The unconscious mechanisms that decide what you’re allowed to feel
The Automatic Filter
There exists an unconscious habit to see certain tones of our inner life as listenable and important, while automatically, auto-magically, disengaging from others, regarding them as unlistenable and not important.
Every moment there is an inner finger, pointing out and choosing what is okay, and can stay, and what must be hidden away.
Think about it. Right now, as you’re reading this, something is happening inside you. Maybe a thought. Maybe a feeling. Maybe a sensation in your body. And instantly, before you even consciously register it, something in you has already decided: is this okay to feel? Is this allowed? Or does this need to be pushed down, ignored, dismissed?
Too Fast to Notice
This process, until realized, is so quick it can easily go unnoticed. Yet, all the while it’s making choice after choice, sculpting our present moments based on absorbed beliefs that we have mostly unconsciously collected from a yesterday somewhere in our history.
The sorting happens faster than thought. You don’t decide “I’m going to reject this feeling now.” You just… do. Automatically. Because somewhere, sometime, you learned that certain things are acceptable and certain things are not.
Maybe you learned that sadness is weak. That anger is bad. That wanting too much makes you selfish. That certain desires are inappropriate. That some parts of you are too much, too loud, too intense, too inconvenient.
And now, years later, you’re still sorting based on rules you don’t even remember learning.
The Two Piles
With deep inspection of our inner landscapes we can see our choosing mechanisms sorting through the piles of inner experience, throwing the contents of our experience either in the “good” “listenable” important pile, or the “bad” “unlistenable” not important pile.
The contents that make it to the good pile are accepted, adored, treasured and usually feed into the ego body’s establishment as real and therefore the belief that there is stability in life and semi-permanence to the ego.
The contents that make it into the bad pile are all the things that threaten the beliefs of stability and permanence, and therefore must be rejected, disliked, unappreciated, unheard.
But here’s the thing: both piles are you. The sorted and the unsorted. The listened-to and the unheard. And when you reject half of your experience, you’re living at half-capacity.
What Becomes Possible
When we begin to realize our own inner sorting mechanisms, it can ultimately create more spontaneous wild and true expression and natural life highs because many of the inner judgments that we have absorbed from our environmental circumstances, that generate our external choices and preferences in the world, often hold us back from traveling in the directions our free spirit may like to go.
When you start to see the sorting happening – when you catch yourself mid-sort – something opens up.
Suddenly you have a choice. You can still sort if you want to. But now you’re doing it consciously instead of automatically. Now you can ask: do I actually agree with this? Do I actually want to put this feeling in the “bad” pile? Or is that just an old rule I absorbed from somewhere that doesn’t even apply anymore?
And when you start questioning the rules, when you start listening to the parts of yourself you’ve been auto-muting… that’s when you get access to the full range of your experience.
That’s when expression becomes more spontaneous, more wild, more true. Because you’re not constantly censoring yourself before you even know what you want to say.
The Question
So who is doing the sorting of your piles?
It’s amazing to turn up the magnification upon our inner auto-sorting mechanisms, just to see, if we actually agree with the methods of organization, of our daily encountered information.
Whose voice is it really, that decides what’s listenable and what’s not? Is it yours? Or is it your mother’s? Your culture’s? Your early teachers’? Some internalized authority you’ve been carrying around for decades without even realizing it?
And more importantly: do you actually agree?
Listen to the Unlistenable
Because once you see the sorting happening, once you catch yourself in the act of deciding what’s allowed and what’s not, you can start to make different choices. You can start to listen to the things you’ve been auto-muting.
You can question whether the “bad” pile is really bad, or just… unfamiliar. Uncomfortable. Different from what you’ve been taught to value.
The practice is simple: notice the sorting. See what gets put where. Ask yourself: who decided this? And is that still true for me now?
That’s where freedom lives. Not in having the perfect sorted life, but in becoming aware of the sorting itself – and choosing whether to keep doing it the same way, or to try something new.
What are you auto-sorting without even realizing it? And what might happen if you listened to the unlistenable?
Loving you always!
Meghan