[To listen to an audio version of this blog post, please click here: https://soundcloud.com/lex-mckee/playing-tag

I’m told it is Mental Health Awareness Week. I smile at this because for me every week is Mental Health Awareness Week. Perhaps they’ll begin selling Greetings Cards.

Putting my cynical self to one side for a moment, anything that raises awareness of the most enduring plague ever to afflict humanity is welcome. Most welcome. Maybe there's some relief to be had.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to hear a presentation from Kay Harrington – a Rapid Transformational Therapist. She mentioned the metaphor of tagging, where our younger selves have uncritically accepted the tags people have placed on our personality and performance and potential over the formative years – 0-7 years of age.

I have a vision of a child in a formerly beautiful duffle coat, now covered with tags that say things far worse than, “Please look after this bear.”

They say foolish and inaccurate things like, “Lazy,” and “Ugly,” and “Stupid.” I know, this doesn’t sound like a positive blog but it really will become one! Stay with me!

You and I, without our knowing consent, have accepted a whole plethora of tags in our most suggestible years. Many of these tags were ‘gifted’ to us like ‘gift tags’ from the best of intentions. Nevertheless, they were inaccurate and unhelpful. After all, the only people who can really know and define ourselves are… well, ourselves.

The well-meaning authority-figure who innocently suggested we’d make a great nurse, or fireman, or counsellor, or accountant, or teacher, or bricklayer, or surgeon… knew very little of what we’d really be great at.

Thus today, as we enter Mental Health Awareness Week, I offer you a pair of spiritual scissors. With these scissors, I offer a suggestion: “Feel free to snip the strings holding any tags to your beautiful and delightful duffle coat!

Am I lazy? (“Snip!”) – no, I’m one of the hardest working creatives I know.

Am I ugly? (“Snip!”) – no, I have a beautifully repaired soul, brought back to wholeness through the golden threads of kindness and unconditional love knitting me back together (‘Kindness’ being the theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week.)

Am I stupid? (“Snip!”)  Are you serious? I think about everything! If the unexamined life is not worth living, my life is most definitely worth living! I could be the most considered soul in history!!!

Take the scissors to the strings that still hold your own limiting tags and labels in place.

Sever them.

Snip!

And share with us the limiting programmes and beliefs you are becoming free from.

My favourite ridiculous belief is wasting my life waiting for ‘the One’ – that soulmate who completes me – heals my loneliness. What a crock of sh…

Instead, I’m now enjoying those friends who kind of partially get me! No one could ever understand this level of complexity!

Snip and be free my friends!

Lex

A Moodscope member.