On Dreamshaping: Groove Is In the Mind

Mark McNease

On Dreamshaping is a weekly blog about shaping the dreams we live.

Remember that song by Deee-Lite, Groove Is In the Heart? It popped into my head when I was thinking about this blog post. The difference is that the song is very upbeat and infectious, but what I’m writing about is the opposite – or it’s infectious in a bad way.

I’m talking about the grooves we create, deepen, and tread in our minds. The mental repetitions that make up much of our daily thinking. So much that it’s hard to really call it thinking. When I’m walking around half-conscious, repeating the same threads of conversation to myself, the same angers, frustrations, and stuckness, can it be said that I’m thinking at all? This is a trap, a series of grooves, that my mind sinks into with alarming frequency.

I hate this job. I’m fat. I’m not accomplishing anything. I’m frustrated. I see no way out. These are just a few of the phrases and judgements that make up the grooves I go round and round in, multiple times a day. I start and stop, start and stop, convinced that one or the other will show me the way to freedom – freedom in this case being nothing more complicated than silence! I can’t shut off my own mind. I can’t step out of these grooves, to the point that by the end of a day, I am often deep into them, looking up at the rim of my grooves longing to climb out.

The best way to avoid those pits, those grooves, is to not descend into them in the first place. But it’s difficult. It can be the first thought in my waking mind: I have to go to work. I hate to go to work. I’ll be so old when I finally don’t have to go to work. I don’t think quitting a job (as an example) is the way to get out of the groove of hating it. The way out is to stop judging it. Time passes. I will get older, and older, and older, until I stop aging altogether and they slide me into a cremator. But it is possible to go to work and essentially not think anything of it. Do the job. Speak to my co-workers. Let it be exactly what it is, rather then something I hate or love.

This can be used with almost everything else in life, with all our grooves. I am not a failure if I don’t write another murder mystery! I’m not surrendering my creative life if I don’t keep doing one of my podcasts, or any of them! The grooves are often connected to my identity, and just as confining. To be groove-free, groove-less, is to breathe in the air around me, hold my head to the sky, and hear nothing but what nature is offering me. Groove is in the mind, and the mind is a garden entirely cultivated by us. What will we plant there? What will we nurture? And what will blossom there? It’s up to us.

Dreamshaping … on shaping reality and living our dreams.