Self Archives - Into The Deep

Who we ‘used to be’: Stop defining your present by your past

Today, I was thinking. We spend so much of our lives thinking about who we were 'before'. Who we were in the past. For me, I 'used to be' a dancer. I 'used to be happy' when I was dancing. I 'used to' know exactly what I wanted in life. But what good do those 'used tos' serve? They make us feel as though our present moment, our now, is lacking something. Like a part of us is missing, off kilter, or just plain wrong. Nothing is wrong. Those 'used to bes' are an illusion. The past, truly, is an illusion. When you think about the past, are you reliving it? When you imagine something you used to do, are you actually doing it? No. It's an illusion, created by your mind. An attachment to something that is no longer there. it's over, done,…

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The Difference Between Soul Experience and Life Experience

As humans, we have a timeline. We are born, go through our terrible twos, and progress through the whiny kid stage. As we develop into teenagers, our lives are fraught with anxiety, depression, and rebellion. We get our first job and struggle to ‘find ourselves’. Once we hit adulthood, we reach traditional maturity, attain responsibility and 'earn our place in the world'. But then the scales tip again, and we become old, grumpy, and tired. We all know this story, the age old evolution of the human life. We know what to expect, and, for the most part, our expectations are met. But what about those people who are ‘old souls’? Mature for their age, or just too wise for common explanation? In these cases we tend to say that the parents got lucky, did a good job, or some other explanation to rebuild…

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Allowing Your Feelings in a World of Expectations

Feelings are the eternal human plague. They bring us up, and send us plummeting back to earth. In a way, they seem to symbolize who we truly are, and we often say that emotions reveal a lot about the inner self. But for as strong and tangible as emotions can seem, they often leave us feeling like we are lying to ourselves and to others. We may feel that a situation we are experiencing shouldn’t make us feel the way it does. Perhaps we are reacting too strongly when others seem calm, or maybe we are completely numb in times of emotional upheaval. Society has a tendency to standardize emotions, leading us to believe that we should feel xyz in this or that situation. We are led to believe that our feelings should fit in a box, with certain emotions or reactions deemed ‘OK’…

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You are the Observer: An Introduction to the Mind, the Soul, and You.

I am a writer, a nurse, a healer. I am 5’8”, a redhead, and an avid learner. These descriptions, however accurate they may be, don’t actually describe me, or rather, my self. When you describe yourself, do you ever stop to think of who is doing the describing? Who is the 'I' in your statements? Not all of the descriptions you use describe only your body, neither do they all describe your mental state. It is curious then, that we continue to use these ‘I am’ statements without ever thinking about who is doing the describing, and what exactly is being described. You cannot be what you are describing, so who are you? As a human being, you are composed of many distinct but interconnected selves. There is your physical self, the body through which you experience your life. You also have a mind,…

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