In the LSBC curriculum, I ask students to imagine their psyche as a dinner plate.
It used to look to me like all people were born with a clean, perfectly clear dinner plate. But little by little, life takes a toll on our plate.
You get teased or left out–there’s a scratch on your plate.
Some traumatic event happens– a big gouge is taken out of your plate.
I used to think we grow up and move through life picking up insecurities, fears, identities and labels, all leaving dents and marks on our plate.
I thought my plate became damaged, but if I tried hard enough, I could mitigate and maybe even reverse some of the damage. Therapy. Self-help. Hard work. If I was resourceful enough, I could buff out some of those scratches and repair some of the dents so that my plate could be as whole as possible. It’d never be fully whole though. It was not the same plate I was born with.
When I came across the New Paradigm, I saw that I had been wrong. It doesn’t work that way at all.
We all have a plate, a psyche, a mind, an essence, that can’t be permanently dinged or dented.
Our design is incredible. It ensures that everything we experience, no matter what it is, slides off our plate. It doesn’t leave a deep mark that way I had thought at all. It moves through us, leaving our plate ding-free.
When we don’t know this, we fail to experience it. We think (because we’re told, and because experience can feel so incredibly hard at times) that those things we went through did leave a mark. We’ve never been the same. But that’s only us experiencing what we believe. When we come to see that the plate can’t be permanently damaged, we experience much more of that.
This plate can’t be irreparably damaged. It’s more that we experience life and it’s like writing your name in the sand on the beach. It’s there and we feel it in an extremely real way. And then the water comes to wash it away.
Life brings it and life washes it away.
