How to break out of prison -- part 1

 
      All prisons are mental prisons
      they all lock from the inside
      and it is we who hold the key 






As a reformed addict and friend of Amy Wine house, Russell Brand has an insightful take on her addiction:  "All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they're not quite present when you talk to them.  They communicate to you through a barely discernible but UN-ignorable veil.… they have about them the air of elsewhere, that they're looking through you to somewhere else they'd rather be.  And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anesthetist the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief."
The sad thing is, people like Amy already have had a taste of what it is to walk that rainbow of creating that 'somewhere else they'd rather be'.  They already know how to feel what they want to create, and then to trust and follow that feeling... and by expressing it, know that expression as their own expression of love.  In other words, to be it.
And of course, you no longer have to go looking for love when that is the place you are coming from.
The problem is, caught up in the momentum of old insecurities, we miss the simplicity and significance of this.  And then we pass-off the joy we once created to 'chance'.  As Churchill once put it, "Once in a while we stumble upon the truth, but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened."
The thing that struck me as I read Russell's tribute to Amy is that, to a lessor or greater extent, we all do this.  Each of us has our own pet distractions that keeps us from being fully present and feeling totally alive in the moment.  'Trying to understand someone' and 'getting engrossed in the task at hand' have been two of mine.
We all have the inner knowing of how to get back to that natural state of pure joy and resourcefulness, regardless of initial conditions… but those insights are like whispers in our mind. They’re always there, but they get drowned by the noise of our thoughts, particularly those thoughts that subliminally direct our attention and tell us what we think we want.  We don't listen to the whispers because 'thinking' has mistakenly become synonymous with knowing, even though it's fairly obvious that it's 'thinking' that generates all the doubts and fears.