Worry and Imagination

Worry is often imagination mistaken for reality.

On this walk, I explore imagination, projection, and the stories we create when we’re not fully present to what’s actually happening. From worry and assumptions to self-fulfilling prophecies, this episode looks at how our imagined realities can shape our behavior, relationships, and parenting. A walk about grounding the mind, questioning the stories we project, and learning to use imagination with more awareness.

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi, good morning, everybody. Welcome to Embodied Wisdom. I'll walk and a talk with Dr. Brooke. I'm a little sniffly today, so uh sorry for the uh if you hear my sniffles throughout our uh transmission this morning. Um so today I want to talk about projection and imagination. I think I'm gonna start first by imagination with imagination because I think projection is like a form of imagination, I think. So, and I'm gonna talk about self-fulfilling prophecy, I think a little bit. So, unless we are present to something, like there, there, I mean, like, you know, like right now, I'm walking one foot in front of the other. Oh, yes, we're live from my neighborhood again, and I'm putting one foot in front of the other, and I'm in my neighborhood, and I'm in front of this particular person's house, and you know, and this is where I am. And so if I start to imagine, ready here, where anybody else is and what anybody else is doing, like if I start to imagine what any one of you guys are doing, I'm making it up. Now, I could say that I think that my daughter's asleep in her bed because I left her there. That's where she was when I left the house. Um, but I still be imagining it. I wouldn't know it unless I was there, right? So the same thing. I know the dog's in the house, but I could imagine where he's sitting because that's where he usually sits. But I don't know that, right? That's not that's a wondering, it's an imagining, and um the reason why this can be so like so so that's what I mean. So we we're wherever we are, so I can assume that my husband's at his office working, because that would be a reasonable assumption given the uh circumstances. I could even, you know, see at my phone, he's at his office, but you know, I don't really know that, right? Unless I was there. Maybe his phone's just at his office, right? So if we don't really, if we're not sub present to something, then if we're not present to it, then we we are imagining it. So you can now probably imagine how much you're imagining. Um this is like a pretty big one would go on with me with time if I was running a few minutes late to something. Um because I grew up in a home that was crazy about being on timed things or being in unusually early, and in all fairness, I grew up in a community of people who got their sort of the earliest to prove they were the most devoted or dedicated, and it would be you know, you're talking about the community I grew up in Long Island, that would be pretty, pretty uh early. So, okay, fine. Like there was uh maybe a legit reason for it, but then that's inside of me, and then no matter where I'm going or what I'm doing, I'm rushing to try to make sure I'm on time. But the people on the other side, they don't consider if you have a 530 appointment, being five getting there at 532, they don't consider that late. And even if I got in at 535, 538, they wouldn't consider that late. They'd be like, oh, just making sure you're okay, you know, because you're usually here on time, but no, I'm in this anticipatory, imaginative state of worry. Oh, this is interesting. Got to bring in worry when he only because I'm only giggling because I was like really in a state of needing to contemplate worry this week. And so worry is imagining, your worries are imagin imagination, is in your imagination because it's not what you're present to in this moment. I mean, think about if you stop thinking about all the crap you're thinking about, that by the way might be assumptive or on the right track, but isn't true. Nope, not true. And think about then how much you base your behavior on these thoughts, on these imaginings of what you're not present to, and think about how much energy that drives you. So, like just like the being late thing. You could you could be like dealing with that like all day. If you're someone who has to run on appointments, or you get in your car, you go places to the appointments. So all day you're like freaking out because you're imagining there's gonna be someone on the other side who's gonna be angry at you because you're two minutes late, and you get there, and everyone's like, Oh my god, love to see you! Thanks for the coffee, you know, whatever, and you're wrong like every single time, you're wrong every time because you're imagining, right? So there's a big idea, might have mentioned it before on the podcast, that the past becomes the present. Okay, and so these imaginings are often based in circumstances from the past, so it's not like it's not based in anything, you know, the imaginings, they have