This week at Q Danny questioned whether we might each have walls in our heads and explored how they might have got there and how we might interact with them.
In this song from the musical Everybody Loves Jamie, Jamie sings about how an experience in his life made a brick wall he now feels the need to climb..
Danny literally had a wall fall down this week and reflects on how it got him thinking about why we have walls and that spiritual growth for us each of us might have something to do with taking down the walls we've built up.
Just as a literal wall defines a boundary and offers security, are there walls in our heads that we've constructed to make us feel safe and secure? These walls might be things that we do, believe or identify with that have come to define us. They feel good and right to us but can also end up defining us, they can be things we just can't get over and all our energy can be invested in trying to climb these walls that we've built. What would life be like if we took those walls down? What if there were no walls?
This clip from The Matrix isn't based in the real world, because The Matrix in the movie is the realm of the mind. Understanding this helps us see that the little boy simply meant that things in our minds can be changed if we are willing to bend and change our minds.
Danny tells the story of the wall that he built in his head in childhood moments of disappointment, when instead of understanding why those things happened he made a judgement on himself that sentenced him to a life of climbing a wall that never needed to be built.
When the walls we build in our heads start to define us, they can create the perception of us and them, insiders and outsiders and give us a false sense of self. This brilliant clip from Ted Lasso reminds us that curiosity is far more useful to us than judgements.
Whilst the walls we build in our heads aren't made of clay bricks, they are made of something: Myelin. Myelin is the substance in our brains that is responsible for the automatic responses of muscle memory and learning how it works can help us understand why the things we repeatedly tell ourselves or the habits we re-enforce are literally changing the structure of our minds.
Danny explains how understanding Myelin can give us hope for change and how celebrating a spirituality that has a concious awareness of the divine in everything can help us see that the walls in our minds are unnecesary.
In the final scene of the movie Neo becomes aware of the reality of the Matrix and this awareness of what is actually going on around him means that he can interact with it differently. Could we deal with thoughts the way Neo deals with the bullets flying towards him? Pausing, observing them and realising that we are not our thoughts and we can choose which we want to re-enforce and which we want to let fall to the ground.
"It's gonna be an awesome day!"
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