You Are Not Your Experiences, But What You Learn From Them

A major cause of distress is often the following: we identify so much with certain experiences that there comes a time when we do not know how to distinguish between the viewer and the game.

Coincidentally, painful experiences are the ones that are most striking and have the most psychological and physical impact on us.

We must disarm that belief if we want to be able to be what we want to be. Understand that you are not what happens to you, but rather the foundation that stores what you experience. You are not what you experience, but what you learn from it.

The explanation lies in evolution

Man was constantly exposed to danger, and that footprint of overexcitement and fear is dormant within our modern minds, even though it does not always manifest.

Therefore, from the individual level we treat pain as something that has come to destroy us. This belief makes us weak and avoidant individually and suspicious socially.

This sickly cycle does not heal any wounds: you have to stop suffering to start flowing, and for that you have to clarify two concepts that have been exposed in recent Generation Therapies: You have to differentiate “your I context from your I content.”

The jar and the substances

Imagine a glass jar. It has a consistent and strong appearance, but we know that certain environmental conditions can cause it to fall and break, by some slip-up or intentionally by someone.

This jar has long been occupying an important place in the living room of a house. It has something special, someone decided to decorate its cover to make it more appealing and write the words “Jar for everything” when the jam that was originally inside it was finished.

Over the years the inhabitants of the house, the children playing in it and even guests, have poured various substances and objects into it.

They put coins inside of it, post-its on the outside. It has been used for “hunting cockroaches,” it has hosted matches, wedding favors, nails, pins, has been washed with bleach, it has also gone through incense and if anyone forgot about it for a long time it accumulated a lot of dirt and dust.

But the jar continued to be kept on the shelf. If you went to the house and they asked you what you saw when you look at it … what would you answer? Surely, you would clearly state that it was a glass jar.

Now you will ask yourself what the point of this story is. Well I can tell you this much, it is not a story of a glass jar, but a metaphor for your life.

I’ve been through a lot, but something always remains the same: MYSELF

Like the glass jar, you too have an unchanging and inherent essence. You’ve experienced disappointments and neglect, you have suffered indifference, betrayals and gotten hurt by other’s bad intentions. A lot of this damage remains within you, and therefore you have become someone more suspicious and even hermit-like.

Very negative things keep adding to who you are on the inside, but this time nobody else put it there but you. You have deposited fear, loss of interest, harmful memories and endless tears. If you keep overloading that jar, you might really break, so stop overloading yourself with such long-lasting negative things.

Get back to your essence and your true self, being aware that no matter what, as long as you’re alive, good things and bad things are always going to happen to you. But you will still be here, and the world will recognize you.

Grab what happened to you by the horns and get back to being you

Knowing that you alone are responsible for the path you choose in your life is an extreme responsibility, but by that responsibility you gain freedom.

So use everything you’ve experienced to learn and draw lessons from life based only on your experience. Forget some and change others and laugh at the rest. Renovate or die.

Return to being the one that welcomes diverse experiences. Or allow yourself submerge into everything that happens to you so your essence taps into the positive and you can get closer and closer to where you want to go. Discarding that which is not worth continually thinking about, since it has nothing to do with you even if you have gone through it.

That is wisdom, but it is also knowing how to reaffirm yourself before the world by openly saying that you have faced the good and the bad and have gone back to being reunited with your essence. Because you have learned that you are not what you experience, but the essence that welcomes them and lets them go by too.