2 Reasons Why "I Don't Know" Is Your Best Road to Health, Wealth & Peace of Mind

Can “I Don’t Know” Be Your Place of Peace?

I mention in a newsletter a free offer of an onsite consult and add “Please, God, not Medford.”   One of the readers is incensed enough at what she assumes is an arrogant, superior Ashland attitude to tell me so.  Real reason: I passionately loathe red-light ticket-cameras; evidence suggests that they are a revenue-generation scam, unrelated to road safety.  So I avoid Medford except for select shopping districts which I can get to without passing the revenue-scams.  She jumped to a completely erroneous conclusion, because she assumed that she knew.  She was absolutely certain, in a situation where she had NO actual information.  All she had was a trying-to-be-funny remark and an Ashland mailing address. 

Our brains are primed to do this by millions of years during which our ancestors were lunch to every passing carnivore.  The “assume it’s an enemy” neural pathways that run through memory and limbic system are the culprits in the “jumping to a conclusion” problem.  But being sure in a situation where certainty is not immediately warranted forms a major barrier in our road to inner peace.  Think I’m exaggerating?  OK.  Eliminate all national politics from the calculation and think about the last 5 times that you got yourself into a tizzy about something.  Ask yourself WHY you were so certain that you knew the other person’s motivation and ethics.  Do this on paper, not in your head.  So you have three columns:  What I Was Sure Of; WHY I Was 100% Sure; What I Discovered When I Asked or Researched.

For most of our tizzies, that last column is blank.  We never check our assumptions. 

Now, please hear me clearly: many times we are sure because our inner wisdom has perceived one of the English-language’s covert verbal attack patterns.  Even when we can’t verbalize how we know, we accurately know that the person is an Enemy.  But it’s not our inner wisdom in every single case.  Sometimes it is our brain taking a short-cut from input to conclusion, bypassing evidence completely.  In psychology, we call this Filling in the Gaps.  Our brains “save time” by filling in the information gaps in what we see, hear or read, by filling in the gaps with beliefs, prejudices and memories of people superficially similar to this person.  This allows us to feel (limbic system, remember?) that we have the preparation for an adequate conclusion. 

In the case I started with, all my client knew about me was that I teach great classes, I write books and I live in the Ashland zipcode.  What info does a person have in all that to come to conclusions about why I avoid Medford?

The major motivation for striving to limit the short-circuits to certainty is the damage that our anger causes in our relationships, with strangers as well as loved ones, and the legitimate shame that we feel when we discover the real reason behind people’s actions.  Naturally, the road to forgiveness, of ourselves as well as others, beckons, but how much better to never go down that road at all!

It IS possible to take control of this Filling in the Gaps.  Start with awareness of the problem.  Practice stopping in your mental tracks every time you feel a conclusion forming, about anything.  Ask yourself, “WHY am I certain?”  If you can interrupt one in a hundred of your leaps to conclusion, it is a start.  As you start this process, you will get to the point where less and less of your precious peace of mind is poisoned with conclusions that you were certain about – for which a better conclusion would have been “I don’t know.”  Not knowing is an amazing place of power.  Some Not Knowing isn’t worth more effort, like why the bank teller was short with you.  [Best bet: a personal problem.]  Say a prayer, send Reiki and move on. 

As Mark Twain reminds us, “It’s not the things you don’t know that will get you into trouble.  It’s the things you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  Amen.

Victoria Leo’s books are available wherever you buy books, including Journey Out of SAD: Beat the Winter Blues – 2^nd Edition, so relevant now, and her newest:  101 Healthy Meals in 5 Min or Less (2^nd Ed) and Red State, Blue Heart  Visit her at https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses, www.soaringdragon.biz, www.youtube.com/user/humanbio4everyone/videos, https://www.facebook.com/Soaring-Dragon.  

Why it only took 12 hours to get home from the solar eclipse, when it took thousands of others much, much longer......

We frequently drive ourselves insane at decision time, wondering if we are hearing genuine divine guidance, deep intuition, whatever you want to call it - or just our amygdalas gone wild.

One way to screen out the thoughtless-emotional pulls is to get very deeply involved in breathing.  Slow and deep.  My 5 Breaths Technique (https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/106742)  Part of my strategic self-care for entrepreneurs class is really powerful for this.  And then look at the voices.  The more urgent they are, the less likely that they are coming from wisdom, and thus the less you ought to listen to them. 

Because forest fires complicated the fact that one million visitors were never, ever going to do anything other than hopelessly jam the 2-lane rural highways that constitute most of the great state of Oregon, hubby and I spent 12 harrowing hours creeping along in the blazing hot sun, in scrubby open rangeland where stopping for a call of nature was NOT a good idea, before exhaustion got enough people pulled off the road that we could start moving, and eventually get home.

Thinking about it, though, I can see some points at which hubby and I used the techniques that I teach.  

1.  We couldn't get lodging close to Madras [$500/nite?  My soul rebels.] so we decided to drive through the night the night before the eclipse and then drive home, planning to take catnaps as needed.

Our first "5 Breaths and then combine analysis and intuition" decision point came after 4 hours creeping 18 miles, when we found a modest and cheap motel for a 4 hour nap (my idea) and a hot dinner in place of snacks (hubby's bright idea).  Stopping after 4 exhausting, physically and emotionally, hours kept us from getting overwrought.  We woke feeling 1000% better after sleep and a meal.  The modest cost was worth it.  We came to this with a combination of the calming 5 Breaths and a clear, analytic Amen!

But stopping isn't always the answer.

2.  After another 5 hours of hell, we saw more and more (mostly Californian) cars pulled off the road to sleep by the side of the road.  Parked 6-7 deep at the rest area, it looked like every photo of a natural disaster that you've ever seen.  We really wanted to stop at midnight, but my analytic side agreed with my wisdom that we needed to keep going, because eventually enough people would quit to sleep that we could do more than creep and park, creep and park.

I was right.  Eventually, US 97 was a road again, as the Good Lord intended and I insisted again on pushing on all the way home across the mountains, while those tens of thousands were asleep and the road was clear.  When the sun came up and all those sleepers got back on that poor 2-lane road, hell descended again for another 6 hours.

5 Breaths allows you to get loose of the amygdala's death-grip on your mind, and you can think deeply and well.  And a 12 hour ordeal won't turn into an 18+ hour hell.

Check out the totality photos in the previous post!

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