Your physical senses are very powerful tools that help you learn about the world, and most importantly, about yourself. There are five of them, your sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. Their job is to learn under your control and look within to see how you can be better and so on.
The thing is, most of us aren’t actually in control of what our senses do. Your senses roam freely, dominating your mind more than you do. Thinking, acting and living for us, not needing our permission to get what it wants. So much so, our senses have become so strong that it comprises our intellect, controlling it instead of the intellect monitoring the senses.
Though the transfer of power from your senses to you will eventually come if you use willpower and S.I.E.P, in the meantime, you would still need to take effort to keep your senses in your reign, not to mention, chances are, your old programming is used to having your senses in control. Your senses and old programming are cunning and will find ways and means to con you into not changing. Often, they can convince you scenarios and situations which aren’t exactly true and in fact can be something else entirely. But your senses can convince you that it is something that it is not.
For example, once, I was home alone after coming back from a day of supporting the awesome Be At Your Best Workshop run by Globetrotter Consultancy (www.globetrotterconsultancy.com.my), my mom, Valsala Krishnan. As fun as it was, we were all pretty tired when we got back and were yet to unload the stuff we used at the workshop from my mom’s car. As we got home, my mom and sister went back out to go buy some things (because there was only room for two people with all the stuff in the car).
At home, sometime later, I heard someone knocking on the door and ringing the doorbell. Thinking is was my mom and sister, I left it to them to open the door for they had the key and continued doing my work.
After a while, the knocking and ringing on the doorbell still persisted. Hearing a commotion outside, I went towards the door and peeped out through the latch. I didn’t see anyone but concluded that it was obviously not my mom and sister. I went back to doing my work and the knocking came again and then subsided a little while later.
At first, I didn’t feel anything much, it was only after a while that fear started kicking in, my emotions having a delayed effect from what my senses heard. I was getting a bit scared and decided to just call my mom and clear things up.
I rang – there was no reply, I texted my sister, and again she didn’t pick up. Fear started building up once again, my reasons for it, unjustified, as I was blindly controlled by my senses, I texted my mentor the situation and asked what to do next.
He told me to breathe and just stay inside and wait for my mom and sister to get back. I remember some part in all of this, my conscious mind kicked in and I remembered to do S.I.E.P. But it was countered by a statement by my Subconscious that it was one of those times when it was needed for P.E.I.S to be in control.
When they did come home, they bumped into our neighbors who then said that they thought we were home and were knocking and ringing the doorbell because they wanted to pass us an invitation to their son’s birthday that was coming soon.
Yet even after they told me this, and I realized that there was nothing to worry about, I was still in fear and it took me a while to snap out of it. That’s how powerful your senses can be; they can make you believe or feel something that isn’t real and still feel it even after it’s over.
When I had calmed down, I told my mom about the whole ‘P.E.I.S was needed to be in control’ thing and justified it as it was indeed an ‘emergency’. My mom laughed and said that my mind was just manipulating me.
Firstly, it wasn’t really an emergency. And secondly, shouldn’t it be more important for me to be in a S.I.E.P state of mind during an emergency? Since only when you are thinking in an S.I.E.P way can you stop and think clearly and not freak out to find a solution.
See how my senses and subconscious tricked me into giving it power? And if I did not give it control, I would have been able to reason and think in that situation.
But don’t worry, if your senses have been in control all this while, it is still possible to regain power from it. You just need to practice S.I.E.P patiently and slowly change. Most importantly, you need to start being aware when situations like the above occur and realise that it is just a manipulation of your senses. Remember, Awareness Before Change!
– Harsha