Part 5 of the 20-part Between Mind and Body series

My mom used to say, “Messy room, messy mind.” It took me awhile, but what I eventually started to understand was that she was not really telling me to clean my room as much as she was pointing to something deeper. She was guiding me to become more aware of what might be going on inside me.

In Buddhism, you hear something along the same lines:

If the mind is unsettled, the world receives unsettledness.

If the mind is clear, the world receives clarity.

What is happening inside us has a way of showing up outside us.

Sometimes that shows up in our home or our car.

Sometimes it shows up in our body language, our tone, or the way we respond to people.

Projection connects to this. What we are feeling or carrying inside does not always stay contained. It can spill outward. It can affect other people. And sometimes, in trying to relieve what we are carrying, we do more than just pass along a mood. We place what is unresolved in us onto someone else.

Instead of simply influencing how we show up, it begins shaping what we believe we are seeing in others.

That is where projection becomes hard to catch.

It is one thing to be in a bad mood and bring that mood into a room. It is another thing to start seeing other people through it. Someone may be quiet, and we take them as cold. Someone may be distracted, and we read it as disrespect. Someone may just be having their own kind of day, and yet we begin to experience them through whatever is already stirred up in us.

Projection usually does not feel like projection when it is happening. It feels like truth. It feels like the other person is the problem. It feels like they are the one bringing the tension, the attitude, or the negativity.

Sometimes that may even be true.

But other times, what we are reacting to in them has already been colored by something active in us first.

I think that is part of what makes projection so human. It does not always come from arrogance or blame. Sometimes it comes from pressure. Fatigue. Frustration. Old hurt. Fear. Things that have been sitting in us without being fully noticed.

What we carry inside often becomes part of the atmosphere we create around us.

And once that happens, it can be hard to tell what belongs to the other person and what began in us.

Sometimes what we think we are saying to others is really just an extension of what is happening inside ourselves.

That is why awareness matters.

Not so we become perfect.

Not so we stop being human.

But so we begin to notice when something in us is looking for somewhere to land.

Sometimes what is unresolved in us shows up in our room.

Sometimes in our tone.

Sometimes in the story we begin telling ourselves about someone else.

And that may be where projection begins.