Hey there! It is Betul again, but this time I am not going to talk about languages. I am going to talk about another major interest of mine: human mind. Specifically, my mind.
This is going to be about the beginning of my conscious self-discovery period, which is pretty much still going on now. By now I am very much convinced that it will never end.
Disclaimer: What I write below is not professional information and I do not claim it is the right way to go about it. But it is something that worked for me. So, here we go.
I always found it exciting and intriguing when people go on a journey to discover who they are, giving up on many things that held them back along the way. To me, that is an indication of a strong desire to go with the flow of the universe. A strong desire to come to peace with oneself.
Big words, right? For some people, these concepts might even come out as gibberish or at least just ideal worlds that are not achievable, so why bother?
That is how I took these big concepts for a long time. But I also really, desperately wanted to know myself. I was noticing the discrepancies between what I did and what I felt. What I did depended very much on what people expected of me. What I felt was a cry from within to give myself a voice.
And I lived with this conflict for a long time.
Then, I decided to go on a journey of self-discovery but in a more tangible form. I wanted to be able to track my journey. I would not be able to make it happen if it was too abstract.
I had always been interested in my mind, the workings of it. So, my first idea was to track what lied in its depths. And I went with this initial idea.
I had heard many times before that childhood years are our formative years and our experiences then shape our thought, feeling and behavior patterns later.
I wanted to see how my childhood had shaped my adult self.
But I also wanted this process to help me let go of my bond with the past.
I started with my very first memory, age 4-5. I sat down with a friend and thought through it. What had happened then? How had I felt at the time? What conclusions had I reached about how the world worked? How did it make me feel now? How had it affect my later selves?
I did the same kind of analysis for each and every memory I remembered until my current self. Each ‘session’ started with an analysis of the event and its effects, followed by a ‘making-peace’ part. I ended each session by ‘forgiving the people and the event’ so I could actually forget about them (not literally, as I still know the events; but forget in the sense that I could cut their effects off my mind). All this could last to several hours but gradually got shorter and shorter as I became more efficient in the process.
This gave me probably the hardest year of my life, with lots of ups and down. It is not easy to face emotions and memories for most people and I faced everything I could think of. As I was facing a certain thought or emotion, I went as down as possible. When I finally let go, I felt up right away. Then, down again and up again. Then repeat again.
After I felt like I had faced everything I could think of at the time, I finished this process.
The resulting feeling was just like how it was in my childhood. Well, ok, this is exaggerated. We can never be ‘just like’ in our childhood. But I got much closer to it. And I felt much freer. I felt as if I took my real self out of the many layers it was buried under. This is not to discard the importance of experiences, but just to re-adjust them so they become more beneficial than harmful.
This process also really got me into mindfulness and meditation, for which I cannot be thankful enough.
I will talk about parts of my journey every now and then, so this much is enough for now.
How about your journeys? Did you do anything to get rid of past bonds? Do you see effects of memories in your lives? Is self-discovery important to you? If so, what do you do to achieve that?