This is Ep 124 – Thinking Yourself into Jail. Have you ever caught yourself looping on something, like an inner dilemma? But the more you loop, the more imprisoned you feel? In this episode we’ll look at how to break yourself out of “thinking jail.”

Hi, I’m Carla Rieger, and this is the MindStory speaker podcast.

I woke up in the middle of night looping on something. My heart started racing, my mind was on overdrive. I usually loop when I have inner conflict about something. In this case, I received business advice that sounded good, but my heart wasn’t in it. The outcome was high stakes for me. I started arguing with myself. The more I argued, the more entangled I got. I literally felt a cat who’s now so entangled in a ball of yarn that it felt like a jail. So the title of this podcast Thinking Yourself into Jail, actually comes from the lyrics of a great, old Indigo Girls song, in case you remember. It’s called Hammer and a Nail and is really about taking action rather than just overly thinking about things, and the beginning of chorus goes:

I gotta get out of bed get a hammer and a nail
Learn how to use my hands, not just my head
Cause I think myself into jail

That song lyric stuck with me for years, and anytime I’m in jail with my thoughts, I remember it’s a good time to take action. In my case, that often means just walking, moving or writing out the thoughts on both sides of the argument. That way it can trigger critical thinking, the kind of whole brain perspective and heart based logic that I talked about another episodes. It’s where you can see beyond the duality to a transformational idea that includes both sides and transcends it all to the next level of wisdom.

So we all go there sometimes, lost in thoughts we don’t want to have, digging ourselves into jail. So, here’s an interesting perspective on it all. What if compulsive and involuntary thinking could be a hidden gift, harkening the beginning of a transformation? Because we often don’t transform our way of being, make big important changes to our lives UNLESS we are triggered, compelled, activated by some kind of inner or outer conflict.

But at the time, it can feel like an addiction to thinking that is not fruitful, not creative not actually solving your problem. Often the thinking feels destructive. Maybe it’s keeping you up at night, darkening your mood, keeping you stuck, maybe indulging in other things to quell your anxiety like food or other substances or activities. It’s the kind of thinking that actually creates more problems if it keeps going round and round and round in an argumentative way inside your head. Often it’s based on old ego programs battling it out together, or an old ego program butting up against a new, more creative thought form.

But if you can get into the role of inner mediator, like a counselor who helps couples solve a conflict, this can help. It’s where you direct all that turmoil in a constructive direction. The first step is to realize the pattern of inner conflict. People usually feel it in their chest, or heart, or stomach, or head or even as a kind of dull backache creating a kind of agitation or even buzzing sensation for some people. So you’re diagnosing your symptoms and tracing back to the thoughts creating the sensations. As soon as you go into that mode of diagnostician, you’ve moved out of the survival brain, and into the Neo cortex enough to start to get control of the process. Then you start to access the muscle of the higher mind, which is a powerful creator. That part of us loves to be creative, and often when we aren’t being creative, or aren’t allowing ourselves a creative outlet in some way, it can fester inside and become these destructive thought patterns.

The second part is to not try to stop the conflict inside. It’s like if you’ve ever tried to stop two children from fighting by shouting at them, can actually exacerbate the conflict. It’s better to let go of your resistance to having this inner turmoil. It seems counterintuitive but it’s often our resistance that has us wound up, entangled, and imprisoned by the thoughts. And as I’ve said on other episodes, most humans are in an almost continuous state of not wanting what is, and wanting something else that seems to be more important at some future point in time. So when you make the present moment your friend, to say yes to whatever arises in this moment, is the 2nd step to unraveling it. So that might look like just putting all your attention on the inner turmoil, wherever it manifests physically, mentally or emotionally. Pay attention to the thoughts without judging yourself, pay attention to the emotions arising without trying to stop yourself from feeling them, pay attention to the pain, the agitation, the numbness. Because, your attention is like the sunlight, it can purify, dry out, unravel and enlighten the darkness.

The third part is to get into action. Sometimes a walk in nature followed by writing things out is very effective. Whatever works for you. Writing things out, as I said, helps you look at what’s going on in the mind and emotions and body so you can get some distance from it, develop a kind of neutrality to the situation, whereby you are activating this inner mediator or diagnostician. That’s when you can see patterns, you can remember times when this happened before, and how you unraveled it last time. You can start to recognize the meaning you’re creating that may or may not be true about the situation.

And the fourth part is to ask – what is the gift, what is the benefit, what’s good about this inner turmoil, where can it lead me that would be constructive, what am I meant to learn here? Now, that presupposes a philosophy that all challenges that come to you in life are there for a higher purpose. This is a tough one for some people to accept, especially if they feel particularly victimized by situation, like an illness, or pain, or someone else’s selfish behavior, or a worldwide situation that’s putting them at an extreme disadvantage. But, it’s the kind of life philosophy that can be quite empowering, and cause you to look for the learning, do the learning, grow and move on. To not have that philosophy keeps you stuck in complaining and blaming others for the negative state you find yourself in.

That said, often the first phase of thinking yourself out of jail is to acknowledge that you might be feeling victimized, and then once you recognize it, it’s easier to then choose something more empowering. Again, you don’t want to judge yourself for feeling like a victim, because then you’re getting into a victim villain relationship with inside yourself. The trick is to rise above all that, see all these roles we take on as just choices, as just parts we are playing in the MindStory of our life, and change characters and scripts where necessary.

