My Emancipated Mind

When reading or hearing the word emancipation I envision great Civil Rights victories such as Race, Gender, Sexuality and Tyranny. I revel in the history, the battle, the triumphs that all culminate with this word emancipation. It is literally the verbal expression of freedom, liberty, and equality. To say that this is a teacher's pet word of mine might be stating it mildly. But what if the entity of oppression that one seeks emancipation from is your own mind? To free oneself from their own mind sounds a little like taking a trip on the drug train, but hear me out.

I was raised a devout Mormon. Within any group, religious, political, social we ascribe to certain ways of seeing the world. In my group I was raised to see the world through Christian Fundamentalist eyes. Black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. I was nurtured in this environment, encouraged to explore the world in these parameters. It was a fine way of life until it wasn't.

When a person steps outside their environment, their lived experience, and becomes aware that not everyone lives with the same set of standards it can become complicated. I started to feel the need to justify my decisions and beliefs. I started to try to find the weak leaks in others belief systems to further prove mine was far superior. I started to become unhappy, unsatisfied, and angry.

Ignorance really is bliss, but in my case I would not trade knowledge and the emotions it brings for that bliss ever again. The belief system of my youth shaped my life and will directly affect me until I die. It is neither the right or the wrong system, it is just a system. Many beliefs within this system in my opinion are wrong and hurtful, which is why I left.

But leaving a belief system is physically easier than changing the way your mind processes the world. And by easier I mean really really hard. So you can extrapolate that changing the way your mind thinks about the world is really (to at least the 3rd) hard.

So this blog invites you to follow my journey as I work to see the world through different belief systems while deconstructing or validating my previous system. Hopefully by the end my mind won't be a puddle of goo.....