a foundation all like a based in likely based in past experiences, but whether no matter what, it's just still not accurate wherever it's coming from. So the idea of projection is when you put these imaginings from earlier times and places onto new situations um where you're imagining outcomes. And I became aware quite some time ago that I need to get in charge of my imagination, and in my imagination, there's Punisher, you know, there's all these types of things I should have known, you know, whatever. There's all types of ideas there. Um, all types of, I don't know, it's like we looked up the etymology of imagine, which I won't stop into right now. It's probably interesting where it where it comes from. I'll gonna check into that. Because I think you know, it's interesting how to look at our words because the words we use where they come from, they create our realities. That's why words, you know, are so important. Okay, so now we're living in our our lives, racing around, putting around you know, puttering around in our imagination. Our fears are there, right? Fear um is what we imagine is gonna happen. It's anticipatory. That's the worry piece. But here we are. We're worrying about crap, and uh what's happen what we're worrying about is not even happening, unless we see it. Now, okay, maybe you worry about something with a kid or a friend or a partner because they have a they have a pattern um that concerns you, and they tend to be in that pattern. But this is why context is so important. So if they're in the pattern and you're observing the pattern and you're not imagining something else is happening, you're just looking at the pattern because here's there's this the combo thing that happens where people see things they don't like in a person, and then they go in their imagination and they explain why the person is operating that way, and they imagine why, and you know, if they're considerate storytellers, and they tell, oh, it's because this happened to him in childhood, and that's why he can't do it, and I have to cut him some slack, and that's like in your that's a way to think about it's in your you're imagining that scenario, you don't even know if that happened sometimes, you weren't there, so that might be a psychological phenomenon that we know to be true, and that in most cases that type of behavior comes from that type of um that type of uh phenomenological experience, but we don't know no, we don't know, we're imagining it. So then what we do with that next thing. Oh, there's a bunch of cuties coming up here. I'm new friends in the woods today. These guys aren't usually in the woods, but really too bad. Hi, good morning.

unknown 11:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

So all the uh the uh thing's coming in so much fuller bloom now. Taking a pick. Um so so then so then what happens is so you you're seeing the progression here. So now you're imagining something. Like maybe it's even like a prequel. Like, like I I do this all the time. I mean, really, this is why I should, this is really why. Oh, and here comes the creativity bend on this because this is really why I should write these stories because wow, they're really good. So I just walked by the little oh the the seams keep coming up with the graves, and it's a little grave for a doggy. Okay, here we go. Wait, I don't even know if it's for a doggy. I made it up. I didn't even know I made that up, by the way. Because I made an assumption because one day it was there, and there was like you know, there were some offerings to the dog on the grave, and and here I go. I think it's a dog. I have no idea what animal it was or why they buried it there, but holy moly, did I come up with a story that I actually thought was real until this moment. No, okay, I didn't really say it was real, like wasn't telling anybody, but in my mind it was real, and I imagined it, and then I I realized I do this a lot with people. Assumptions, imaginings, thinking about what they're saying, what they're not saying, thinking about what my kids are doing, not doing. It's it's exhausting. It's exhausting. Especially because it to what end? Because then what's so awesome about this is then you start to behave in ways based not in the context like here I am, here's a tree, uh, there's you know that that that back end of that house has a basketball court. Oh, it's a little muddy here. No, no, no, that's not. I'm then basing what my behavior is gonna be on what I am now going to imagine is gonna happen. This is the this is what self-sulfilling prophecies are. So I'll give a little brief example, Kabit Tabid. When my son was younger, well, he still does this, but oh sorry for outing you on the podcast, buddy, but he's a good example, he's good with the examples on this one. He's a great imagination, really good imagination, my son. Um, so he is young, he gets in a fight with his buddies. I don't know, maybe nine or ten. My babysitter calls me. She has to send the other boys home because she sort of loses control of the play date a little bit. And so they don't really work