You are a flea in a jar
The most popular video I’ve ever recorded is called Fleas in a Jar.
In short, the metphor is as follows:
Fleas have the capacity to jump a couple of metres. But if you put the fleas in a jar with the lid on, within 30 seconds of jumping about they learn the confines of the space of the jar. So that then even if you take the lid off, they will never jump out of the jar.
The human mind is like this. Your mind confines itself. You develop fixed thinking about all things… a fixed view about yourself, about your family, each of your friends, a fixed view about your work, your boss, the world… in fact everything that you think about.
There is of course some benefit to the ‘known’ world that our minds create, providing us certainty and perhaps safety.
But the fixedness of your thinking also has significant downsides. It creates tightness, it creates limitation to what is possible, it creates judgment that impacts relationships, it creates presuppositions.
And the mind is so immersive you don’t even realise that it’s just your view - you're actually immersed in your thinking as ‘your reality'.
We live in a story, for example “Life is difficult at the moment. The global situation is worrying. My daughter is lazy. My boss can’t be trusted. I’m so busy. I don't have enough money… and so on.”
I was recently working with a team, who did the wondering exercise. Do you remember that from your Quality of Mind programme? Wondering is about wondering freely. It’s about relaxing the fixedness of the mind, it’s about letting thought flow. When this happens, we access different ways of seeing things. What if you relaxed everything, every view, every perspective that you'd ever had? What if you learnt to see the world and your world in a different way?
Remember it’s all an illusion anyway. As Einstein reminds us “Reality is an illusion, albeit just an extremely persistent one”.
If you’d like a practical exercise to remind you of this, I invite you to do the wondering exercise on your own. Pick a topic or situation where you’d love fresh thinking. Then sit back and wonder.
“I wonder what I’ve not seen about this yet. I wonder what the other person thinks. I wonder what my wisdom says. I wonder what is driving me in this situation, I wonder where I am gripped by ego… “ By wondering even alone, you’ll start to experience the loosening of your thinking, collapsing the walls of the jar, perhaps even letting the fleas jump out to fully be their jumping potential once again.
