Becoming Conscious to Habitual Reality Creation

There are two main ideas that go into this post

1. Fear is a powerful motivator of action and tends to create the patterning of habitual reactions that can play a large role in the creation of our individual realities – especially if they go unnoticed
2. There are as many versions of Truth as there are ways of looking at things: Truth is fluid. Becoming conscious as to which Truth you actually want to nurture in your heart is a key to living happily and on purpose
   

The best way for me to explain this is to give an example from my own life, which just took place! Life is an amazing teacher, especially if you choose to be aware of the opportunities it gives you to become more and more on purpose, joyful, and free of ‘old stuff’. When you choose to be aware of those, you begin to notice that knot of anxiety when it happens, and then wonder why it happened. It’s a truth, it is happening, you do feel anxiety… but the big question is: Do you have to?

Something says you do, that there’s a real danger here. Autonomic patterns created by the mind and body the last time you had this kind of experience will lead you down a path to create a safer situation. Again, it’s a truth. As true as you allow it to remain. Allowed to run the show, the autonomic mind and body reactions will affirm the truth of the fear, and you’ll begin take unconscious action accordingly. In doing so, you actually begin to create the situation you believe is True. You do so by nurturing it in your heart with your own energy, focus and choices. But who is in the driver’s seat? Do you want to live the truth that fear dictates is ‘real’?

Here’s what happened to teach me these things I’ll even give a little backstory afterward for context. Oh, and by the way, I’m a firm believer that life will reflect back to you the truths you hold in your heart. Life itself will give you a roadmap out of old truths and patterns that no longer work and restrict your freedom – truths you hold close that unintentionally keep you creating things you don’t want to create.

The Now Story: My husband and I play in an online game. We each play to our own strengths and the things we enjoy. There’s a mild sense of competition between us, but it’s more of a relaxed playful reason to push ourselves than anything else. We play separately sometimes, and other times we work together as a team toward a common goal. We have a lot of fun together, and it’s taught us a great deal about communication, working to compensate each other in the weaker areas and hold up each other’s strengths and draw on them. When all is in balance, we each feel useful and powerful in our own way as an individual, and powerful as a team.

No system is static, and there’s never a perfect forever maintained balance. As each of us grows and learns and gains in skill, the balance tips, back and forth, back and forth, one of us being more powerful than the other for a bit, and then shifting the other way. The balance is pretty easy to maintain, all things considered, and stays for the most part in a comfortable middle ground where we’re both happy and feeling powerful and accomplished. Every once in a while, though…

Last night I learned some things in the online game that pushed me ahead in the power arena. It was a big accomplishment and I was excited about it because previously I’d been lagging behind and not doing so well and feeling unhappy about it. It’s not as much fun to play when you lose all the time, and I had ventured into new and uncharted territory in the game and hadn’t found my stride yet. Well, last night I found it, and in a Big way. My husband knew I had planned to work on it, and this morning he asked me how it was going.

I began sharing about how great it was, how powerful it felt to play so well. As I shared my accomplishments in some areas that actually outstripped my husband’s most recent victories, I began to feel a great deal of anxiety, and an odd sense of stubbornness. A push pull feeling. It was uncomfortable and I left the situation feeling a bit roughed up, without my husband having had any idea of my inner turmoil.

I was sure that he was jealous and that I had gone too far in my sharing of how good it felt and of how powerful I had become. I decided to downplay things in the future to compensate and make him feel better, to be sure to point out his achievements, and to stop enjoying experiencing ways of excelling, so that he could excel for a while without any competition. The idea made me feel sad, but it felt like it was the only choice. I had a roiling kind of anxiousness in my stomach as I began to chide myself for being so prideful.

And then I woke up to the pattern. My feelings had hit a red-line, a place I don’t tend to go – so far down that I chide myself into submission for my own good. And I began to explore how I felt, and why I might feel that way. I replayed the conversation in my head and realized that there wasn’t really anything in it that would lead one to believe that my husband was jealous, unless they were really looking for it and read a lot into the conversation.

I went and asked my husband, and as I had thought, there wasn’t any jealousy there. There was a tad of the ‘now I have an impetus to excel, too’ sort of a feeling, but nothing of the huge jealous competition sense that I had believed I was triggering. If I had gone forward with my unconscious changing of my behavior to suit a truth that existed only for me because of my fear…I would have been resentful, and eventually created the reality that I feared existed through a chain of events.

My compensating change in behavior and the resentment created in me by it would have led to my experiencing the repercussion I was afraid of and had unconsciously patterned to avoid. Here’s the backstory that created the pattern in the first place.

The Then Story: When I was a little kid, my mom told me that my main job was to keep my dad happy. My dad was a childish man, and very competitive. He viewed me as an equal when it came to competing for my mother’s attention – it was, in a lot of ways, more like living with a jealous brother than a father. At the time, though, I didn’t know the difference. Best I knew, this is how reality worked. I laid low, downplayed any accomplishments, and heaven forbid if he got the impression I felt powerful because it would lead to a swift and painful backlash from him that usually far outweighed any threat I may have posed. Undermining that power became important to him, and he did so by showing me how powerless I was, in various childish ways.

