The mind is your mansion. What happens when a rat moves in?
A few years ago, I worked with an athlete who is among the best in the world in his category of sport. During a conversation, he asked me if an unresolved issue he had was affecting his performance on the field.I answered without hesitation, “Yes. Absolutely.”I went on to elaborate on how I viewed it.
Imagine a large house—a mansion with many rooms. Now imagine a rat that lives in this mansion.Will this rat confine itself to the kitchen and stay there simply because this is where the food is, and he can most likely nibble on crumbs every night? Absolutely not. The rat will travel and explore the mansion.
It will make its way to the living room, where it may find more crumbs or pieces of popcorn that have rolled off the palm of the owner’s hand into the cracks of the sofa as he dozed off on the couch while binging a Netflix series late into the night. There’s always a buffet of crumbs on the couch, especially if you have kids.
It will also explore the bedrooms, the pantry, and anywhere else it can reach in the mansion. Wherever this intrepid rat goes, it will bring along its diseases and germs, contaminating every part of the home.
The mind is your mansion. If you have a rat in your subconscious—and in this case, when I refer to a rat, I mean an unresolved emotional experience—you can be sure it is affecting every part of your life, whether in a large or subtle way. Unresolved emotional experiences in our subconscious affect the way we act, how we respond and react to experiences, and they influence our state of mind, our physical body, and more. This is the barrier to growth and change.
Not everyone wants to admit they have a rat problem in the house, let alone do the work of catching the rat and eradicating it. Unpleasant. The first step is truly taking ownership of our mind and acknowledging that it is a product of our creation—radical ownership. Then comes a deep understanding that it took decades, centuries—lifetimes, in fact—to get it to where it is today. The outcome of truly understanding this is self-empathy and self-compassion. Once this is attained, we can begin the work of eradicating the rats—resolving the unresolved emotional experiences within the subconscious.
Ultimately, we want to get to the superconscious, but we have to go through the subconscious to get there.
All of us can be a little happier in life—but we must do the work.
How many rats—unresolved emotional experiences—do you have in your mansion?
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