Hello to all you beautiful curious minds, hearts, and souls!

Friday was a particularly hard day for me.

My mind was wrestling with an expression that was messing with my mindset.

“You reap what you sow.”

Colloquial phrases are not something that is immediately apparent to my logical and abstract mind. I’ve had some expressions rattle around in my head for decades before I fully comprehended their meaning. (I’m autistic)

What was really going on though was my mind was trying to decipher my emotions. Ugh - the mind isn’t equipped to UNDERSTAND emotions.

Emotions are produced in the body (through our hormones) and need to be processed by the body (our solar plexus, stomach, heart, lungs, spleen, liver, our entire nervous and digestive systems).

I wasn’t allowing myself to feel what I was feeling. I was persevering. Pushing past my emotions. Instead of giving them the 15-30 minutes to see them, to feel them, they occupied a space in my head all day.

I’d made the decision to go get my mother at the hospital and take her for a drive. Ignoring my feelings made it all the more difficult to deal with my sensory issues (to self-regulate) and be present with my mother who has dementia.

Mindset isn’t about making decisions. Mindset is about your attitude.

It can be a conscious choice on how to view life - say for example optimistic or pessimistic. Mindset is also about what happens unconsciously - our internal filter, how we perceive life. The subconscious is more powerful than the conscious mind.

I have the gate of oppression (gate 47) in my Human Design. My mind can be relentless, replaying snippets of life, conversations, expressions looking to make sense out of them. The key to realization is patience. Waiting for the epiphany to naturally unfold. It cannot be forced. I know this.

I wasn’t intentionally thinking about this expression but my mind kept going back to it and I had to keep redirecting my attention to the present moment. And at the time, I was clueless that my mind was trying to understand my repressed feelings.

“You reap what you sow” is similar to “what goes around, comes around” or “do onto others as you’d have done to you”, or “you get what you give”. These sayings were frequently directed at me in childhood.

What was bothering me is how these expressions all imply that life is fair and just. That there’s an inherent balance in life. But we all know good people die young. Bad things happen to good people. Someone who smokes may never get cancer and someone who’s lived a healthy lifestyle can. (I’m not saying if you smoke you deserve to get cancer.)

Life isn’t fair and some crops fail to grow no matter how well you tended them. In this case, I’m using this expression when thinking about failed relationships. So, that expression, “You reap what you sow”, isn’t a universal truth.

As a child, I took these expressions as universal truths which made me feel like I was a bad person because bad things happened to me. Thus, I became a “people pleaser” because good things SHOULD happen to good people. Not realizing that it’s my “good nature” that attracted people who abuse good will.

What was playing out in my being was that these emotions I was avoiding had triggered my inner child hence my unwillingness to want to sit with them. As a child I felt ill equipped to process them.

When I finally did sit quietly with myself and allow those feelings to be fully felt, the episode didn’t last long and the “ah-ha” was revealed. Most importantly, I was able to give myself forgiveness.

What were the expressions used in your household? What underlying beliefs did they instil in you? Are they serving you or harming you today? Are they true or is there an inherent contradiction in them?