The Root Cause of a Shrinking Life

Do you feel like your life is shrinking?

Even if you've been wildly successful in the past, if you've hit a plateau, it can feel like the walls are closing in on you. Why is that, do you suppose?

I think it's because we begin to spend inordinate amounts of time on the symptoms brought about on the plateau, time and focus that take us away from the other areas of our lives where we are successful. We lose the gratitude for what's working and we begin to live in the despair of what's not.

I have been a victim of my own stinking shrinking thinking. And for years, no decades, I didn't fully understand the cause. I had little moments where I caught glimpses of the cause but even then didn't know what to do about it, so I quickly forgot about moving forward conquering that monster, and settled back into my habitual stinking, shrinking thinking.

Wisdom from Anais Nin

We only need courage in the face of fear. Fear was the cause of my stinking shrinking thinking.

Little did I realize that my thinking was actually the cause of my fear!! Say what? This insight was revolutionary.

In classic, chicken and egg style, I had to ask myself which came first, just to make sure I understood the nature of my problems.

Which comes first, the thought or the fear? Before I get to that, allow me to introduce, or reiterate if you've heard of them before, the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought.

Sydney Banks and the Power of Thought

On my About page, I talk a little about my stinking, shrinking thinking and how it affected me negatively for much of my life. In this context, I also mention Sydney Banks, an ordinary welder and high-school dropout who had an experience of awakening accompanied by an inner download of amazing wisdom.

Sydney Banks said that we are all given three gifts. Divine Mind, Divine Consciousness, and Divine Thought. While Sydney didn't use the word Divine to modify his three principles, certainly not initially, over the years it was apparent in his teachings that he was very spiritual and he believed the three principles were indeed divine.

These three principles hit me right in my stinking, shrinking thinking like a ton of bricks.

The Principle of Mind

Mind is what I call The Great IS. The Great Ineffable Something. Many other names have been used... God, Goddess, Jehovah, Buddha, the Universe, the I AM, and one of my personal favorites from Marilyn Flower on Medium.com - IATIA (which is I am that I am.) I am sure you can come up with more, but the name isn't the important part.

But for simplicity's sake I will describe Mind as an all-powerful, all-encompassing energy and intelligence, maybe an intelligent energy. We have all been endowed with access to this Mind. We have woefully chosen to access such a small part of it, having become convinced that we are limited beings.

Mind is the source, I should say The Source, of all miraculous order, including planets being held in orbit, plants pushing through concrete, blood and breath coursing through our bodies without our effort, and the tiniest cells holding true to their divinely ordained functions.

The Principle of Consciousness

Consciousness is the ability to be aware. By and large it is a function of our senses, and we have our physical bodies to thank for that. Have you ever thought of your body as the vehicle for consciousness? Wait, it gets better.

Consciousness gives us the capacity to experience life. More specifically, and perhaps more poignantly to our theme here, it gives us the capacity to experience our thinking. (I told you it would get better. Wait until we get to Thought. That's where our true power lies.)

Author Laura Basha, in her book The Inward Outlook, says that Consciousness is the movement of Mind through us. "In part, we experience Consciousness as our senses, although it is more than this. Consciousness creates the sensory data in our day-to-day experience. It is the ingredient that gives thought the appearance of reality."

The Principle of Thought

Many of us have a tendency to believe almost every thought we think. If it pops into our minds, there must be some reality to it. Little do we realize that we have a choice. Thoughts are like clouds and in time they dissolve if we allow them to pass by, but when we focus on them, we can become entrapped in them at worst, and entranced by them at best.

To be entranced in this sense is not negative. It isn't about being under an evil spell. It is about being under a spell of sorts, but of our own choosing. When we want to experience a thought, we consciously choose to fall under its spell so that Consciousness makes it real to us.

Gabriela Montana Maldonado in Inside Out Transformation, says that Thought "comes from Mind as a creative agent to experience the world. It is constant, and ever changing. It is never stagnant and it has a diverse expression. Sometimes this Principle is visible to us but lots of times it is completely invisible."

Clarity Coach Jamie Smart writes in his book Clarity that the Principle of Thought "refers to our innate capacity to generate a perceptual reality; an outer and inner world that we can see, hear, feel, taste and smell. This principle is also the source of the countless thoughts and perceptions that arise in the course of a day."

Allowing any and every thought, especially the negative ones entrap us in scenarios we then believe are unchangeable.

When we choose to be entranced, we also know that we can change the "entrance" at any given moment and discover a new reality, or at least shift the one we are in. Are you getting a feel for the power now?

A Divine Trinity

When we realize how these three gifts work in tandem, we are empowered with knowledge and choice that can transform our lives without the need to focus on symptom management.

Understanding that we are emanations of Divine Mind, endowed with Divine Consciousness, and gifted with Divine Thought - with the ultimate power to choose our thoughts, or at a minimum allow them to fade like clouds without attaching to them - we come to know our true expansive selves.

It becomes much easier not to have a shrinking life, because we are no longer victims to stinking, shrinking thinking!

And finally, back to the question...

Fear Before Thought or Thought Before Fear?

Some teachers and coaches seem to teach that it's all about thought, and yet others say that feelings (e.g. fear) seems to precede thought.

Here are my thoughts and feelings on the matter.

I think they are both right. Thoughts and feelings arise in tandem. Because we are gifted with Divine Thought, many of our subconscious healthy fears, like running from the hungry mountain lion, come naturally on a level that precedes conscious thinking.

Many of our innate feelings are subconscious or preconscious. We feel them before we recognize thought for what it is. But who's to say a baby or perverbal man isn't or wasn't thinking just because their expression isn't or wasn't one we're accustomed to relating with thinking, e.g. speech or writing.

Consciousness allows us to both feel our thoughts, and to form thoughts around our feelings. The shrinking happens when we are seemingly unable, and sometimes unwilling to recognize the thoughts, now unsconscious, that unwittingly drive our feelings and our reactions to them. If we really thought about what we were feeling, we could find a thought or belief attached to the feeling in the context of our circumstance. And then we could choose to attach to that thought, or let it go. It's just a thought.

And so, like the chicken and the egg, we are left to ponder which actually came first, feeling (in this case fear), or thought. I do know that there's a chicken inside that egg, expanding and expanding until it breaks through the barrier! No fear here!

Here's to life on the edge,

Michele Jennae