Our daily walk through the Gallery
Our lives are full of experiences. We meet people, do things, see places, interact with the world. And all these experiences are filed away as memories, and some of them are stored in our Unconscious Mind…for future reference. Now imagine the place where all this is stored as like a gallery, full of paintings. The paintings depict all the things, events and people we encounter while living our human experience.
It’s interesting to note that we created none of those paintings – not a single one. They are just snapshots of what has entered our consciousness. They come ready-made, if you will, into our lives. And when they arrive, we look at them. We examine them carefully, and then we put them in a frame and hang them up in our Mind gallery. Some parts of our gallery we visit often, others not so much. That is because we find some paintings very alluring and pretty, and others we consider ugly or scary. But this daily gallery walk is very important to us, because it allows us, whenever a new painting arrives that looks just like one we already have, to give it a nice, matching, similar frame. After all, the similar painting we already have looks good in this frame already, right?
But is it really the painting itself that gives us feelings of joy or sadness, happiness or depression, hope or despair? After all, it’s just a snapshot of what is or was, right?
The Mona Lisa, dressed up in IKEA
Imagine da Vinci’s most famous painting framed in a do-it-yourself, fake-wood frame from a well-known Swedish manufacturer of affordable furniture. What do you think that would do to that masterpiece? It would still be the Mona Lisa alright, but our experience of it would be somewhat…diminished, would it not? Yet that’s exactly what we do every single day when new paintings arrive in our Mind gallery. Our internal frame shop does not work in a very artistically pleasing way a lot of the time, and it creates frames that oftentimes simply ruin the painting. The reason for this is that our frame-making process is heavily tarnished with our beliefs and opinions of what is good, bad, beautiful, ugly, sad, joyful, that have nothing to do with the painting itself – which comes from the outside – but only with what’s inside of us. So sometimes we do a really good job of finding the cheapest, ugliest frame possible – maybe one that represents a few truly dysfunctional and non-resourceful beliefs about ourselves – and slam it on something that, in another frame, could maybe look stunning, or at least decent.
Upgrade your frame shop
Your personal frame shop has unlimited creativity and ability. It can create true works of art that will make every painting that arrives in your gallery pleasant to look at, probably even beautiful, possibly a masterpiece. So why not discard the old tools you use to make your frames, and replace them with a new set? It is absolutely in your power to give your paintings any frame you desire. That, of course, works both ways.
Changing your frame-making process is one of the best things you can do to create a gallery that you actually will enjoy looking at.
If you want to learn more about how to upgrade your frame shop, drop me a line here.
Remember…when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.