Sometimes, true learning is to unlearn

There is a well ingrained belief in our society that to learn means to add new information/knowledge. It is said that only people who "add information" to their current level of understanding the world are evolving and are in the process of becoming the best version of themselves.

But what school and society do not tell us is that adding new information to what we already know is not authentic learning first of all, but it is also not the only way to learn. Authentic learning is when you not only find out new information, but you are able to digest it through your own internal mechanism of thought and critical thinking, by questioning it and by understanding all its perspectives. What society does not tell you also is that a lot of the times the healthiest form of learning is by ... unlearning. What does that mean? For instance if you have a toxic habit that you have learned as a working coping mechanism for avoiding to feel your feelings, in order to truly get rid of it is to learn about yourself and your wounds that are a match to this behaviour. The way to unlearn a toxic behaviour is to learn about yourself. Unlearning conditioning that you have been programmed to think about yourself is actual learning.

Unlearning the way you have been reacting to a trigger is real learning.

Unlearning your self-defeating mind chatter is actually learning how to reach your true self.

Unlearning the story you were told about yourself when you were a child (that you were too sensitive, too needy, too lazy, too this or that)is the way to learn how to unapologetically be your authentic being.

Unlearning shame around expressing oneself as oneself feels is resonating is true learning etc.

So true learning is not just adding information, it is also substracting toxic, untrue and unhealthy information by filtering it through awareness. And when you make all the unconscious beliefs come to the light of consiouness, you disidentify with them and hence you slowly unlearn them.

We have to understand that in order to reach our authenticity and our being (that have never been lost, they're just well hidden under a pile of heavy rubbish we call socialization) we have to uncover layer by layer the programming and social conditioning and all the social rules that were ingrained in our DNA about who we are and how we should be to be accepted.

Unlearning the falsehood of our egos and healing the wounds start with the right questions.