Are we living in reality?
In a world where so many things take us out of the physical realm — how do we ground ourselves more?
During the pandemic, I started listening to audiobooks and podcasts from a woman called Byron Katie. She is an 80-year-old spiritual teacher known for an epiphany she had in a halfway house in 1986. She entered the rehab facility in her 40s, seriously depressed and left a completely different person. She says that she woke up one morning and saw a very different reality for the first time. The reality she saw wasn’t scary at all — she saw clouds and trees and rivers and kindness and nature working in perfect harmony. She then founded a tool called The Work1 that helped thousands of people all over the world.
Her whole thing is: are you OK in this moment? Right now? What can you see? Are you safe? If yes, then it is your thoughts that are the painful bit, not necessarily your current reality (i.e. in which you might be sitting somewhere with a cup of tea). At first, I found her work pretty jarring. She has die-hard fans and she has critics. I did have an a-ha moment though, among the trees in Hackney Downs park — I became aware that my thoughts were rarely ‘the reality’ of a situation. As a head-in-the-clouds writer person, I’ve been wanting to explore this topic for a while.