What else would it be beneficial for you to unlearn?

While I was searching my bookshelf for a book I wanted, the title of another book, “A Life of Unlearning“, seemed to jump out at me.   It rang true for me – it seems that in order to live our life in the best possible way, one of the best possible things we can do is to unlearn some (maybe most!) of what we have already learned.  It’s not always easy to do that because we are highly habitual – I remember John, my ballroom dancing teacher, bemoaning the fact that he found it much harder to correct people who already knew how to dance than to teach people to dance from scratch.  Those bad habits had already become ingrained into the person’s physiology and he found it hard work to get them out of those habits. (OK, so yes, he was talking about me!)

So what, besides dance moves, do we need to unlearn?  Well, I think there’s a whole raft of thinking and behaviours that would profit from some unlearning.   One of the biggest challenges is to unlearn our view of the world.  There is so much evidence that our world is energy based and yet so much of our society seems ignorant of this.   I’ve been demonstrating to people in presentations how you can measure someone’s energy field with divining rods.  There’s an obvious fascination with this and sometimes it is the person’s first introduction to themselves as an energetic being.  Of course EFT is an energy based technique and because it works so well in helping people to feel better on all levels there is an obvious advantage in being open to the possibility that the world does not work in the way we thought it did.

As I write I’m thinking there is so much to unlearn.  I think I’ve yet to come across someone who wouldn’t be better off by unlearning their critical view of themselves.  We seem to pick up that inner critical voice early on and maintain it despite evidence that it’s not even valid.  You might even be attached to this criticism because you think you need it in order to motivate you to do something.  But if you think about being criticised by other people you’ll realise that being criticised makes you angry and upset.  Criticism is constricting and contracting whereas praise and kindness is expansive.  So the criticism needs to be unlearned and replaced by praise, kindess and compassion towards ourselves.  I’m really a work in progress on this one I have to confess.

Another unlearning could be that of limited thinking.  I was lucky that after I went to naturopathic college I worked with Petrea King for a while and learned to be open to possibility.  Her experience with cancer took her close to dying but as those of you who have met Petrea or listened to her on the radio will know, she is very much alive (and in good humour!) many years down the track.  I learned from her and many other people that seeming miracles can happen and that things don’t necessarily go on the ‘official’ predicted trajectory.