A week after our first session, we talk again.

“How are things?” is my question.

“Well, okay, things are pretty okay” she says.

And she starts talking about her week so far.

There have been moments where she really became aware of the voice in her head and stopped believing it.

That was surprisingly practical.

Good stuff.

Promising.

But I can sense that she still has no clue about the real implications of living more like this, and how her experience of everything will radically change for the better.

“So, yeah, things are okay, I’m starting to see it, I guess, but there are still moments where I forget about how we’re not our experiences, and I get lost again!”

She looks at me as if she’s doing something wrong.

This always makes me smile.

It never ceases to surprise me how people’s logic reasoning stays firmly in place, even when we’ve started to dismantle it.

After realizing that there’s a way to stop being so deeply lost in the mind, after seeing that many things that seem rationally obvious are completely unhelpful in daily life, and after getting a glimpse of what’s to come, logic still prevails.

The idea that ‘knowing how we work’ will magically change everything about our lives, just like that, is one of those things that remain firmly in place.

When I tell people they’ve been living intimately in their mind, even AS their mind, for almost as long as they’ve lived, and that this relationship is precious and deep and powerful, it’s hard for them to realize that unlearning takes time.

But it does.

Even 8 or 9 years after I really started to see this very clearly, after a couple of huge personal epiphanies and enlightening insights, I still live inside my mind, or at least: life is still created that way.

That’s just how it works.

How WE work.

And knowing that, or starting to directly understand that, will gradually and unavoidably open up our experience and uncover the deepest and most confusing mental habits and clear them, but it takes time.

Actually, it’s the journey of a lifetime, and there will still be a lot of confusion and disappointment.

It’s simply impossible to bypass the system of the human experience just because you get a sense of how it works.

It will operate the way it does, and its unpredictable creations will still be your experience.

But the really, REALLY good news is how quick the first moments of freedom and really fresh experiences start arising.

As a comparison: I’ve had many years of therapy and most of that was about a time somewhere in the future where healing would become apparent, but somehow we never got there.

This is different.

Very much so.

This ‘works’ from the first moment we get introduced to it and really start seeing what it’s about.

Sure, we’ll still be caught up in our minds all the time because that’s how individual human life is created, but the relationship will change, deeply.

And when that happens, a whole new phenomenon will be introduced.

Because we’ll soon find out how quickly we adapt and get used to a new standard of well-being and clarity.

It happens very frequently that I chat with my clients after 1, 2, or 3 sessions and ask about the problems they had when they contacted me, and they have no clue what I’m talking about.

When consciousness starts to shift and expand it comes with a new outlook on life, and you might just totally forget about things that have been haunting you for years.

In many cases I deliberately and methodically remind people of the shit they brought in when we first met, not so they can feel bad again, but because it helps them to realize how fast many things have changed.

“Shit, you’re right, I didn’t realize that, wow!”

If we’re right in the middle of the change, we don’t always notice it.

Since our awareness is now literally different than it was before, since consciousness is somehow expanded within us or through us or however that works, we simply stop noticing stuff that felt bad and problematic before.

And it happens regularly that people tell me they don’t see that much progress, but when we talk about the weeks that have passed since our first conversation, many moments pop up where life has radically changed for them.

What a surprise!

It’s truly amazing to be in the business of helping people with this.

To be there when clients see life in a new way and share their liberating insights around almost anything.

I literally talk about one thing all the time, and it’s NEVER the same.

No wonder it doesn’t really make sense in the beginning, because we have no way of appreciating the possibilities that wait for us in awakening.

But once we’ve opened the gate, the opportunities are limitless.

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(Photo by @supergios for Unsplash)