Listen to this thought on spotify here.
In the film Inception, the central theme is about the power of an idea. The aim of the protagonist is to insert an idea so deep into the target’s mind that it feels like a natural thought to them. The idea is so deeply rooted in their subconscious that they can’t shake it off and don’t realise that it has been planted there by someone or something else. And ultimately, it can have devastating consequences.
Ever since I saw that film the notion of inception, an idea that sits in your mind and keeps coming up again and again, has fascinated me. I keep thinking about it. Because maybe there’s something we can learn from it.
We all have ideas or patterns of thinking that are rooted deep in our minds, maybe so much so that we don’t notice them or even think they are part of us or who we are. They might have been there since childhood, maybe even planted by someone else, some unknown protagonist that we’ve long since forgotten. Yet those ideas and ways of thinking affect us every day and because of that, it’s worth trying to identify them.
So, what are your inception ideas? What thoughts and patterns of thinking do you have in the back of your mind that you keep coming back to again and again. Notice these ideas. Are they useful, are they helpful, how do they serve you? And once you do notice, can you accept that this idea may have been planted in your mind by someone else, or by situations beyond your control, that they are not part of who you are. And though that may be the case, you have the power to dissolve that idea and implant new ones that help to serve you better.
I have a friend who had a revelation recently. She suffers with health anxiety and has a near constant feeling that something might go wrong with her body at any moment. And she realised that when she was growing up she had the same feeling about her family, that something could go wrong. This was the result of her parents not being in a happy relationship and for years she would witness them treading on eggshells around each other, waiting for something to go wrong. Eventually they got divorced which only confirmed her thought that things can and will go wrong.
So she realised that her health anxiety is in part a manifestation of a deeper idea, a deeper inception. That something is likely to go wrong. And for her it came true, her parents did get divorced so now she has to battle that deep rooted inception.
A common repeating thought many of us have is that we are not enough. There are huge forces in society that make us feel this way (more on that another time) but as an example, consumerism needs you to think that you are not enough and that you need to buy things to make you whole. But maybe that’s a bad idea to have. Maybe we have been inceptioned by some (marketing, most likely) protagonist. Maybe we are enough.
I hope you can spot those pesky inception ideas. Identify them, root them out and replace them with ideas that serve you.
