The big red pen inside my heart looking for a grammatical mistake to edit

Religion has been telling us for thousands of years that sin begins in the heart long before it manifests in the body.

Coveting, or the mere wanting or thinking about doing something, is already wrong. And our intent to commit that wrong is as sinful as the deed itself.

Seek the holy spirit to keep our hearts pure. Amen.

It’s a nice idea in theory.

But from a practical standpoint, doesn’t that sound exhausting? Isn’t that a completely futile and uphill battle against our inherent and imperfect humanity?

I’ve tried to control my supposedly unclean thoughts on thousands of occasions in my life, and frankly, it never improved anything. All it did was make me feel guilty, frustrated, restricted and out of touch with my feelings.

Like there was a big red pen inside my heart looking for a grammatical mistake to edit on a term paper that nobody would ever to read.

It’s time to have some compassion. Let’s stop judging ourselves for the weird movies our brains are playing. Denying our reality only makes things worse.

To quote my favorite therapist, when you swallow your feelings, your body begins to digest itself.

Here’s the reality that our religions and cultural intuitions are disincentivized to tell us.

There’s no such thing as good or bad feelings, only healthy and unhealthy ways of expressing them.

Think about that insight for a minute. Shakespeare’s version of that comes to mind, he said:

“For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.“

Here’s a case study. If some thought or feeling comes across our mental or emotional screen that is offensive, rude, deplorable, bigoted or offensive, that doesn’t mean we are more or less worthy than we were a minute ago.

It simply means we’re human.

Southpark’s award winning musical has a great parody song about this process. The missionary is determined to quash all of his pesky homosexual urges, so he sings this verse:

“When you start to get confused because of thoughts in your head, don’t feel those feelings. Turn it off, like a light switch. Just go click. It’s a cool little trick. When you’re feeling certain feels, that just don’t feel right, treat those pesky feelings like a reading light.”

What thoughts and feelings are you trying to turn off?

One strategy that helps me have more compassion for my inner life is journaling. First thing every morning, I give myself twenty minutes to expel every single movie inside my brain, regardless of what the rating or genre of that movie is, with no judgment.

These things aren’t good or bad, they’re just things.

If you’ve never had any kind of any regular emotional discharge practice like this before, let me tell you, it’s deeply cathartic and cleansing. It makes me feel human, honest, calm, liberated and connected to my higher self. Flushing all of those things out of my system without beating myself up for having them makes me more forgiving of my humanity, and as a result, more forgiving of other people’s.

The best part is, after my meditation completes, this document is immediately deleted. Forever. Gone like a fart in the wind.

And knowing that fact going into the journaling exercise is precisely what allows me to feel unencumbered during the process.

It’s a safe container. These thoughts and feelings are between me and the page. There’s nothing sinful about this daily practice. I’m not an unclean, unworthy person because of what happens inside my heart. It doesn’t make me proud of the crazy things that happens inside of my heart, necessarily, but what does make me proud is the compassion and forgiveness with which they’re managed.

Remember, there is no thought police. There is no belief committee. And there is no sanctioning body whose job it is to assign us demerits for holding inappropriate or extreme thoughts.

Play that reel of feels and enjoy the show.

Give yourself permission to feel whatever you want to feel. You might be surprised what you learn about yourself.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you fighting an uphill battle against your inherent and imperfect humanity?