For example, in the TriUnity self coaching model that I teach, we have a reference chart of archetypes and core scripts. Disempowering and empowering ones. So in the list of popular disempowering archetypes and scripts that are often involved in this inner turmoil, common characters that make you think yourself into jail are:

• the victim, whose core script is – bad things keep happening to me.
• The slave, whose core script is – I’m oppressed
• the coward, whose core script is – I’m too weak, afraid and closed
• the wounded one – I’m too broken inside

There are several others but these seem to come up a lot when people are unraveling these inner mindstories. So, during this process of unraveling it helps to activate the more empowering, or light versions of these archetypal energies:

The Guardian, whose core script is – I can protect myself and others
the sovereign, whose core script is – I’m free to create the life I want
the adventurer – I’m strong, courageous and open-minded
the Healed – I’m healed and whole enough now

Because, if you live in a dualistic world like we do, chances are you have both programs the disempowering and the empowering. You are the writer of the story of your life, and you can cast yourself in any role you want, no matter what situation you face. Now, sometimes there is benefit in being the victim, the slave, the coward, the wounded. There are lessons to be learned in those parts of the story. It’s just if you get stuck there, looping around in these disempowering characters, and want a way out… It helps to rewrite the story you are acting out. To make it conscious, to be the director of the show or story.

Case in point. I was working with a business coach who suggested a way of marketing my business that had been very successful for him and many other people who use it. When I expressed my discomfort with it, he said that was just fear of the unknown, not seeing how well it worked. So I agreed to go along with it, but before I launched it, I was having a sleepless night. Something about it wasn’t right to me. It just wasn’t the way I wanted to bring my information to the world, even if it was a tried-and-true method. I needed to unravel whether it was just fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of success, or was it actually a wise part of me steering me in a direction that had more integrity for who I was, and what I was trying to do, and who I was trying be in the world.

I just looped on it internally, tossing and turning, until I got up in the middle of the night. I did some stretches, then I pulled out my journal, and used a self coaching process to discover the characters in the conflict, what their core script was about, what was the lesson that needed to be learned here. It was a combination of fears driving the discomfort, some fears that were unfounded, and some that were important to pay attention to. If I hadn’t done this diagnostic process of all these symptoms of agitation and sleeplessness, I wouldn’t have come to the grand learning and realization that I needed to re-gig the process to make it work for me, who I was, and what I wanted to share with the world.

It’s often easier just to follow prescribed processes that others give you, but if you really want to feel in alignment on your journey, sometimes you have to go through these entangled processes of thinking yourself into jail, and then in the unraveling process you actually transform the whole situation, get creative and find new solutions that you never would’ve found if you hadn’t gone on that adventure, shine the flashlight on these knots and jail cells of the mind.

So, don’t resist or fear those times you have been thinking yourself into jail, see them as
a hidden gift, once you put on your detective hat and discover what’s really there to learn it can be a fascinating process. Just make sure you don’t try to do it in your head, while lying in bed, pull out some paper, activate whole brain-whole heart thinking and that’s when you’ll start to see amazing, insightful, wise, creative solutions to the inevitable challenges that come your way.

Do check out MindStory Inner Coach book and try using our 5 part AVARA Self Coaching Model to breaking free of a habit of thinking yourself into jail. Just go to mindstoryacademy.com or see the link in the show notes.

Some people use that 5 part AVARA model any time they’re in this negative loop, and it just takes a few minutes and boom, they’re out of it …either right away, or within half an hour or an hour, it starts to dissipate completely. And they start to go in a more constructive path in terms of their thinking, finding new creative solutions.

So, just to let you know, I will only be doing one more episode of the MindStory Speaker Podcast, which is the next one, episode 125. I’ve starting a new podcast called The Golden Age Timeline podcast which will cover some of the same things here, but I am going off into more, what you might call Woo-Woo territory. I feel it’s important at this time in history, to start to acknowledge our intuitive skills to help us navigate these very confusing times. We can’t rely on external sources of information only anymore, we need to tap into our on wisdom, inner truth, and break free of mindsets, attitudes and mindstories that no longer serve, so we can take back sovereign control of our minds, our bodies, and our lives to, create the life we were meant to live.

I will bring on guests and discuss topics that might be controversial for some, but I feel need to be addressed, about what’s really happening in the world and how to best navigate our way through it in the best possible way for all concerned.

I understand if this is not your cup of tea. And if so, thank you for listening to this episode or any of the others that you have listened to, on the MindStory Speaker Podcast. And maybe we will reconnect at some other point.

If you’re curious about what I will cover, I hope you can join me. You can subscribe or just check out The Golden Age Timeline podcast on Apple podcasts, YouTube, stitcher, Libsyn, or of course our Golden Age Timeline dot com website and several other platforms. You just have to type in Golden Age Timeline and you’ll probably find it.

In general the theme of the show is this. The world is splitting off into different timelines depending on how you focus your mind. This show is about how to choose to leave the control matrix and transition into a higher, more benevolent or what I like to call The Golden Age timeline. Each day you have a choice about whether you want to continue to be controlled, or to take your freedom back.

If life is a game, then we are in final exam time. The intense scenarios happening on the world stage are designed to teach wise discernment. It’s to wake you up so you can get back a life of purpose and meaning. If you’re already aware of some of this, then I believe you are meant to lead and help others.

It’s about helping you find and develop your purpose in this new Golden Age timeline…as many people are walking away from jobs, careers, businesses that either no longer serve or will no longer be relevant in this new era in human history. We explore how to shift subconscious “mind stories”, enhance your intuition and other dormant abilities, to get clarity on your mission and purpose, overcome procrastination, and build authentic self confidence. Here you’ll find an intersection of career/business clarity, personal growth, emotional well-being, and spiritual development and creative self expression…where we’ll be exploring many of the concepts found in the novel Helio Tropez. Check it out if you’re interested.

So that’s it for today. Thank you for listening today.