Ever noticed that you constantly outline your plans to make over yourself, a room in your house, your finances, your garden, change your career path, any number of things …. and yet also experience yourself curiously unable to make the time, take even the first steps, carve out any space at all to get cracking with it ? If so, you are in good company.
Perhaps you find yourself talking about your efforts to get going with any number of exciting projects, announcing your hopes and dreams for a new beginning, and then, annoyingly, something happens to interrupt this and you do one of several things that mean you never draw any closer to your goals.
The modern way seems to be to impede ourselves by being busy all the time, we find that other things must take priority, we find distractions all too easy to pull us away from setting up to even begin a project, or we manage one or more days and then get swept away onto something else almost before we’ve realised it.
And if all this happens over and over again, it’s almost as if we go asleep to what we professed to want for ourselves in the first place. I want to shed some light on why this may be happening and perhaps add something of value here to why this frustrating and commonly experienced pattern may be happening again and again to you.
I have noticed in my own life that it can be easy to succumb to internal noise, the voice that says to you, well, you are useless, you will never get that clutter problem in your home under control, you will never lose that belly fat, or even it’s impossible to find a relationship where you feel in tune, or a job that pays sufficiently well, or a …. And you can INSERT WHATEVER YOU LIKE HERE. It sort of doesn’t matter what the end goal was.
I believe that we start to create inner resistance, even without knowing that we are doing it. It is as though some internal super-critical voice begins a well-worn script that says, yes, you have failed again, well, what did you expect? Why did you even try?
Until enough time passes, and you have forgotten about this particular voice or managed to briefly nail it down in a box and the same unresolved urge to achieve that particular thing you feel tension about surfaces again, that lack of stomach toning, that excess stuff in the loft you believe you could clear so that you can convert that space, those shrubs that need trimming back so that you can open up some light.
It seems that there is always too much to do, too much to take us away from doing that one thing that might make a difference in the short or long term.
So, here is the problem. What on earth can we do about it? What I have to share is this: first, ACCEPT that you are where you are, START from this place today right now, FOCUS on a short and easily achieveable goal, for a SPECIFIC length of time, and WATCH for what comes up to take you away. WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WELL. If you get up bright and early for a day of cleaning the spare room and after your 3rd cup of tea, a most wonderful film comes on the TV that you have longed to see, accept that you won’t be doing any cleaning and WATCH IT WELL !!
Here are some universal truths that may or may or not help but which I believe are worth knowing …. When what we say doesn’t match up with our actions, we should know that we are telling ourselves a STORY, we are essentially making a FICTION.
When we demonstrate that we have an INTENTION to create something or to change something, we must anchor that to a PURPOSE or MEANING, otherwise the action soon dilutes and dissolves as there becomes no reason to make that effort (unless of course you are being paid to do it and are essentially being COMPELLED by something GREATER THAN your own conscious choice).
The founder of Psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli, who began life studying under Freud, developed a series of Psychological Laws in the 1920s that were quite radical and ahead of their time. His insight was, that whatever I am holding in my mind will produce the corresponding physical images and ideas … whatever energy I invest in repeating the same mindset of not completing something, or failing to even get started, then that energy is available to me and powerful enough to bring the desired and longed for outcome close.
So why bring the result close that you DON’T want?
That is the point at which we have to be honest and see what is happening; if again and again, we are in the same pattern of not getting on with some piece of work or making a choice we find difficult, we are in fact keeping ourselves SAFE from the change we profess to want. Something in our unconscious programming is constantly sabotaging our desire to move on with our goals.
Knowing that we are unconsciously stopping ourselves from reaching our goals is a huge step forwards, because it gives us the opportunity of self enquiry, if, of course, we are able to be sufficiently honest about what is ahead.
Knowing that I am the Creator of my own Reality and therefore my own Destiny, actually gives me responsibility, if I can bear it, for all the things that haven’t turned out the way I had hoped. That doesn’t mean getting submerged in self-recrimination, it means an honest look at why I have yet again lost 3 kilos in weight and then gained a futher 7. But I already know the reason. I was doing so well with the whole weight loss thing that I decided to take a break over a long weekend in the Cotswolds and eat a lot of cream teas. So I take responsibility for that choice I made that sabotaged all my previous effort. I went asleep to my earlier professed aims and purpose and allowed my unconscious impulses to bring me safely back to the place where I started. This is bad enough, but do I need to add a lot of tortuous self criticism to the mix?
Another way of looking at this is that a large part of effecting change requires you to SHOW UP. If your purpose is to be rich, to have abundance and you believe that one way that this dream could be fulfilled would be by winning the lottery and you told yourself this repeatedly, and yet you never bought a ticket, what would be the point of that?
In part two of this blog, I help you to get more SPECIFIC – here I just want to highlight that realisation of when we have taken an easier path or resisted a change that this should not also be an occasion for beating oneself up with internal criticism, name calling or identifying yourself with feelings of negativity, failure or deficiency. If anything, I urge you to be kind and gentle to yourself and to your defences. Awareness is key.
After all, maybe there was a further meaning behind why you kept yourself safe from this change all this time. Perhaps deep down, you don’t really want to throw away your old clothes or change your place of work, or start running or whatever it is. Maybe you retain an attachment to worn out things, an affection to artefacts that hold memories of a happier, sweeter time.
I invite you to notice where there is a strong feeling of intentionality to hold onto an object, relationship, way of being, when in the same breath you profess to want to let it go ….