Crow Attacks and Belief Systems
Today during my daily morning walk, I nearly got attacked by a crow. It swooshed by really close to my head and in the kerfuffle, I dropped my phone and then seriously considered leaving it behind to not have to risk an actual beak-head collision.
After that, I was hyper-aware of all the crows around, hyper-aware of their cawing, I kept looking around expecting another crow to come down and get me.
Most of the time we have all these thoughts jumbled in our head so it’s hard to see how they are affecting us, but it was so fascinating this time because I was able to witness myself
Accept a new thought: “I am going to get attacked again”
Immediately see the emotion it created: Fear
Look for all the evidence that it was true: “look at all the crows, I think that one gave me the evil eye?, I know 4 people who got attacked”
Ignore all the evidence against it: I literally did not get attacked again
This is the Reticular Activating System (RAS) at work. Your RAS is the bundle of nerves at the base of your brain stem that allows your brain to focus only on the important information and filter out the rest.
This is kind of a silly example, but this process is happening constantly for all our belief systems. Imagine you believed “I am not XYZ enough” or “I will never be able to XYZ”: without awareness, it would be hard to stop believing these thoughts, because your RAS is constantly trying to find evidence for you to support these beliefs and ignoring the counter evidence, and then you use that “evidence” to strengthen your belief. And the cycle goes on…
So the first step to coming out of this cycle is to stop and recognize first that this belief…is just a belief. It’s not the truth, it’s just words in your head that you repeated to yourself so many times that you believe them. This is great news! From that place of awareness you can ask yourself if this belief is serving you, and decide if you are willing to let it go. The crows can still be out there but you can choose to think about them differently.
I’m here for you if you would like to take this work to a deeper level (I promise we won’t talk about crows, unless you want to!)