When we are born into this world we arrive a clean slate of possibility. At some point, usually between ages three to five, we have an experience, a defining moment where we decide something about ourselves that has us question our goodness, our value, our abilities, etc. This experience and the story we create about it become a mind filter through which we begin to see and experience ourselves, and the world.
As we further navigate our formative years, we have more experiences, which, viewed through the original filter—through the lens of a wounded child—create more layers of mind-filters. These filters, much like the dirt building up on the windshield of a car during the early stages of a roadtrip, begin to cloud our mind and distort our vision; hindering our birthright to thrive.
Imagine handing your car keys over to a three year old, and saying, “You drive.” Poor kid, perched on a stack of phone books in order to see over the dashboard, legs stretching to reach the wooden blocks strapped to the gas and break peddles, with no experience in operating essential functions, like windshield wipers. And, heaven help us if there is a stick-shift and clutch to navigate. The idea of this is absurd. Yet, handing our life over to the mind filters of our wounded child, isn’t any less absurd.
Continuing along our life-path, unconsciously adding layer upon layer of mind filters as we go, we acclimate to our obstructed view—the filters, having become more or less a blueprint for self-imposed limitations, and a roadmap to what we believe is possible—to the point where we are driving through our life blind to our potential.
We cannot eliminate these mind-filters, or the facts-of-our-past they represent; what has happened cannot be unhappened. However, we can renegotiate their purpose and value while allocating them to “one side” of our mind—hence the name Mind Filter Combover. Within this action we can consciously choose to repurpose the-facts-of-our-past as reference-data rather than truth. Though this data may still inform our vantage point, it no longer dictates our present, or future, potential. This shift in perspective—much like engaging the wiper blades and cleaning fluid to clear the built-up on the windshield of a car—engages our mind in establishing an unobstructed (mind) clearing through which we reconnect to the unfiltered potential we stood in when we first came in to this world.
Having established these two distinct mental playing-fields, something very natural and profound takes place. Our Head and our Heart begin to communicate with each other, working together as an internal GPS. Our intellectual left-brain, our emotional right-brain, and our spiritual heart-brain, working in tandem, give us a more accurate understanding of, and access to, our creative potential; transposing our life experience from one of surviving to one of thriving.
