Three crows balance in the air like acrobats, swinging up and dipping low, they bump and plunder the skies like pirates of the seas. No worry embraces their antics. Spiraled daredevils, they seek only to move to new places to occupy the space.
Birds have wings, we have thoughts.
Both will take us places we may or may not wish to go.
Balance in life tends to float about like the crows. We swing through not realizing how much destruction lands in our wake. Words cut through the emotional plane of strength and resilience. Like pirates who plunder and take what they want, words take away power when we allow them to fester inside of our minds. Thoughts, then, need to be defined in a way where we can live in peace with their onslaught.
The freedom of thought graces lives when unity remains present. Consider the thoughts like the wings of the crows. They flap up and down, take the crow to destinations far and wide. When the bird lands, they fold their wings up. As they look about they don’t flap their wings. They sit, pick on something they wanted to eat, prune their feathers, and keep a look out for what comes next.
When the crow decides to fly high above, looking down below, they don’t flap their wings so much as they soar overhead. Swirling down, and back up again, they flap only when needed.
Our thoughts are much like the crow’s wings. They wander into our mind, but we can sit with them, without flapping the wave of emotion, which shows up with their arrival. Birds have wings, we have thoughts. Both will take us places we may or may not wish to go.
In reality, its the use of the wings which take the birds to places of safety or to seek a mate, eat food, or find shelter on a rainy day. On a same note, thoughts can take us to safety, run us amok, and destroy our relationships, help us engage in overeating, and isolate so we think we have control over what comes into our minds, and tell us lies about ourselves or others.
Thoughts, then, need to be defined in a way where we can live in peace with their onslaught.
Where do they come from we may ask ourselves? Thoughts, flap in and out as we see, do, and experience life. Events such as weddings, funerals, and family functions all provide input.
Now, the input has to start somewhere, doesn’t it?
While we are in utero the stresses a mother’s body experiences transmits to the fetus via the blood. The umbilical cord transports oxygen, hormones, and other substances throughout the body of the fetus. Since the mother’s body under stress contains cortisol, the same hormone moves through her blood system and into the blood stream of the fetus.
So, there is the start of the body’s response system to stress. Once a newborn is breathing air, they experience the cold sensations of the room, the uncomfortable hunger feelings, and they miss the constant touch of a warm embrace.
According to Sapolsky, the most important new area of neuroscience research may be the effort to understand differences in the way individuals respond to stress. “This gets you into the realm of why do some people see stressors that other people don’t, and why, in the face of something that is undeniably a stress to everybody, do some people do so much worse than others?” he said.
“Genes, no doubt, have something to do with it, but not all that much. However, there is evidence about development beginning with fetal life — prenatal stress, stress hormones from the mom getting through fetal circulation — having all sorts of long-term effects.(Stanford Report, March 7, 2007).
From that moment onward, each experience enters into the brain’s memory system. As the neurons fire and wire together, whatever experiences the newborn and then young child on up consistently builds a mental library of expressions, feelings, and yes, thoughts.
Dr. Don Colbert states, “We are all hardwired differently and have been programmed to a certain degree by our past experiences, genetics, and environment, as well as by our choices in life” (p.29).
The body, a great work of art, holds vast storehouses of knowledge. The thoughts are only one segment of the processes. The big picture helps us understand how we are not at the mercy of the thoughts, and at the same time, we have grace to move through whatever thoughts arise.
If we recognize much of the stress of life comes from our early years, moving forward through adolescence and then upward toward adulthood, we can let go of the overwhelming concern we have toward our thoughts. Letting go, as if our thoughts are like wings floating and soaring around and not literally landing on anything in particular, its possible we might be free.
The freedom isn’t so much in never experiencing a discouraging thought; the freedom is in choosing what we will do with the thoughts as they arise in our minds. No matter what circumstances brought us into the world or held us in bondage throughout a traumatic life, we ultimately get to be the leader of our thoughts.
~Just a thought by Pamela
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: on iStock