Imagine for a moment that you have a lovely new shiny colourful pair of Wellington boots or rain boots. You’re very proud of your new boots and you’re excited about wearing them. You put them on and you go for a good walk across the fields. It’s been raining, so the field is a bit muddy. Inevitably some of that mud ends up on your lovely shiny new boots. You come home and put the boots by the back door, ready for their next outing.
The next day you decide to do a bit of gardening so you pull the boots on again and get on with digging and planting. Now more mud gets on those lovely, shiny boots.
And the next day you decide to go for another muddy walk across those fields. Now your boots have even more mud on them!
At some point you realise that you need to clean the boots. They have become covered in mud. The mud is not the boots. The real boots are underneath all the mud but you can’t really see them anymore, you can’t see the lovely colour of them because they’re all covered in mud.
So you grab the hosepipe and you wash those boots down. You know that you can clean them, it doesn’t enter your head that it’s not possible. You start to clean and some of the mud slides off, you need to scrub harder in a few places but before too long you can see your lovely boots again. Hoorah!
Why am I talking to you about mud and rain boots?
Because I believe that we are like those boots. We are born into this world, lovely and shiny and colourful. We come in as pure, positive energy ready to experience the beauty all around us.
Then we start walking through life. And as we do, we start to pick up some “mud”. It’s just what happens. Somebody says something negative to us or about us and that mud sticks. We experience trauma or abuse and more mud sticks. We feel stressed or anxious and there’s some more mud. We have difficult times, we pick up limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world we are living in. Mud, mud, mud.
Before too long our lovely, shiny, colourful selves are covered in mud.
And the heartbreaking part is that we start to believe that we are the mud. We think the mud is actually who we are. But it isn’t. We are not the mud. We are the lovely, shiny, pure, positive, colourful rain boots underneath. That is who we truly are, we just forgot that because all the mud got in the way and we couldn’t see ourselves anymore.
But because we believe that we are the mud, that it is just who we are, we don’t really realise that we can wash it off. We walk through life unaware that it is possible to wash that mud off and find ourselves underneath. So we don’t even try to.
I want to tell you that it is absolutely possible to wash that mud off. Sometimes it takes a bit of work and sometimes we need a bit of help. But we CAN wash the mud off so that we can once again see the lovely, shiny, colourful, pure, positive energy underneath. The true us.
Remember that today. We are not the mud. We are the boots underneath it. And we can wash that mud off anytime we like.