Let me talk to you about RADIOs…..
Isn’t it interesting that a tiny little box, sometimes referred to as a transistor, is able to ‘listen’ to thousands of sounds and interference and by fine tuning is able to connect to one stream of communication and translate that into words, music or sound that we can hear clearly and connect to it’s meaning…. It absolutely blows my mind that such a tiny simple device can simplify such a complex thing… Consider this… I can be sitting hundreds of km away and yet I can hear that person as if they were right there opposite me. It’s amazing….
It’s equally interesting how I could be sending a message as hard as I like but unless someone is ‘tuned in’ to my channel no one will here me…. I could be screaming down the line, blasting the sound through, but if no one is on my frequency I am deaf to all ears except my own… this often depends on the amount of ‘reach’ I have with my transmission.
And so I reflect… our thoughts are no different from that radio! We are receiving thousands of messages every minute… “am I hot?”, “I wonder what I will wear?”, “these shoes feel comfy”, “I wonder what my parents are doing”, “where do I have to go today?”, “what do I have to achieve?”, “what am I supposed to me doing right now?”, “isn’t that a cool tree”, “what have I just finished doing?”, “left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg …”, “breath in, breath out” etc., etc. Our brain is super intelligent to filter out all those sounds and what we get left with is the thoughts we ‘tune in’ to. These are the thoughts that we ‘pay attention’ to, the ones that we choose… consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously.
So with that knowledge we ‘could’ (said loosely) readjust our ‘transistor’ to listen to a different frequency if we didn’t like hearing what is playing… I think we, as humans, forget to do this so often… we feel trapped in this state of perpetual rumination and self torture… we listen to the sounds of our worries, fears and continual failings in order to ‘hear’ it… how is that serving us?... why would we want to do this? It seems totally perplexing to me and yet I’m ‘guilty as charged’.
Now I hear you saying “well it’s not that easy, my struggle is real, I can’t just tune it out”… what if you could? What if you had the power to tune it out? Would you use it?... this is the ultimate question because even though we don’t want the sounds in our heads all the time… the alternative is equally scary and foreign to us… what if we hear another sound that is more frightening than the first one?... legitimate question right? However I could ask you the same question…. What if you heard something magical, beautiful, mind blowing and new? Would it be worth exploring? Especially if you knew that with one twist of the wrist you could return to your “happy/unhappy” channel?...
Maybe that’s a stretch, maybe your tuner is broken and you only have one channel to tune in to?... Well what about the volume switch? Could you have a go at turning down the volume on the troubling voices, and pumping it loud on the great songs? Who decides the level of the volume control?
Maybe when you were a child you had no control of the channels or the volume because “what mum/dad said went!”, but you are no longer under their power by force. You get to choose now! It’s part of our privilege our right as an independent human being. Okay, you’re right! You can’t go blaring the radio at 2 am in the morning, the neighbours would have something to say about that, however you can chose to turn down the sound when you don’t like something and you can walk away when someone else is tuning into a channel you don’t like.
Okay, I’m getting into the nitty and gritty here so I’m going to go back to my main point… Our thoughts are like a radio waves and our brain is the radio transistor!. How equipped and functional that device is, is up to you!.
So what are you tuning in to today?.
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