Rachel A.
Have you ever been in the market for a new washing machine, and then conveniently noticed your local department store is selling them at 20% off? Or, upon breaking up with a partner and moping over your new single status, realised that there are happy, lovey-dovey couples, everywhere you go?!?
Hate to break it to you, but washing machines are always on sale. The rate of human coupling has remained rather steady over time too. So, why is it you are only noticing these things now?
In short, what we hold at the forefront of our minds effects our experience of the world. When we become focused on something, we tend to see more of it. To understand why, we need to appreciate how our brains make sense of information.
As you know, our brains sit in complete darkness within the confines of our skulls. They are reliant on our senses to understand what is happening outside around us. But our senses are hit with anywhere between 11 million to 400 million pieces of information per second. As our brains cannot consciously process all these stimuli simultaneously, it has to focus on a small portion – roughly 2000 pieces of information. (This explains those times when you have been so absorbed in an activity, had someone say something to you, and then later realised you didn’t register a word of it). If our brains were to allow every single piece of stimulus into our conscious mind, the overload would cause us to pass out.
If you take a moment right now and listen, you will start to hear sounds that you had tuned out. Perhaps muffled voices outside, or the refrigerator humming. Maybe you still have the taste of coffee or lunch in your mouth? And you likely tuned out the feeling of your clothes on your body moments after you put them on. And just for fun … how does your tongue feel sitting in your mouth?
So, what determines which of these millions of pieces of information are brought to our attention, and which are not? Well, there is a bunch of neural fibres, known most commonly as the reticular activating system, or RAS, that acts as the portal through which almost all information enters the brain.
Somewhat like a spam filter, the RAS decides which pieces of information are deleted, which are modified, and which need our immediate attention. When our thoughts go down certain paths, we unknowingly predispose, or program, our RAS to search for matching information.
Washing machines are always on sale. Until you care about this fact, you won’t notice it. The same can be said of nappies. Unless you have a baby, you won’t bat an eyelid at ‘two packs for the price of one’ deals. They aren’t being brought to your immediate, conscious attention, because your RAS does not deem them important. But, have a baby, and suddenly your RAS will alert you to those nappy sales!
Why is this important to understand? Because our belief systems affect the RAS too. If I consciously decide that I believe in the existence of vampires, fairies or mermaids, my mind is going to seek out and find evidence of that existence, and it will ignore anything to the contrary. It might sound a little silly, but to take something closer to home, if you have set up your RAS with the thought ‘my life is crap’, guess what you are going to see? Evidence of the fact that your life is, indeed, crap. Conversely, if you are telling yourself ‘life is amazing’, you will see the wonders of this world.
Here’s the most important fact The Guild wants you to take away:
If your thinking is faulty, if it is negative, if you are saying to yourself that you are not good enough, not lovable, not attractive, not smart enough, then you are programming your brain to keep finding and storing evidence to support that.
The RAS will in effect reinforce the belief. It will point out again and again evidence that the programmed message is true. What this also means, is that we all have blind spots – things that we are not paying attention to, things that we are not aware of, both positive and negative because the RAS is ignoring them. Believing that you are not good enough, means you have programmed your RAS to filter out all the information demonstrating that you are! So, warriors, if you are being down on yourself, The Guild wants you to flip the message. To start programming your RAS to look for evidence to the contrary – that you are good enough, you are lovable, you are worthy, you can be confident, you are smart, and you are lucky. You are a warrior.
The Warrior-Womxn's Guild 