Do You Think Life Could Be Easier Than You Make It?
Experience is a balance between how we choose to respond to what happens to us and the extent to which we feel we wish to create it. In both instances, we can get in our own way. This rests in our internal process and our internal system – how we organise our response and ourselves.
Getting in our own way means that we have the ability to make life more difficult for ourselves than it needs to be. Much of our struggle with ‘what is’ is internal. We can block ourselves and block experience. Much of what holds us back, often unconsciously, keeps us safe, and so looks after us, it is not self-sabotage. Getting out of our own way entails a softening of these holds and an allowing of experience and so our capacity for flexibility. Our capacity to meet our experience matters, so that we can live life feeling connected; from an open heart and with a clear mind.
How We Can Get in Our Own Way:
- Impeding natural movement by pulling back or bracing into
- Not giving ourselves permission to do what we would like
- Not listening to what we know through our intuition
- Internalising or playing out other people’s opinions
- Constraining and curtailing our natural creativity, courage and risk-taking
- Not being willing to be vulnerable
- Creating fear and anxiety by thinking around ‘what ifs’ instead of creating ease and spaciousness around possibility
- Judging against assumptions
How We Think About Ourselves:
- Complicating through over-thinking and analysis,
- Finding fault and blaming ourselves for being flawed humans.
- Feeling guilt and shame for making mistakes and not getting it right
- Thinking a lot about how we should be a better human being
- Believing we are not good enough (compared to others)
- Believing what we think about ourselves is true
How We Meet Our Feelings:
- Avoiding emotions as much as possible (even though human experience is essentially emotional)
- Believing our brain or logical thinking can think our way out of our problems
- Discounting the wisdom of our bodies through overriding feelings and sensations
- Suppressing what we feel and hiding it from others
- Judging ourselves for how we feel
- Fearing that strong emotions will overwhelm us
How We Meet Our Experience:
- Trying to control and fix what is wrong
- Confusing our sense of esteem with productivity, achievement and busyness
- Believing only when we get there or do that will things feel better
- Trying to manage our response from a place of disregulation or self-protection
- Believing what we do is more important than how we are being
- Not acknowledging when we are struggling
- Diminishing what we already have