Life is lived unconsciously from outdated programming in the subconscious mind. When you embark on a spiritual path, you wake up from living an autopilot, self-defeating life and become mindful or full of awareness. Living mindfully is fundamentally essential for enlightenment and Self-realization.
Life-long belief patterns don’t break by wishing them away or saying positive affirmations. Although, helpful to keep the mind on the positive, but it won’t change deeply grooved patterns. Nor, do patterns disappear by listening to subliminal hypnosis, again helpful, but the pattern must be consciously located. Patterns of thinking and behaving are deeply grooved into the subconscious mind. It takes a conscious effort to think differently. Plus, courage to overcome fear, not feeling good enough, or hurt. Think of beliefs as the software and the brain as the hardware.
Pushing Love Away
I know it might sound ridiculous, why on Earth would you push anything away, much less love. Or how we sabotage good relationships, finances and career successes. It’s done a lot by sabotaging what you believe about yourself. We aren’t conscious of all the times we push love or life away. Unhealed people live to please others and forget entirely about their needs and wants. Or live too much in their ego to truly enjoy life experiences. Living life for others is called wearing a mask. People wear masks to hide their true selves from others. They pretend to be someone else and live a facade instead of being true to themselves. People may not have experienced healthy loving relationships, so they undermine the connection when love appears. Sabotaging love and life is common.
Addressing the Shadow
People wear all types of masks. For example, the “wife” or “husband” mask or the “father” or “mother” mask. There’s also a “good employee” mask. Masks aren’t bad or wrong, but they can stop you from enjoying life. One day you’ll wake up, especially after the children leave, and wonder what happened to my life.
Co-dependency is also a sign of not living your life. A person is co-dependent on another person for happiness or approval. Co-dependent relationships usually show up in long-term commitments or marriages. The author, Terry Cole, wrote a book called Boundary Boss; you can check out how co-dependency plays havoc on lives.
Life can feel out of control when the shadow starts to come to light. The shadow self is part of you, hidden and controlled by the ego. The ego’s job is to keep you stuck, fearful, hurt and angry. Sweeping things under the rug is not healing. It’s avoidance—no healing in avoiding or denying issues. Over time, avoiding issues causes explosive anger unrelated to current situations. Avoidance leads to feeling overwhelmed and stuck.
Emotional baggage is hurt, defensiveness, resentment, bitterness, anger, fear, resistance, revenge, jealousy and envy. Everyone carries different emotional baggage, even if they don’t want to admit it. Beliefs are held on to because we feel safe thinking a certain way. Beliefs become your identity in life.
Breaking Patterns
Are you projecting your past relationship issues onto your new person? We project our wounded selves onto others all the time, and then blame them for our issues or mistakes.
Patterns change when the original event that caused the hurt becomes consciously apparent. Locating the actual event is something you talk about often, but getting to the core of the issues is often tricky. The core of the problems is not something obvious. It’s behind an evident experience. Go deeper and dialogue with hurt feelings. See if you can find what caused you to push away from love, for example.
Have the courage to take off any masks. No one will criticize you unless you judge yourself. Plus, no one is perfect. Living your life shame-free and content takes addressing the inner self and becoming aware of your feelings and thoughts. You can’t run away from your shadow (issues). You can deny, resist or delay, but you can’t escape problems.
Remedy
You are not what is being triggered. You are not an angry person, although you might feel angry at the moment. Or notice that you feel out of control and shift your mind by saying, “I’m in control.” Start to talk to yourself (self-inquiry). Ask what is going on. Why am I out of control?
To heal, you can’t justify anyone’s behavior. To truly heal, you need to get real with your feelings to snap out of the old energy patterns. For example, forgive your mom for being
- Being emotionally unavailable
- Repeated rejection
- Lack of attention
- Insensitive to your needs and wants
- Unable to teach you essential life skills
- Raising you through her struggles
What you resist persists. What you avoid comes back to haunt you in another person or situation. Deal with the issues with the original person and move on with peace. Talk yourself down from any agitation. Once the mind is on-guard or overthinking, it’s a clue to think positive and calming thoughts.
Change Your Mind and Change Your Life
You have the power right now to change your mind from any negative thinking to positive and life-enhancing thoughts that uplift you. It shows strength in character when you admit you have issues and work through them instead of blaming others. When patterns of thinking change, you’ll think differently, feel happier from the inside out, won’t be triggered by the same stimuli and your outer world changes, and you become happy and peaceful.
