Roots of the ‘Civilized Mind’
Most of us were raised with a thinking mind programmed for what I call a “Civilized Mind”:
Follow the rules of the civilized world to fit in and stay safe
Silence any dissent from the body, heart, or spirit to protect us
We are alone in our experience and must compete with others for scare resources (connection, love, time, money) .
It’s the voice that’s so enmeshed in our identity we don’t even realize it’s not who we actually are (psychology usually calls this our Ego).
It is likely the voice you have heard in your head since you were young. Depending on how you were raised, this may be the only voice you’ve ever known.
For others who were allowed to keep their child-like sense of wonder intact for longer, this voice may have started to show up in the middle or high school years, or in their early 20s.
If we had thoughtful reflective caregivers as we grew up, then this voice may simply be what eggs you on to do something more quickly or to over commit to the things you love.
However, if you were raised by caregivers who were nursing their own emotional wounds, then your Civilized Mind might sound more like this: “Don’t Do…, Do More, Be More, Give More, Work Faster, Work Harder, and Compare and Judge Yourself Against Others”.
Photo credit: Heidi Kurpiela - Feral Photo Works
This is commonly called “The Inner Critic” in psychology and inner coaching work. I have a motto for this that I used to tell others when I struggled with this in my early decades: “You can never possibly judge me as harshly as I judge myself”.
When our nervous system is in Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn mode, fear will also lock us into the tiny box of the Civilized Mind in an attempt to protect us - we may notice obsessive thinking or our mind making up false stories to explain things we don’t understand.
Learning how to recognize the voice and feel of the Civilized Mind is important so we can catch it in the act. Depending on your astrology it can feel: heavy, urgent, numbing, rigid, or defensive in the body. You may also notice a pattern of it creeping in when you’re feeling afraid, hurried, tired, angry, stressed, lonely, or sad.
Once we learn to recognize when it’s showing up, then comes the task of practicing the skills to acknowledge and quiet it to create space for your higher wisdom and inspired mind to shine through.
This is where the rubber meets the road - you learn to rewire your mental patterns and habits each time the world activates you and you consciously choose how to respond rather than reacting from a defensive place.
If we don’t take the time to do the work of understanding the nuances of our own inner voice, and how it can show up in different ways, it makes trusting our instincts, intuition, and our feelings much more difficult.
All of our states of awareness can become enmeshed and colored by the tone of the Civilized Mind as it disguises itself in an attempt to keep us safe by controlling the outcome of our daily life to protect us (which is an illusion).
Without this discernment and self-awareness, we can easily mistake fearful thinking for intuitive “downloads” or our instincts. When we’re in places of true connection, the quality of it can feel present, clean, peaceful, clear, quiet, still, or light in the body. This is when we can trust the higher wisdom of our soul to shine through.
Our wise mind, or (Wise Self) is able to see the forest for the trees. We become able to see the bigger picture and put our challenges, concerns, needs, and desires all into context of this bigger view of our life. Developing a regular soul presence practice develops our muscle memory for connecting and disciplines the mind so eventually it’s a natural habit to “check in” before you react to something.
This also disciplines our thinking mind so that it understands its job is to collect actual information from the outside world and review inner sensory data needed to support our decisions so the Wise Mind can use discernment to coordinate with all of our elements.
And here’s the kicker - our thinking mind is NOT the decision maker of our life, rather, we are wired to go through a process that comes from checking into all of our states self awareness before committing to a path of action. AFTER all our aspects of self are in agreement, then our thinking mind can shine again as it brings us ideas and opportunities to consider on our pathway.
When we live with our Civilized Mind in charge of our experience, our mind will write endless checks that our body cannot cash. It will commit us to huge undertakings and plans it believes are “a good idea” that our heart and soul do not agree with.
Without the support and energy of the heart, our body gets drained trying to keep up with the mind, which leads us to feeling unmotivated, depleted, procrastinating, or not finishing projects.
When we think we’ve “failed”, the Civilized Mind tells us it’s because we’re lazy or we don’t follow through — when in reality we didn’t make a clean decision from the start — because parts of us will get depleted and sabotage the result eventually.