yourself against the dragons.
Some people try to build the castle out of money, if I just have enough money the dragons won’t get me. Some will try and build it out of love. If I can find one person who loves me enough or a lot of people who love me a little that’ll keep me safe from the dragons. Some people try and do it through power. If I become powerful enough the dragons won’t be able to get me. Well meanwhile there’s a whole bunch of people, who just the castle building thing isn’t going to work out for them and they are just trying to cope with dragon bites, and so they drink or they smoke or they bite their nails or they over eat, or they do whatever they know to do to cope with dragon bites.
What if you wake up one day and you realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are no dragons. Now everyone else still thinks there are, you can’t even really talk to them about it, because that’s crazy, of course there are dragons. Well you might go back to your castle building and kind of…you might still build it because its fun but you wouldn’t build it with that same sense of desperation behind it anymore.
And if you used to do something to cope with dragon bites and you realize that you can’t be bit by a dragon and that feeling is just your own fear, your own thoughts creating fear inside you, well you don’t need an antidote to rat poison that you didn’t drink. You don’t need a coping mechanism when there’s nothing left to cope with and that’s the power for me of mindfulness, that’s the power of clarity of mind, of recognizing that we live in a thought-created experience of our lives, and if we allow it to it will flow and change…”