It’s strange how easily the mind draws its own lines between cause and effect. We notice two things happening near each other and assume they’re linked. Sometimes they are, but often they’re not. This piece began with something as ordinary as a sneezing fit, but what it revealed was how quickly we build meaning around what interrupts us.

Image caption: A man caught mid-sneeze raises a hand to pause the moment, reflecting the physical interruption described in Inner Work.

When the pattern feels real

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had sudden sneezing fits that can last five or ten minutes. They arrive without warning, and when they do, I can do nothing. I have to stop everything. As a teenager, I began to notice that they often came when I was deeply engrossed in work, completely absorbed in what I was doing. It seemed apparent that the two must be connected. The fits were happening in the middle of intensity, so my mind filled in the gap. It must be stress, I thought. That made sense because whenever they came, I was right in the middle of something.

There’s something reassuring about having a reason, even when it’s not the right one. When we find an explanation that feels tidy, we can stop looking. It gives shape to what would otherwise feel random. And yet, this tidy reasoning was wrong. My sneezing fits weren’t caused by stress, focus, or the pressure of completion, they just happened to appear when I was working, which is almost all the time.

The realization that changed the story

One day, without any drama or buildup, I saw it. I’m always doing something. There is no “before” or “after” to compare it with. Every fit had felt connected to the act of doing, but that was only because doing is my default state. The link I’d built between stress and sneezing was a perfect illusion, formed by repetition and familiarity.

That was the real insight, and it arrived like a clean break in the story. It showed me how my brain had built a narrative to make sense of something unpredictable. The mind doesn’t like randomness, it prefers logic, even when the logic is false. We do this constantly, attaching patterns, assigning meaning, drawing invisible lines to make discomfort feel coherent.

When I finally learned that my grandmother on my father’s side had the same thing, everything shifted again. She died before I was born, yet here was a small thread of inheritance that linked us. It wasn’t stress. It wasn’t psychology. It was simply a quirk of biology that had passed from one generation to another.

Freeing ourselves from false meaning and association lets us see more clearly.

How easily the mind assigns meaning

The lesson was quiet but lasting. The mind’s first instinct is to explain, not to observe. It wants to turn every interruption into a signal. A headache means you’re overthinking. A delay means you’re being tested. A coincidence means something larger is at work. But often, things just happen, and our explanations only make them heavier than they are.

What’s fascinating is that the story we invent isn’t random. It’s built from what we value most, what preoccupies us. For me, that was work. Focus, output, productivity, all things I’ve carried with me for decades. So of course my mind would link a physical interruption to the very thing I give most of my energy to. It wasn’t a failure of logic, it was the mind trying to make sense of the familiar world it knows.

When I saw through that, the sneezing itself didn’t change, but my relationship to it did. I stopped wondering what I had done to trigger it. I stopped treating it like a message to decode. It was simply part of how I am. The meaning I’d assigned had never belonged to it.

The value of Inner Work

Inner Work isn’t about fixing or reframing. It’s about seeing more accurately. It’s not a process of turning bad thoughts into good ones or rewriting how we feel. It’s the act of noticing where our assumptions live and asking if they’re true. That kind of clarity doesn’t come from effort, it comes from honesty.

When we look closely, we find that the patterns we believe in often dissolve. The same event can appear meaningful until it’s seen from another angle. We recognize that our explanations are usually placeholders, designed to keep uncertainty at bay. The sneezing story is a small example, but it shows how deeply this runs through our thinking.

Every belief, every explanation we carry, has a moment when it was formed. Sometimes it was an observation that made sense in the moment. Sometimes it was a guess that became a truth through repetition. Inner Work invites us to revisit those moments, not to undo them, but to see what they were trying to protect us from.

Seeing without attaching

There’s a quiet relief in letting things be what they are. When we free ourselves from false meaning and unnecessary associations, we begin to see life with less distortion. The mind doesn’t need to build a story for everything that happens. Some things don’t carry a message, a lesson, or a symbol. They simply exist.

Recognizing that doesn’t make life colder, it makes it truer. The space that opens when we stop assigning meaning is the same space that allows us to see connections that actually do matter. Real patterns stand out more clearly when they’re not surrounded by imagined ones.

Inner Work, at its heart, is about cultivating that clarity. It’s not about achieving peace or balance or any emotional state we can name. It’s about learning to see what’s in front of us without filling in what isn’t there.

Written by Dave Mac Cathain, The Creative Guide

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