Move forward

As a pre-requisite to having a good life, a lot has been broadcast from the self-help community about the importance of ‘stepping into a vision of who you are.’ What does it mean? Our modern day mystics and philosophers are referring to self understanding. The self is your rendition of the Spirit within you, your individual spark of divinity. Your God/Goddess within is your true self you become over time. It is your journey to being whole.

Realizing our own divinity, and using it to create a reality free from angst and disappointment, is about living in conscious awareness of who we are. All the time. And we practice being divine by making choices based in the present, using a creative license to choose what we want. If we recognize the Divine within, and identify intimately with that idea, so there is no differentiation between what is God and what is us, then we are capable of anything. Our choices, just like the universe, become limitless. Our purpose then, in this collective soul journey we share, is to become that which is within. It is to become our God-self. It is our inheritance, our innate gift and natural state.

I have not always been this smart. Like you, I have stumbled from one hard lesson after another over the course of many years, wondering why I seemed to revisit the same type of relationships or never felt in charge of my destiny. Why did the same patterns emerge in my career paths? The same disappointments? From bitterness over family matters to love gone astray, I found myself thinking ‘life happens’ or ‘it was never meant to be’ far too often, as an unspoken acceptance of my lack of ability to overcome.

Beginning as children, we readily accept conditioning by such mantras of non-control, turning our power over to other ideas, food, relationships, religion or materialism. By adulthood, we gather quite a large collection of anesthetics, choosing to bed down with them for long winters of discontent, blaming outside circumstances for our reality. Only we find we aren’t any closer to our goals the following spring, we’ve just invested more energy convincing ourselves why it’s not time to receive our good. And this is our biggest mistake. Life is not a nuisance to push through. It is designed to be so much more and I think, living within the genius we call the Universal Creation, our shared experiences all point to the same signpost: Thoughts Create Reality. This Way . It is our choice whether to travel on that path of enlightenment or not.

The complexity that permeates our lives has little to do with what we completed on the to-do list, but much about our difficulty to experience the life we want. There is no plot against us. We’ve outlined these challenges for our own self-development because we are trying to leave ourselves clues that we are mentally capable of overcoming our environment. We are attempting to teach ourselves we have the ability, present in our own minds, to experience the world as a creator, living life fully and consciously aware. We can manifest what we want. It only takes practice!

How We Blow It
Rather than going within for power to create joyful lives, too often we look to the environment or relationships. Naturally, we crave reinforcement and praise. Who doesn’t feel good when a sign arrives, encouraging us to keep putting one foot in front of the other? Feeling we make a difference is important, but where we get into trouble is functioning completely on automatic thought patterns to get the positive strokes.

Physiologically speaking, we wire our brains by our associative memory - our associations with people, places, things, times or events - and assign emotions to those ideas. It causes neurons in the brain to form a connection and when enough connect together a whole series will fire. That’s called a neurological network. They are developed by repetition. Neuro nets help us function because they provide our bodies with the ability to function automatically with skills sets such as brushing our teeth, walking or typing. But because humans are complex beings, we’re highly integrated in terms of the body and mind. Emotions associated with those complex skill sets can become triggered automatically, affecting our behavior and our bodies by the production of chemicals. Our bodies begin to rely upon those chemicals. No kidding - scientists found we can be addicted to our emotions!

Automatic programs don’t serve us well when we rely upon them to propel us through life. For example, if you had abusive parents you may have created a memory of that relationship. Over years of repetition, you might have created an automatic program around this set of ideas, which included certain emotions such as low self-esteem, anger, or resentment. Emotions begin to be problematic only to the degree that we are unconsciously surrendering to them in ways that don’t serve our highest good. How can we recognize when this happens?

An example would be the automatic program that kicks in when something triggers your memory of your parents. You respond to people who remind you of your parents, or other authority figures, the same way chemically. Most of the time, we don’t even realize our dependency on these old programs that prevent us from experiencing healthy, new relationships. Old programs affect our present day circumstances, clouding present-day judgments and opportunities for wonderful experiences because we are using old information, responses, and body chemistry to interpret the way things are today. It’s not an accurate assessment of reality.

What can you learn from this quick tutorial in Brain 101? If you produce the same outcomes in life, over and over again, it may be a demonstration of what is, in fact, an old program in your head. You are recreating the same conditions to produce the same chemicals your body craves. For example, surrounding yourself with people who make you feel like your parents made you feel, so you have an anger outlet. Or, substituting loneliness for love because you don’t want to open yourself up to the possibility of rejection. So, until the pattern of memory is broken by detaching from emotions you associate from this past relationship, you will continue to search unconsciously for similar experiences. Why? Our bodies naturally seek the chemical comfort. And many of us rely upon such automatic programs without even realizing it! We are more chemically attached to our bodies than we think, often making present day choices based upon our bodies and minds seated in the past.