PATTERN RECOGNITION
One of the greatest gifts that this ‘spiritual’ journey has given me is the ability to identify patterns.
Without realizing it, we are pattern creators, and we live our lives dictated to by patterns created in our past. While those patterns serve to protect us during our growing years and early adult life, by the time we reach maturity they become prisons of rigid beliefs and behaviors. We live our lives driven by wounds and avoidance of facing them.
It is hard to see them, let alone break free of them. The spiritual journey, for many, is actually the journey of becoming free of these (usually) self limiting patterns. We long to break free, but as much as we try or even understand intellectually, still we remain encased in our stuff.
The patterns must be released for freedom to be realized. That comes through recognizing how that pattern showed up in your life, why it came into being, how it was an asset to you and what it means to consciously release it.
You have to become willing to embrace the unknown.
You have to be willing to meet the raw feelings.
You have to be prepared to stop giving away your authority to other people or to old habits, patterns or beliefs.
You have to drop all pretending and all avoidance.
It’s not the end of you. It’s the end of the you that is the result of beliefs learned in childhood that no longer serve you.
You cannot meet life in freshness and presence without dropping all that is old and unconscious. It can’t happen, there is too much residual spillage from the past into the present. It leaks into everything, it clouds judgment and clarity.
The gift I am talking of is an ability to identify those patterns, where they originated and why they are still operating. That simple act of identifying brings an opportunity to make decisions about whether to continue to be driven by them or to embrace the courage to no longer be defined by them.
I bring a kind of natural logic to the spiritual life journey.