Emotions are powerful. They can bring people together, break people apart, move mountains and start wars. But how much of our response to things are subconscious emotional patterning, rather than conscious aware emotional responses?
I want to talk about those moments of being highjacked by your emotions, getting triggered, and those moments when the person you are talking to asks themselves “how did we get to ‘childhood trauma,’ when I only said I have a thing for cheetos.” But for you, the connection between Cheetos and childhood trauma makes sense, perfect sense and effortlessly connects and triggers responses.
Emotions can have us feeling 'heart centered' or 'off centered.'
These responses, or reactions, find their home in our mind and emotions, they can leave us either ‘heart centered’ or completely ‘off centered.’ These responses are apart of being human, and effect all of us, regardless of gender, age, and cultural background.
In the yogic culture, these emotional waves that spur, either outburst or addicted cravings, are called ‘vasanas,’or mental impressions. Just as everything, there are positive and negative vasanas. There are mental tendencies that cause us to externalize, i.e. highjacked outbursts, and those that cause cessation of externalization and create more stillness.
What are your triggers? These programmed responses that have you fearful, lashing out, angry etc. There are stories we play in our heads about something that hasn’t yet come to pass, why do we do this to ourselves?…
Topics like; food insecurity though you have a full pantry, breaking a ceramic plate that inspires a full on meltdown, having a cancellation at work that creates an existential crisis, feeling financial constraints when you are actually have more savings than ever, feeling perpetually suspicious of friends, family and romantic partners that drive you to self sabotage again and again… and the list goes on.
Why do we have these excess worries, when in reality or when assessed with a clear intellect, we have no need...
Where is 'self sabotage' located in the brain? Is there a neural connection or a gene that we can switch off for the 'body image response' too?
These are all examples of how subconscious tendencies rule our lives.
We are a bag of our past. Who we are now is a compilation of all the choices that have come before this exact moment. But we have yet to move into a level of knowing that everything is happening ‘for us’ not ‘to us.’ Believe it or not, but we are not the victims in our story. We are the heroines- one choice away from defeating the past programming that keeps us enslaved and addicted. Enslaved or addicted to food, to the same romantic partner, to feeling unworthy, or to not feeling good enough.
The solution is in the in-between state. There is a pause between our thoughts and actions. We may not see it now, but if we could all just notice this break, a pause, before our instantaneous malicious reactions, thats’ one less degree of strength that the patterning will have. Keep doing this, and you will have regained the power from the subconscious programming.
It is crazy that we can not even remember what we ate for lunch yesterday, but we can, in full colored array, remember trauma from our past- sometimes feeling it as if it is still happening to us.
In my line of work, it is all about awareness. We judge everyone else so quickly, yet, have we taken an honest look at ourselves lately? Pause, and become aware of your choices, of your thoughts, or your feelings. I commonly say, “no one should know you more than you know yourself.” You should be your own master. You decide whether to give your power away to others to define your self worth. And if you decide it, you can choose to live in awareness, full awareness. No more living of life available to it or ‘half online.’ But being fully present, fully aware of all that you are. Aware of the dialogue, of the subconscious tendencies and programming, and giving it all a pause before you run in the direction of trauma, phobia or erratic emotional triggering. Then, with grace, you will realize that you are more than you ever thought- unbounded and free.
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