Learning to Look Inwards
my endless struggle with the mind
I’ve been working on looking inwards lately. Particularly when it comes to dating and relationships.
I don’t know how it’s taken me the vast majority of my life to learn how to look inwards at how I feel rather than looking outwards at how things appear – but here we are. I am 37 years old and just now starting to figure this out. It seems like everyone else came out of the womb learning how to listen to their instinct, while somehow I have been caught up in this perverse whirlwind of listening to my mind and the mind alone. Which has tended to steer me wrong again.
And again.
And again.
I have a track record of chasing after external fulfillment. I have made a host of not-so-insignificant life choices just because of how they made me look on the outside. I have always chased the person I thought I should be with, the job I thought would make me look most successful, the lifestyle I thought people would envy. In none of these cases have I ever truly considered what felt right to me. And truth be told much of the time I honestly didn’t know what felt right. I had buried my intuition down so long ago that I just stopped trusting it entirely. And when you stop trusting your intuition, you stop looking internally for answers. The only way to make decisions is use your mind and focus on what the mind understands. For me that meant strategizing on what looked best or “made the most sense” on the outside.
This is problematic for many reasons. When you make the vast majority of your life decisions with your mind, the outcomes created come from choices that might not have actually been right for you in the first place. The mind loves to tell us what we should do or who we should be. But every time we listen to a “should” we are likely ignoring a truer voice inside — the voice telling us what we want to do or who we want to be. If we make choices solely with our mind that manifest into reality and we realize they are not actually right for us, it creates a huge amount of dissonance. We feel off-track, frustrated or exhausted and maybe we can’t figure out why. We become fundamentally misaligned.
The universe has a way of working these misalignments out. And the outcomes don’t generally end well. It takes an enormous amount of energy to keep up with things that make sense to your mind, but don’t feel right to you internally. It might be a marriage you talked yourself into, a career path that looked great on paper (until you actually started doing it), a big purchase or significant commitment that checked all the boxes but never truly felt right. These types of things happen all the time. And unfortunately for someone like me, they have happened more times than I care to count. I have made a variety of very small and very large decisions based on what seems to be the wrong guidance system entirely.
The mind is an incredibly valuable tool. It is there to keep us safe and to help us advance in a number of externally-facing ways. But it is not the only tool at our disposal. And as I am learning (again, late in the game here), it should not be the sole decision-maker either. Our intuition and feelings and spidey-senses exist there for a reason. And they should be used in conjunction with the mind. Sometimes it takes a bit of time for the mind to sync up with what the intuition says. The body does respond much quicker than the mind after all. Think about a time you had to make a big life decision. Deep down in your gut you probably already knew what the right answer was, but you still spent a ton of time thinking through it and justifying all the reasons why that was the right answer. The mind always needs to understand why a choice is right and process through that (especially if it’s a particularly scary or uncomfortable-feeling answer). Meanwhile your body or intuition likely had already determined what the right choice was for you, and the mind is simply catching up.
My mind has become particularly monstrous and strong-willed given that I’ve let it rule over the majority of my life choices for the past twenty years or so. I can be stubborn and I will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again until I can see and fully understand what is happening. It’s painful and it’s frustrating and sometimes it will take me years to fully understand a sequence of events. But the common thread I am finding in a lot of this is that the mind has steered me wrong time and time again. Particularly when it comes to relationships. When I have made decisions with my mind and mind alone, it has led to some unfortunate, baffling and highly misaligned circumstances. This is not surprising when we consider that I was ignoring my own gut feelings in service of the mind. I would easily let my mind take over and tell me what “looked good” or “looked right” on the outside, and then go along following that, even if it didn’t align with what felt right to me at the time.
Part of this gross misunderstanding is that I am a particularly tenacious individual. I will chase after a goal like it’s nobody’s business. Give me a list of requirements and a list of constraints and I am off to the races like a cheetah with bells on. There are few things I love to do more than work a plan. Being in motion sets my heart on fire. And I will apply this same enthusiasm for logic and problem-solving to dating and relationships, when these are likely the last things that should ever be approached with the willpower and strategic nature of a business person. So we start to see here why I have problems in dating and end up in relationships that are fundamentally misaligned. I treat my dating life like a business, and I am always on the lookout for a good ROI.
Guess what happens when you get great surface-level ROI in a relationship but don’t actually feel happy or seen or understood or loved?
Yeah, it can be a pretty disappointing experience.
So I am working to let my mind take a bit of a backseat in this whole arena. And for me that means learning to look inwards to better understand what feels right, even if my mind doesn’t understand it or is still catching up. It’s proving to be a lot harder than I thought, and that is also probably all the more reason I need to work on it. I don’t want my mind to be the standalone player determining which people are right for me or not. It hasn’t worked out for me so far. And when there’s something out there that feels right, it’s probably worth exploring.
After all, it doesn’t matter how good of a shot you are if you keep loading broken arrows into your bow.