Free Your Mind
Free your mind! A simple phrase and concept. Simple in theory, but extremely difficult in practice. However, it’s far from impossible. In fact, even as you’re reading this sentence, I bet you’re wondering what this truly means.
The mind determines so much of your world that most people are not even aware of it. How you think determines your mood, behavior, body language, and the “vibes” that you send into the world (for lack of a better word.) This determines how people react to you and to an extent, what happens in your life.
Determination is just one facet of the mind’s ability to direct your life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying determination isn’t important, to the contrary, it’s vital to the achievement of your goals and where you want to go in life. Everyone has heard of the common (and true) phrase, “You can do anything you put your mind to.” Commonly, this is thought to apply to determination to achieve goals in life or acquiring skills for success.
No. There is more to that saying than meets the ear. You would be only partially correct, in that it does indeed apply to personal achievement. However, it also applies to your inner beliefs about your abilities and what you believe to be true in life. I’m talking about your deep, innermost beliefs about who you are
The truth about impostor syndrome
A person can achieve great things, yet not feel as if he/she deserves any of the spoils of their labor. This is what is commonly known as “imposter syndrome”. You feel like a fraud. Your inner, deep self tells you that you never really earned any of it. Even worse, it tells you that you do not deserve to have achieved it at all, because you feel as if you are not capable. Yet, you are. Your mind has erected barriers within you which tell you that you’re not capable. Your mind operates within it. Regardless of if those barriers were imposed on you in childhood, past failures, or your own mental framework of what is possible, your brain believes and operates from these barriers.
Free your mind of mental barriers. “So you think, so you shall become.” I would argue that it goes further than that. It should be modified to “So you think, so you, and your reality, shall become.”
It sounds simple but as you are reading this, I can place a safe bet that it feels like an incredibly hard thing to do.
This scene from The Matrix illustrates this perfectly.
This scene from The Matrix illustrates this perfectly. Morpheus tells Neo to remove fear & doubt. Immediately after, he demonstrates what can be achieved from the freedom of mental shackles. Neo Is, of course, skeptical. His mind is telling him that gravity will pull him down, one of the Matrix’s barriers that it imposes on everyone. Because he clings to that limiting belief in his mind, sure enough, what he believes will happen, happens. He falls on (and bounces off) the pavement.
Let’s break that down that scene and its significance to our lives. Morpheus knew no limits. He accomplished what Neo believes (now) is impossible. He’s an expert, a seasoned veteran of what it means to be unplugged from the Matrix. To him, making the jump was as natural as breathing. To Neo, it was something incredible – he even says “Whoa” in reaction to witnessing Morpheus’s “incredible” jump. It was his limiting beliefs that elicited that reaction, and the resulting fall when he made the attempt on his own.
Morpheus knows that Neo carries his limiting beliefs and spends a good chunk of the movie attempting to show him that his beliefs about what is possible are limiting him. After they spar in a martial arts fight later in the film, Neo catches on to what Morpheus is trying to do. Slowly over the course of the rest of the film, we see Neo slowly realizing the truth, that mental barriers are holding him back, and he fights back.
Later, this culminates in 1. His deciding to perform an impossible task, leading up to the climax of the whole movie. Others tell him, “you’re crazy, it’s suicide, don’t do it.” He won’t back down, as he believes it is possible, and guess what? He inspires those who just told him it’s a bad idea to join him. In the end, they succeed in this “impossible” task. (No, I won’t spoil it!) 2. Later, he finally sets himself of all his mental barriers, and ends up stopping a hail of bullets coming at him. He then fights one of the powerful “agents” with literally one hand behind his back.
Why this is so significant for us, and why it's so important
How does this tie into what I’m telling you? We don’t have a Morpheus coaching us, but we can be our own inner Morpheus urging our inner Neo. The first step is awareness of the limiting beliefs we hold. Second, we must work on countering them. We must continually tell ourselves to “free your mind.” This will have to be mantra. Like Neo taking his first jump, we will fall. We cannot unlock special abilities with our minds alone, practice does make perfect, after all. But we can achieve “perfect” in the sense of living our best life possible.
Being “nice” and seeing yourself as beneath others and acting as if you are lower than them is a direct result of mental barriers. As people capable of being whole, we must steer our ships in life. This means our mind and challenging our inner beliefs by letting ourselves know that we can practice blocking out our critical voice, try out radical skills, and push ourselves beyond what our limits tell us is possible.
Over the course of the month, I will be taking an active role and challenging my own beliefs that I still possess that limit me. I invite you to do the same. It will not be easy. My mind will fight me, you can expect your minds to fight you as well. We must keep at it. The mind seeks congruency. By pushing past your mental barriers, little by little, ounce by ounce, you mind will fight less and less, as you feel better and stronger in your sense of resolve and in your growth.
We can all become our own “One”. Let’s do this!
(Sadly, I couldn’t find the full scene on YouTube without some odd foreign language dub, so for the purpose of this post, what I got will have to work. Chances are you’ve already seen the movie, but if you somehow haven’t, I recommend you watch it. It’s awesome!)