it out, they just kind of go home. And now he is so afraid to go to lunch the next day because he's like anticipating, imagining how those boys are gonna be to him because of whatever is unresolved. And sorry, I got thought tracked in my head. Um, and then and then he's telling me, he's going on and on, and I'm like, listen, if you go, I go, these boys are probably gonna forget because they're boys and they're young, especially. Men tend to be like more like, let it go, let it go. Post women, I said, you're holding on to this, you're gonna bring it to lunch with you, you're gonna have the weird look on your face, and then you're gonna be the one that ruins lunch because they're gonna respond to you. Here's the lens of the amount I go, but if you go in there and like them, you pretend because that's probably what's gonna happen, that nothing happened, you don't even have to pretend they've moved on. Then you're gonna feel. Oh, this is really good. A really good picture. I'm so excited. It's better than the other one. Really beautiful day. Really cool. Okay. Yay. I hope you know I realize this is a staying on my camera. Um it's weird. I don't know. Sometimes I don't know, because it there's like a I think my screen cover is a little broken, but then it sometimes you could see, you're probably seeing the picture when you look at it, that it's like I don't know, it's a little ghosty. Though it looks like there's a ghost in there. I think it's a reflection of the light. But maybe, maybe it's also a ghost. Okay, so um okay, so now he goes to lunch, and he if he went without my suggestion, he's ruining lunch. He's now in a fight with these boys, and it's not over. It's still going on. Or he heeds my advice, he goes in, god, I just almost left, he goes in and he eats his lunch, does the normal boy thing, whatever they do, and moves on, and it's over. And I cannot believe how much of my life has been spent in these projections. How much of all of our lives. I'm gonna say that with forgiveness for all of us, that this is a human phenomenon. Um, and also we are not taught to uh curate our imagination. I'll say it that way. We are not we are not taught to curate our imagination, we are not taught to manage our minds from the imagination level. Now, this is the thing though. I am not, I am not undermining imagination. Imagination is innovation, imagination has saved people's lives, right? Imagination has changed the face of probably our planet more times than we'll ever know. Shared consciousness. So I don't even know. Now I'm kind of in the mind space, but I don't even know how big I would even consider the imagination to be within the mind, right? Like, so we can we get to have dreams, we can imagine new lives for ourselves, right? It's there's so many beautiful ways we can use our imagination, so many, but if those imaginations are met with other, you know, negative imaginations, you can see how we could just get stuck in our minds, and then we don't end up putting anything into reality, and these are all big words. You could what what is reality, you know. Uh I'm doing I'm I'm bringing I'm saying reality like the material world. I'm walking right now, here's a tree, you know, that type of just if we don't bring those imaginations into reality, and you know how we could do that too? Communication. Yesterday I was talking to someone, and she was in her imagination around something with a sibling, and I suggested that that she go and I don't know, seek out whether that was true. And I have these conversations, that's just one of many conversations I have with people, because that is a way of grounding our imaginations by asking someone a question. Now, let's say you're in circumstances where you're seeing this whole type of familial family shitstorm, whatever, and you're sitting in the middle of it, you see everything, but really you you're imagining one thing about this particular person. Well, I you don't have to get into the whole McGill, you have to talk about the whole thing, you don't have to talk about all the projections, you don't have to talk about, you don't need to prove anything, you don't need to defend anything, you just need to ask. Now, you know the funny part is you may not even get a straight answer. People lie to themselves. We've I've talked about this before, but you know what the lies are, they're imaginings. They're projections. They're not reality. They're not what's real necessarily. People remember things all different ways. There's endless studies on that. So, what you're responsible for is your imagination. But if if you could get a concrete answer about some stuff, or even the other person side of it, all of a sudden, it's the same thing with the boys. You're like, oh, oh, it's me. It's me in this idea. Now, sometimes I'll validate people and I'll be like, you know what? That projection is unresolved. That imagining is an unresolved part of your experience. And that imagining, I'll say it again, is an unemotionally unresolved part of your experience. So it's not that when you project that outward to say