Pat Divilly - Fit Mind: 8 Weeks to Change Your Inner Soundtrack and Tune into Your Greatness

FIT MIND

8 WEEKS to CHANGE your INNER SOUNDTRACK
and TUNE INTO YOUR GREATNESS

PAT DIVILLY

GILL BOOKS

To Ryan Johnson. Thank you for the encouragement and love you and your family showed me in my late teens. It changed the course of my life forever.

In loving memory of Eric Coleman, Chick Gillen and John Creaven.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Inner Exploration

This is a book about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the world, and the impact those stories have on our health, happiness and overall experience of life.

We speak to ourselves more than anyone else in this world. Thousands of thoughts, beliefs, stories and assumptions run through our minds every day. For most of us these stories and thoughts go largely unquestioned; we take them as gospel and blindly believe them, often with little or no evidence to back them up. With so many thoughts and beliefs going through our minds all day, every day, we might assume we are thinking. In truth, we are often just remembering old internal narratives played on a loop. These old stories or beliefs are the lens through which we see the world and serve as the script or blueprint for the story of our lives.

We walk through life with this largely unconscious blueprint, a collection of ideas and expectations about how things should be in order for us to be happy. We then quickly make judgements about our experiences in life, labelling them good or bad, right or wrong, depending on how they match up to this unconscious script or blueprint of expectations in our minds. These beliefs or stories that make up our blueprint of how the world should look are shaped by our environment, our past experiences, the society and family weve been raised in, what we see in the media that we consume and what weve been told either implicitly or explicitly by others.

We have stories about how our bodies should look, how our partners should communicate, how we should or shouldnt feel given our circumstances and countless other stories about what we need to experience in life in order for us to be happy. The tighter we cling to these stories, the more conditions we set up for our happiness and the more conditional we become in our love for ourselves, for others and for life itself. Its rare that we think to question or challenge these stories that run our lives and thus we can begin to feel that life is happening to us rather than for us as we see the same difficult cycles and patterns repeatedly showing up in our lives.

If we think of this one precious life weve been given as our very own movie, are we playing the role of the scriptwriter and director, creating the film and making it our own unique masterpiece, or are we the actor with no creative control whos playing out a script written by others?

We often think that its the events or circumstances of our lives and relationships that cause our stress and problems, when in fact its the stories we tell ourselves about these events or circumstances that are so often the source of our suffering. The stress or suffering we associate with our relationships, our health, our finances or our career are really a result of the disconnect between how things are and how we think they should be. As a result, day-to-day life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster and we can spend much of our lives trying to change the outside world to match the pictures and expectations we have formed in our heads.

When we begin to become more aware of our stories we can find appreciation, gratitude and freedom from our expectations and can be with life as it is rather than life as we feel it should be. There are a great number of things outside our control in life and all too often our attention is focused on those things we cant control. Taking responsibility in life involves bringing our attention back to the controllables our thoughts and our actions.

In my younger years I had stories playing over and over in my head about not being enough, about not fitting in and about not being of value. I had stories about who I needed to be to be loved, stories about what I needed to achieve to feel successful and countless other stories and expectations for myself and others that made living with myself difficult and exhausting. It might surprise you when I tell you from the outset that all those stories that I used to live with still go through my mind frequently. The soundtrack is still there; the difference is that now I dont believe everything I think and I have a simple toolbox that helps me quickly find perspective in times of stress or suffering to help me change my internal tune.

This toolbox not only enables me to question or challenge the stories, thoughts and beliefs that surface in the present, but also to look back on past experiences and become aware of the origins of my beliefs and stories. It also helps me to see that thoughts and emotions I previously deemed negative are actually where many of my lessons and much of my potential lie. I have learnt through the consistent practice of the tools in my toolbox to go from identifying with my disempowering thoughts to instead being aware of those thoughts, recognising the impact they have on my feelings and actions and then choosing whether Im going to blindly believe the difficult thoughts or take some time to explore their purpose and origins. I have also learnt to accept and work with the negative thoughts and emotions I once tried to dismiss.

I look forward to sharing this toolbox with you in the coming chapters.

Self-care has become a real buzzword in recent times. It is often used in the context of looking after yourself through diet, meditation, exercise, or lighting some candles and having a bath. Theres merit in all of these, but I cant think of any greater act of self-care than actively choosing to improve the way we speak to ourselves.

We improve our relationships with ourselves, not by achieving more to fill voids or wounds that we feel within, but by accepting parts of ourselves that weve yet to accept, by coming to more intimately know and understand ourselves, our fears, our values and our drivers.

How we talk to ourselves matters the most.

As a kid Id often arrive home from school and announce that I was stupid or that I didnt fit in. Without skipping a beat my parents would quickly challenge these stories by shifting the perspective to things I was doing well or to the groups I did fit in with. Youve probably done something similar with your own kids or your friends, helping them to find perspective beyond the narrow lens of their inner story.

This book invites you to begin challenging the thoughts, stories, beliefs and assumptions that are causing you dis-ease in life, and it arms you with the tools to do so. Alongside concepts, ideas and new perspectives, I will share an eight-week practical programme of journalling, meditation and self-enquiry techniques that offer a chance to immediately begin implementing these new ideas and practising mental and emotional fitness. I encourage you to pick up a journal that you can use alongside this book as you go through the eight-week self-enquiry programme. You can also find guided versions of the books meditation exercises, along with other bonus material, at patdivilly.com/fitmind.

Despite the comforts of the modern world, theres an overwhelming collective experience of disconnection, isolation, addiction and depression. Our connection to others starts with our connection to ourselves and so its in the work that we begin to do in this book that we improve every relationship in our lives.

In the coming chapters I will share how you can: