The Mind is a Gun
On survival, freedom, and the intelligence that lives beneath thought
In a year of intentional work with plant medicine, there was one cold hard truth psilocybin wanted me to know:
The mind is a gun.
The human mind is sharp and vigilant, built for survival, always scanning the horizon for information or danger. It kept our ancestors alive, and it keeps us functional now. But the same mechanism that once kept our species safe is quietly shaping, and fixing, how our entire reality appears. A mind that is built for survival edits the present through the filter of the past, firing before we realise we’ve pulled the trigger.
And when the survival mind is in charge, even our longing for change gets authored through its logic. This is why so many people have the repeating experience of not being able to reach the goals they set (i.e. feeling stuck), or why others feel too frightened to hope for change at all. It’s nothing to do with lack of discipline or motivation. It’s because the place their goals are being generated from is already limited.
To understand this, we need to look directly at this thing called a goal.
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So what exactly is a goal? It’s a concept held in the mind — an image of who we think we should be, or what we believe we need to do. And if a goal can be pictured, it can only arise from the box of what we already know. The mind is reaching backwards, deep into its archive of lived and mostly unconscious experience, and placing this blueprint full of unmet needs upon the here and now.
It’s a paradox: we are hoping for something new, but the form is being generated from the past. And when we create anything from the past, all we can ever produce is a more polished version of where we have already been. A refinement of sorts, but really it’s a loop and a repeat. No true expansion, or stretch into the uncomfortable unknown.
This is why “goals” so often fail. They aren’t wrong; they’re simply authored by the narrator we’re trying to outgrow. The mind-as-gun is concerned with trying not to die rather than living. It protects the status quo, and it tends to enact precisely the past pain and hurt we were once wounded by.
“Enactments are the way dissociated self-states speak.” — Philip Bromberg
The past is not behind us; it is fully alive within us until it can be metabolised. And while the survival mind continues to lead, it can only aim within a narrow radius of what it already recognises. Everything else — the vast, formless, creative field of the unknown, and the possibility of breaking, mourning, and metabolising transgenerational cycles of trauma — lies outside its jurisdiction.
In my process as a Psychotherapist, BodyMind Maturation guide, and Chi Kung teacher, I am actively working to shift the entire axis of attention. Instead of focusing on the goal or the target for our blame (the presenting issue, the symptom, the problem) we look to the place the goal or target is being generated from. The underlying, habitual, stuck way of being; the complexes, frozen moments, ruptures, and unprocessed emotions that continue to drive and shape how reality appears.
Because if the past is generating the present, the present can only become more of the past; real change happens nowhere except at the root. If we want to release the past in a lasting way, we must outgrow it, and in order to outgrow anything, we first need to be able to see and feel it.
One of the ways our unconscious reveals its hidden truths is through dreams. Dreams surface raw emotional material the waking mind cannot yet articulate: anxiety, rage, fear, shame, longing, vulnerability. Shadow parts we’ve learned to turn away from. Even a fragment, like a mood, an animal, a colour, or a single phrase, is enough to begin. These details are arrows pointing toward some essential, rejected piece of you, beneath the rational mind, rising and ready for integration.
When we turn towards the dreamfield, and suspend our doubt, dreams show us truths the mind is not yet ready to say but our psyche is longing to clear. True Dreamwork isn’t interpretation, it is contact. A felt encounter with the intelligence inside us that is older than thought. If you want a way into this work (to unlock the messages your dreams are trying to bring you) begin my free 10-day email series here: Dreams Decoded.
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The unconscious is also threaded through the soma — the full body experience of being alive. Difficult things get locked in the body, beneath words, beneath knowing. Psychoanalysis calls these knots complexes. Maturation calls them frozen moments in time — experiences too overwhelming to process when they first happened, now solidified into core beliefs, encapsulated in the layers of our physical form, and defining our identity:
I don’t belong. I’m wrong. I’m not safe. I don’t matter. I’m not here.
These beliefs generate survival strategies that organise our whole way of being: like keeping one foot in and one foot out of relationship, refusing visibility, anticipating attack, avoiding disappointment pre-emptively.
Through ontological inquiry — which is a deep listening into the architecture of our way of being — we can track these patterns back to the origin. I witness it over and over again with my clients: when brought into full and embodied consciousness, the grip of the past loosens; traumatic moments unfreeze and begin to move through us. The old blueprint of who we thought we were, and needed to be, stops living our life.
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There is another door to the unconscious: intentional movement.
“Physical experiences—breathing, moving, and connecting to the body—are fundamental to restoring a sense of safety and aliveness.” — Bessel van der Kolk
At the core of my practice, I work with Elemental Chi Kung. Drawn from Daoist philosophy, it was designed not for perfection or performance, but the release of tension and blocks: the restoration of FLOW. The defining quality of flow is the dissolving of edges, and there is particular way in which Chi Kung, practised with intention, offers an encounter with the formlessness of the Cosmos through the gift of our human form.
When flow returns, something reorganises. We can’t get there through willpower or more effort, only by creating space for the body’s natural tendency towards homeostasis: remembering how to move, how to breathe, how to trust its own rhythm. Chi Kung reopens the system, and returns us to the present moment, which is the only place where something new can happen. Survival, like a gun, is braced against life. Flow is the freedom of life beyond separation.
I’m teaching a lunchtime Chi Kung class next week — Tuesday 16th December, 12:00–1:15pm. You’re so welcome to join me, and if this is your first class, email me directly for a free link to book.
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Much of what we call self-improvement is actually the survival mind trying to manage itself — striving for control and optimisation, as if a human being were a problem to be solved. It’s exhausting and it doesn’t work. Growth is not an addition but a subtraction, a removal of the interference that blocks the intelligence already alive within us and ready to thrive.
“Each person enters the world with a specific call, a destiny, as the old Greeks said, a daimon. Our task is not to manufacture a life but to listen to what wants to unfold.” — James Hillman
When we bring awareness to the past that is generating our present…
When we learn the strange language of our dreams…
When we create the stillness required for the body to speak its truth…
Something shifts. The space opens. And from this place — this wider field, this bigger flow — many people realise something unexpected: the goals they were striving towards no longer fit. They were too small, too narrow, too shaped by the survival mind’s fear of the unknown. And from that emptying out, we get the chance to outgrow what no longer serves us and generate a future co-created by the deep wisdom within and without.
The mind is a gun. But you are not your gun. And life is not meant to be lived through the tight grip of its fear. There is another intelligence within you — preverbal, somatic, relational, dream-born, ancient. When we learn to listen to that realm, the whole field changes. Not because we finally hit our goals, but because we stopped shaping our lives around a weapon designed to keep us shackled, and began living from the vastness of what is actually here.