Our patterns of thought can free or imprison us. Often habitual, choice is about intention, and choosing the influence we want our memories and thoughts to have over our mood, outlooks, habits of thinking and being.
A native of Hungary, Dr. Edith Eva Eger was just a teenager in 1944 when her family and she were taken to Auschwitz. On May 4, 1945 a young American soldier rescued her from a pile of dead bodies where she then received medical help. The Choice is her memoir about this experience and the life she built in the aftermath. About her inner world, she said:
“ We were able to discover an inner strength we could draw on - a way to talk to ourselves that helped us feel free inside, that kept us grounded in our own morality, that gave us foundation and assurance even when the external forces sought to control and obliterate us. ”
Our ability to reflect, to hold our inner thoughts out for examination is a gift, a gift that allows us to explore our inner world and to in a sense make choices about those thoughts and how we allow those thoughts to define and/or influence us. Reflecting upon our thoughts, feelings, and experiences is not an exercise in tamping down, ignoring, or silencing. Instead, she suggests that to silence is to become a prisoner to your lived experiences, the trauma one experienced. Far better is to hold your experiences up for examination, growing in your understanding of how those experiences influence you, and then choosing to adjust, to release, possibly to forgive that which has its grip on your life. In so doing, we choose to step off the hamster wheel of habitual feeling, developing our sense of agency with regard to our future and our role in it.