When I had been labeled as ‘not living up to my potential’ and ‘holding back’ in school, my mom had been more angry than I had ever seen her. I was to excel. I was to be powerful. She refused to accept any less. And I was to do so and keep my father happy. Her love and a desire to not disappoint her fostered in me a great sense of joy whenever I excelled, one that went in direct contradiction to what I needed to do to keep my father happy. So I learned to feel that joy in private, and to hide any sense of power.

I learned to be selectively powerful, and never, if at all possible, around my dad. A vast network of patterned behavior developed, and as early childhood patterns often do, it extended itself to include anyone with power in my life.

As you can imagine, a lot of the unconscious patterning that I have been releasing for a while now was created by the above environment – and this most recent one is no exception. Small, safe, powerful triggerings of those patterns by my life have, over time, allowed me to dismantle them, one by one. The biggest key I’ve found to letting the things go is becoming and then remaining conscious of each one as they’re discovered.

Without fail for me, each time I become conscious to a pattern, it comes up again a few days or weeks later. It’s triggered, again, this time with a dual perception going on for me. The part of me that would have always reacted in a certain way in the past is there, and there’s another part of me which is going, “Wait a second! I’m awake to this now…I see what’s going on…!”

Sometimes the patterning is so powerful I don’t even notice and I just run down the reaction route again a few times for good measure. It always comes up again, though, so I’ve learned not to be too hard on myself when I realize what’s happened. I just examine the situation to see what was so seductive about it that I couldn’t break free of the old pattern, and decide on new beliefs I would rather have – new truths I would rather hold.

And eventually, I come to wonder what the big deal was. Just a boogeyman in the closet that had such power! But it was just an illusion… Just a paper dragon. Just the fear of an old situation that’s no longer present, throwing its weight around in the Now as if it were real. Becoming aware of the illusion and consciously choosing to act differently reveals it to be nothing more than a shadow, with no more power than what I gave it by holding it true in my own heart.

It is powerful to wake up to the understanding that you’re the one holding the keys, and that you’re the one in the driver’s seat who makes the final call as to where you’re going. The GPS system of your mind does its best to keep you safe and get you were it believes you want to go. In the end – you’re the one driving.

The Power of Inclusionary Choosing

Yes, I want that vs. No, I don’t want that – both make a choice, both are expressions of inner thought. Ponder it for a moment… How does it feel when you say to yourself, “Yes. I want that. That is what I want.” And then try on for size the feel of saying to yourself, “No. I do not want that.”

Vanilla or chocolate? Do you tend to point at the chocolate and say, “Chocolate’s for me!” Or do you tend to point at vanilla and say, “Nope, don’t like vanilla.” Or…perhaps your thoughts and voice go along the lines of, “Oohh, chocolate, I want that! I don’t like vanilla.”

We make choices every day, voicing and experiencing our preferences. The ability to choose is one of our most precious gifts. And one of our greatest experiences of that gift is our freedom to choose how we focus in on those preferences.

Our natural, life force tendency is to align with that which we want. Life is an inclusionary energy. It wants to know and experience the next great thing we desire. To focus on what we don’t want, on what we want to exclude, is to clench down on that life force. We actually end up spending some time experiencing that which we don’t want by choosing to think about how icky it would be! It may only be in our minds, but it is still an experience that effects our bodies and our moods.

Our mind’s tendency is to pattern match in order to insure safety. The mind suspends inclusion until it can confirm safety – and it pulls from all kinds of things to do so. What happened last time you chose X. What are your parent’s and other’s opinions about X, and about Y? And maybe even Z! Maybe none of them is right to want! Your mind tries to zero in on the perfect match that includes your desire, plus what you Should do according to (insert parents, peers, religion, society, anything you feel is important enough to consider while making this particular choice, here).

“I will not include that, I will not receive that, until I know it is safe/good/right,” says the mind. “What you actually want is only part of the equation. I’m here to keep you/me safe despite all those things you want and probably shouldn’t want, and if you know what’s good for you (oh irony) you’ll let me do my job and analyze all of the possibilities first.”

We are not, however, at the whim of our minds. Our mind is a tool, one for us to use to create new and interesting experiences for ourselves. The mind’s pattern matching process is based on fear of the unknown. Its intention is to analyze all that has gone before, so that it can accurately predict what will happen if a particular choice is made. In other words, it loves to spend time in Ugh-ville, because its current programming runs on the idea that it’s doing a good job keeping you safe by doing so. It must save you from yourself, and it gets so tired doing so!

Our minds have become so busy with pattern matching that we more often than not don’t use them for what they were really made for in this day and age – creating the life of our dreams via inclusionary choosing in our day to day thought-chatter. Instead we tend to run ourselves ragged (literally), making sure we don’t accidentally want what we shouldn’t want.

We’ve come to a point in our evolution that we can begin to trust our desires. Little by little, by focusing on what we want, we will learn to trust our natural inclusionary tendencies. The mind will be there to make sure we don’t walk in front of a bus on our way to our desire – it won’t go away while we’re not looking.

It will take time to build a new habit. To free ourselves to want, free from the exclusionary ‘but what if?’ experiences of the fear-based mind. The mind will slowly be re-programmed to function in an inclusionary fashion, shifting the fear based ‘but what if?’ experience into a passion building inclusion based ‘but what if?!’

We can do it. We are doing it! It feels good to do it. Just think…”What if!?”

What do you want? A good hint, believe it or not, is what thrills yet scares you.