by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
How You Got Trapped in The Mind Prison and Lost Touch With Your REAL Life
There’s an irony at the heart of our human condition:
Our instinct to stay safe and to avoid pain and conflict is one of the most natural and legitimate instincts we have but when it becomes over-activated, rigidified, and even weaponised against the self, it can lock us into a self-made prison that drains all of the life out of our lives.
This is because in this prison we can start to forget ourselves and lose contact with real life as our world shrinks around us until all that remains is a shadow of what could be.
This is the story of the Mind Prison but the ‘good’ news is that we also carry the key to get out again.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Mind Prison: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- How You Got Trapped in The Mind Prison and Lost Touch With Your REAL Life
- The Natural Need for Safety and How it All Goes ‘Wrong’
- The Ego’s Mind Prison: ‘Lived’ in the Mind, Lost in the Body
- The Fear Behind the Fear: What We Really Avoid
- The Mind Prison’s Operations: How it Plays Out in Life
- The Key in Your Hand: Trust and Flow
- Getting Out of the Mind Prison: Steps for Reclaiming Realness
- The Shift from Illusion to REAL Evidence
- The Mind Prison: The Final Word
The Natural Need for Safety and How it All Goes ‘Wrong’
From the moment we arrived here on Planet Earth, our nervous systems have been hard-wired to scan for threats:
This means that we’ve evolved to seek safety, to avoid pain, and to steer clear of conflict that could injure us or destabilise our world. This isn’t a pathology or a sign that there’s something ‘wrong’ with us – it’s a design feature of life itself and it helps us to stick around and actually live our lives (without, you know, dying).
Paradoxically, though, when this ‘safety’ instinct is given too much power, we end up over-protecting our lives and so we build layers of control, erect walls of certainty, and vow to ourselves that “I’ll never feel like that again” in the face of threats and chaos.
Unfortunately, when we hide too much from these threats and chaos (which are both inescapable parts of REAL life), we can end up stepping into a static identity and so become someone whose primary job is to avoid pain rather than to actually live life.
Here’s what often happens on the journey to the Mind Prison:
Some time in the past we experienced something that felt utterly unsafe like a betrayal, an emotional collapse, or a moment when froze up and so ended up believing that we couldn’t handle life.
For whatever reason, this moment became so potent and overwhelming that we let it define us and so we decided (often unconsciously) to become the person who doesn’t get hurt again:
We wrapped ourselves in armour and became risk-averse, tightly controlled, and always on the watch for some new threat to knock back and overcome. That identity – a version of ego that we became attached to – was born and started to define ourselves, our lives, and how we interact and relate with both.
At the time, this all mad sense and was a strategy that kind of worked.
Well, for a time, at least:
It achieved safety (to the extent it could) and stopped us feeling uncomfortable feelings that we confused for actual physical danger (‘threats’) but, eventually, we started to notice something:
The armour felt heavier and heavier over time, the world started to feel more distant, and the blood running through our veins felt diluted and detached from life.
We started to see that we were living life as though behind glass – observing instead of inhabiting as the the wall of control we’d built for ourselves had turned into a prison.
The Ego’s Mind Prison: ‘Lived’ in the Mind, Lost in the Body
When we build our identity around risk avoidance and control, we detach from our body and our real presence and start to live in the mind (because it’s ‘safer’ there, after all, and appears to give us more control over our lives):
The mind is where we plan, anticipate, worry, defend, rehearse things but the mind is not reality; the mind is just the map, not the territory.
When we’re attempting to ‘live’ from behind the Mind Prison, we hold ourselves back from real action (which is the only thing that can really improve our lives in a consistent and sustainable way):
We show up in relationships not as ourselves in our own realness but as a performance and believe that if we can just control enough of life – our habits, our environment, and our narratives – then we’ll be safe.
What usually happens, though, is that the opposite begins to happen:
We become disconnected from our feelings, from our bodies, from the rawness and richness of being alive.
This is because trying to control life and stay ‘safe’ all the time just has the effect of becoming that prison we keep talking about:
The walls appear invisible and that’s because they’re not made of literal bricks but of unreal fears, habits, and beliefs. This Mind Prison keeps surprise at bay, keeps chaos out, keeps discomfort muffled, sure – but, over time, the cost becomes too high as life begins passing by like water through fingers and we start to wonder why we never feel real anymore.
