video ~ Dr Joe Dispenza Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself.
Dr Joe likes to say that memory is a function of the imagination. It makes sense; try asking a sibling about events of your shared childhoods. Chances are you will recall some events and people in a similar way, but there will always be moments that you have different feelings about.
My son was adamant that the day we went to the Eiffel Tower was rainy and dark. Until I showed him the photos; tank tops, hats and ice creams were the order of the day. We squinted into the sun as a random tourist snapped our photo.
Your brain is an artefact of the past, says Dr Joe, and by that I think he’s referring to our mind and all its machinations. Thoughts and images layer upon each other and colour what we see.
This process is so important for artists as it’s this inner visual landscape upon which we build our body of work, our imagery, our stories.
But as I wrote yesterday, we can’t believe everything we think.It’s one thing to invent fictional stories or develop visual imagery for our art based on what’s going on in our heads, but quite another to simply accept every thought that pops into our heads and live our lives accordingly.
As I tackle my memoir, tentatively called Remembering Paris, this is at the forefront on my mind. I want to write a story that people enjoy reading. When I wrote my story 13 years ago, there was a lot of sadness and a touch of anger because I stuffed down the seething anger that I really wanted to write about.
Now I can look back at that time and remember it differently, not because the circumstances changed but because I’ve changed the way I look at those events. And I’ve changed. I had to, because If you don’t transform your suffering you will transmit it.
As artists our job is to notice says Glennon Doyle, and our ‘job’ as humans can be made so much easier by noticing what’s going on in our minds and taking out the trash every now and then.
And the best part? If we can change our past by changing the way we think about it, imagine what we can do with our future!
You must be logged in to post a comment.