The Prison of Imagination — Set Yourself Free Series

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The Prison of Imag­i­na­tion — our sense of being trapped, caught, is almost always just us, trap­ping ourselves.

Many, many moons ago, Darbella shared a story with me.

She was describ­ing her life, and the short ver­sion was that she imag­ined her­self alone in a castle’s tow­er room. Nice­ly appoint­ed, door to one side, win­dow, 20 feet up, on the other.

She said she could see the sky through the win­dow, and hear the sounds of peo­ple, and a parade, out the window.

Dar was com­fort­able, but unable to par­tic­i­pate in what she could hear and then assume was hap­pen­ing out­side the tower.

I read the sto­ry, got a sense of how frus­trat­ed she was, giv­en that the sto­ry was “the sto­ry of her life.” 

I asked her, “Can you go inside and imag­ine the room?”

Dar’s good at visu­al­iz­ing, so she did that easily. 

I said, “Would you mind going over and check­ing the door?”

She did… and it was unlocked!

As are almost all the doors in our our lives.

We are prisoners of our own imagination

For me, a major “unlocked door” I needed to “let go of” was being a minister

I knew, back then, that as the years went by, I was more and more dis­sat­is­fied. I stayed, I admit with embar­rass­ment, because I liked speak­ing in pub­lic, liked the adu­la­tion, and liked the money.

Three really bad reasons for doing stuff

It all “went South” back in 1996, and here I am, 28 years lat­er, and none the worse for wear. 

There was no down­side (oth­er than a bunch of peo­ple who like­ly are still mad at me… I’m used to that) — the things I imag­ined hap­pen­ing if I left that prison nev­er happened.

I’m not being Pollyanna-ish about this — the clear truth is this:

Bad stuff hap­pens to all of us, but almost always, the con­se­quences are not as bad as we imag­ine. And no mat­ter how bad it gets, there are ways “out and through.”

Sitting in the locked jail cell, concocting horror stories, on the other hand, means a relentless flow of “day after day, all the same.”

Back in my coun­sel­lor train­ing days, the Profs taught you fall­back ques­tions — what to say if you got stuck. I sel­dom do, but remem­ber the ques­tions. I even pulled three out the oth­er day. They are:

1. do you have per­mis­sion to be hap­pi­er than your parents?
2. do you have per­mis­sion to have a bet­ter rela­tion­ship than your parents?
3. do you have per­mis­sion to be a bet­ter par­ent than your parents?

and I’d add:

1) do you have per­mis­sion to be more suc­cess­ful than your father or mother?

Odd, eh?

And not very self responsible language, I know. Maybe better: “Do you allow yourself to…”

But it is sort of like per­mis­sion I give myself. I can choose to let myself exceed the stan­dard I grew up under, and then to exceed my own stan­dards, again and again.

• I remem­ber, for exam­ple, that my dad was a ping pong champ. He taught me to play, and by High School I was pret­ty good (not by today’s stan­dards.) I played him once, and was win­ning. I dis­tinct­ly remem­ber a lit­tle voice, telling me “You can’t beat your dad.” I lost 3 games straight on the last point.
• More cru­cial­ly, when I decid­ed to end my pri­or two mar­riages, in each case, one of the first calls I made was to mom and dad, to see how they would react. They’d been mar­ried 56 years when my mom died, so my pid­dly 2 and 8 years seemed a betray­al oƒthe stan­dard they had set.

I knew I was thinking that way, had been making clear choices for myself for a decade, and still wanted their approval.

Knowing myself, I wouldn’t have changed anything if they’d have freaked out, but I also breathed a sigh of relief when they didn’t.

This is how nuts we all are.

There are all kinds of brakes and lim­i­ta­tions going on, right under the sur­face of our con­scious­ness. With­out effort, it’s hard to see through them. So, you have to look.

They will seem like hard limits

Look for stop words — things like “always” and “nev­er.” Or “every­one knows.” Look for how often you are cran­ing your head around, look­ing for per­mis­sion, for some­one to blame, or won­der­ing what oth­ers think of you and what you’re doing.

Ask your­self, “Who am I giv­ing per­mis­sion to — who gets a say about what I do, think, decide?”

You might just be surprised.

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Explore how you keep your­self con­tained — what uni­ver­sals you declare to keep from hav­ing to think for yourself.

What things you want to do, try, do you declare off lim­its, based upon fear of fail­ure or fear of judgement.

Is doing what some­one else tells you to do, for fear of ruf­fling feath­ers, real­ly how you want to spend your life?

That door, in your locked tow­er… is it even locked?

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