We forget the thrill of being surprised; we forget the aliveness of vulnerability; we forget that we were born to live fully – not just to avoid getting hurt and so the identity that once protected us now imprisons us.
The Fear Behind the Fear: What We Really Avoid
When we say we’re “keeping ourselves safe”, what are we really doing?
Beneath the surface – though we might not yet admit it – is a fear of life itself and how it operates in a real and inescapable way.
This fear isn’t just a fear of any potential pain but of being confronted with something so raw that we believe we can’t handle it because it’s going to ask us to (finally) face the shame, guilt, and/or trauma – the Unholy Trinity – that drives us from beneath the surface of our lives.
We also fear that once we stop identifying with the ego/identity that’s led to the Mind Prison that we’ll have to start facing the unacknowledged parts of ourselves that we’ve exiled in the Shadow Territory – all of the goals, values, and qualities that go against the nice, ‘safe’ way that we’d like to see ourselves as embodying (so we don’t have to see life as it really is).
In short, we fear that life will present something to us like a challenge, a loss, or a confrontation with our hidden self and so we arm ourselves, hide from life, and attempt to remain immune to it all.
This is the origin of the control freakery that keeps us in the Mind Prison:
We think if we can just suppress what might hurt, then we can stay “safe” but what we’re really doing is suppressing what makes us human and cutting ourselves off from what we really want: REAL LIFE.
When we step into the Mind Prison of resistance and avoidance, we allow our identity to be determined by what we fear, rather than by what we love. and we just end up keeping our real life at bay – even from ourselves.
The Mind Prison’s Operations: How it Plays Out in Life
This Mind Prison and its illusions of safety and control shows up in all sorts of subtle ways:
- Our actions: Rather than doing what we deeply want, we hesitate and hold back. We don’t invest in the vision because we’re not sure we’ll ‘succeed‘ and so we don’t lean into the discomfort of growth. Instead we prioritise what feels safe, what is predictable, what we can manage and then just find ourselves ‘stuck’ without direction.
- Our relationships: We keep walls up because don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Instead of just being present, we perform and show up in the world as a version of ourselves we believe is acceptable instead of what’s actually real. In doing so we lose connection to ourselves, to others, and to life itself.
- Our approach to reality: We try to keep life at a distance and to sanitise it and shape it to our will because we want smoothness and a false sense of order. We avoid the jagged edges of real life despite the fact that reality will always interrupt, always surprise, always demand something of us. The ego is the opposite of reality and it makes us believe “If I can manage the world, I can stay safe” which contradicts what reality says: “You’ll never be safe but you can be alive”.
The funny thing is that the more control we attempt to force upon life, the more life diluted it starts to feel and so the more we avoid risk, the more we feel stuck.
To make matters worse, the more we prioritise safety over aliveness, the more we drift toward the VOID:
This always leads to a sense of disconnection, restlessness, frustration and a sense that something is missing (which it is: your connection to your own realness).
We end up building a life around ‘almost’, ‘one day’, or ‘not yet’ but that’s just real life passing us by and we look through the cage bars of the Mind Prison.
The Key in Your Hand: Trust and Flow
Here’s the truth and the ‘good’ news:
We already hold the key to our own freedom and back out of the Mind Prison but we’ve simply forgotten about it because we stepped into the cage so long ago.
Long story short, the key is TRUST:
- Trust in yourself: Knowing you can handle whatever life presents.
Even though you can’t predict what comes – and can’t control it when it does – you still have within you the the capacity to respond, adapt, and keep growing real. This requires letting go of the belief that you must plan for every outcome and that you must keep armouring up instead of going out into ‘battle’. - Trust in life: Knowing that if you step forward, the next step will eventually reveal itself.
This means embracing that you live in an interdependent system, that life isn’t solely your responsibility, but that you’re a participant in the flow. This is the essence of your REALNESS : the overlapping of subjective experience with objective results.
This is because results always speak for themselves and so, when we trust life, we step into reality, not merely into our mental constructs (which are what keep us in the Mind Prison in the first place).