that never happened to you, that you're wrong. But if you are not present to a person and you are imagining what they are saying, you are still projecting onto them. It's like a projection machine, your imagination. Because unless you're bearing witness, you're in your imagination. And this is a lot of what happens in intergenerational trauma and intergenerational stressors because parents love projecting. I say love, oh god, I don't even know. It's like auto. Or we're taught to do it, or it's human phenomenon. I don't know, maybe it's all these things. And we project on our children, our childhoods, and then we try to fix our childhoods. But our children aren't having our childhoods. And it's like, this is my opportunity to fix my childhood with my kid. And then your kids like, get off of me, leave me alone. It's 2026. What is the problem? Or they're like, Mom, what what were you thinking? Like, why would you be thinking like that? And I'm like, oh, because I was thinking about me. It's so crazy. Or weird. I don't even know. Crazy, weird. I and this is how we raise our children. Uh, not if we're lucky because we are aware of these crazy types of phenomena in the human experience, but this is also like where blind spots can come in. It's it's such a strange circumstance. And the reason why we have blind spots, well, first of all, just because we're human, we have blind spots we can't see, and I guess our blind spots are sort of dictated by our spiritual DNA that then dictates our experience. But or and it's very powerful. These narratives, they go on from generation to generation, and they don't even apply. But this is what we recreate in this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy space. And the Robert Merton, who wrote, like, who cut he is a sociologist, came up with this concept, or at least is credited with that coming up with the concept. And he gives this example of you start a rumor that so I just I just uh shifted first. I shifted over, so sorry if I just realized like I went from one phenomenon to another. Let's see how it connects. But he so he he showed basically, if you give an example of you say the money, the bank's running out of money, the bank's running out of money, everybody freaks out the bank's running out of money, so they go and everybody takes the money out of the bank, and then the bank really runs out of money. So that's like a more concrete way to look at a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you tie that over to what I was saying about my son, or your imaginings, or all the energy you spend worrying, and what you're worrying about isn't real, it's an imagined experience, or it's an experience you had from the past that you have now generalized to all experiences. So now you're angry at someone who didn't even do what you claimed they were doing, and and um, and so you're living in this imagined story, and then you even could write sometimes people like if I go back to the early show, they're gonna confront the person, and the person's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. That's not how that's not what happened. Or, you know, people, sometimes difficult people, they'll bring up stories of um. I'm not gonna get diverted by what I just saw because we're at the end, or towards the end of it, it's not gonna bring in a new idea, but just saw a little Robin's egg. It's reminding me of a prey predator behavior, and maybe I'll just link that in one sec with the parenting piece and the confronting people, uh, you know, like the the parenting piece of prey predators, it really is like your children become your the prey to you being a predator to their reality, their energy field. It's like it's like you have to work out your thing in their space. And I do think it might be extreme to use a predatorial way to look at it, but I would say it's a type of predatory behavior. Um and so it's good to look at that, it's good to wonder about that anyway. So just last minute loop that in. But if we were to um go back to what I was last saying about not creating a story or a narrative and then living by that narrative and knowing or not knowing it's imagined, and then behaving within the narrative, it just causes lots of problems because the other person may not even know that that's your narrative and may not even be participating in that narrative with you. They have their own narrative, just like our children have their own energies, their own energy fields, their own space. Our friends have their own space. The people we serve have their own space, and it's really not for us to get up all in there with them. It's not our place. So that's uh it for today. I hope you enjoyed. Hope it gives you things to think about that can clarify your imaginings today. Or you dream a nice dream today. Um, it's always happening, so whether we like it or not, we have an imagination. It's just how we decide we're gonna use it. So thanks for walking with me today. And have a good week. Always I enjoy being with you. Thanks for being here. And I will walk with you again next week. Thanks.