In other words: the Mind Prison dissolves not by designing a newer, better cage but by unlocking the door, stepping out, and rediscovering what realness feels and flow feel like.
Getting Out of the Mind Prison: Steps for Reclaiming Realness
So how do we move from the Mind Prison of illusory safety to the freedom of real life?
Here are some practical steps that take you through the Awareness → Acceptance → Action pathway I use with my coaching clients to help them make permanent changes in their lives (all transformational journeys take you through these three stages).
1. Awareness (Deconstruct Ego/Identity)
- Notice where you are: What behaviours, habits, or identities are you carrying that stem from “I must stay safe” rather than “I want to live”?
- Name the fear and write down what you are avoiding by hiding behind the Mind Prison’s bars: Is it shame? Guilt? Trauma? The belief “I can’t handle life”? Etc. Etc. Etc.
- Map the cage doors: What systems of control are in place? What do you avoid? When do you hold back?
2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow Self)
- Accept what is and start to regulate your nervous system and cultivate presence: Past events that convinced you “I cannot handle life” might still have a hold over you but you can accept that it happened, that you reacted as you did, and that you created protective measures.
- Accept the Shadow Self: The real ‘parts’ you’ve hidden like the vulnerable self, the wounded self, or any of the parts deemed “unacceptable” because they all contain energy, authenticity, and power. Bring them into light and start using that light in your life to break free of the Mind Prison.
- Accept and enter the flow: Recognise that life will always involve uncertainty and risk and so feeling safe all the time is an illusion. Real safety comes from being regulated, present, and connected – not from control systems designed to keep you from your own emotional ‘stuff’.
3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)
- Create a real vision: What might your life look like if you were a bit braver and leaned into your realness? If you embodied your real values instead of your safe identity? Write it out. Let it be bold and messy even (real life comes with chaos and learning to embrace it beyond the false order of ego).
- Break it down into goals: Find one or two tangible goals tied to that vision – e.g. “I will start a weekly yoga practice”, “I will take one creative risk each month”, or “I will deepen one relationship by showing up in a real way”.
- Build daily habits: These are small actions that remind you who you are, not who you think you ‘should’ be. It might be a morning check-in with your body, a breathwork session, a short journalling habit, a yin session to regulate the nervous system, or even a power yoga session to feel strength in vulnerability. It can literally be anything (I just like yoga – hence the examples I gave).
- Become friends with risk instead of avoiding it: Identify a calculated risk that aligns with your vision – ideally something meaningful, something that stretches you beyond your comfort zone. Step into it, see what happens, monitor the outcome, and then learn and adjust.
- Practice trust: Each time you act, you accumulate evidence of what you’re really capable of. This serves as evidence that you can handle what comes and evidence that life can fill the blanks. Use these as data points to dissolve the stories that kept you locked in the Mind Prison and to free yourself once and for all.
Read Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to go much deeper into your own realness and building a solid foundation of flow in your life.
The Shift from Illusion to REAL Evidence
As you begin taking real action, something beautiful occurs:
The stories you told yourself – like “I must stay safe”, “I can’t take risks”, or “I must control” – begin to lose their power because reality starts to push back with something stronger – EVIDENCE:
The evidence that you show up and something happens; the evidence that you take a step and life meets you halfway; the evidence that your vision isn’t just a fantasy but a lived experience of realness.
Ultimately, you’ll see that the Mind Prison was never a real prison – it was just a concept or a story in your mind.
In other words, what you feared was never life but your story about life.
What you’ve been starving for wasn’t more safety – it was your own aliveness and the presence, flow, and trust that comes with it.
The Mind Prison: The Final Word
The Mind Prison isn’t some external cage built by other people but an inner fortress that was built with good intentions but layered with self-protection and held together by fear.
The ‘good’ news is that the key has always been in your hand and so when you step out and trust yourself and life then you reclaim what you were always meant to be:
A living, breathing, feeling human being instead of a risk-averse statue to your own unreal life.
Start today by seeing the Mind Prison for what it is, turning the key, and walking out there and allowing life to meet you where you already are:
In reality.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start leaving the Mind Prison then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to find that key and start turning it through real action.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
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