A few weeks ago, I wrote about what to expect when engaging long term in self exploration through therapy or self-work in general.
One other perk is that, as you become more and more attuned to yourself and the world, your relationship to your own life changes. You start noticing the mirror that your experience is constantly presenting you, usually a few weeks or months ahead of schedule. The way I experience it, life is bringing things into my awareness long before I actually get to go through them internally, almost like pre-framing, or priming me to seize the opportunity when it presents itself.
As I am a therapist, it happens most through my clients. I’ve learned to pay attention to the type of issues people bring, or to any challenge that arises, because it’s usually a heads up for something that I will have to deal with in myself or in my life a few days/weeks later. The latest example happened during a recent workshop, where one of the participant had a very strong reaction to what was being shown of her. She was stuck in an intense emotional loop born out of denial, and it was challenging for me to sit with her in that. By the end of the workshop she was feeling better and I didn’t think any more of it… Fast forward a few days later, when I get intensely triggered by an exchange in my own life, and as I am taking care of the part of me that is in total emotional turmoil, I suddenly realize that this client had literally embodied this part for me during the workshop, down to the words she was using. This also applies to waves of clients with the same issue : I might not see how it relates to me, but usually that very issue will be awakened in my life soon after.
Of course it’s not limited to people. For those of you familiar with my work around metaphors and stories (see the Moonlit Path podcast), you know that I’m constantly mining my surroundings and the happenings in my life for metaphors about the unseen dynamics in my own self. Whether I have to cut brambles around my house or jump through hoops to get something that was supposed to lighten my load, it’s all talking to me about the unseen dynamics within myself.
We think that we know who we are, what we want, what we do, etc, but in reality the cognitive space we operate from has very little power when it comes to interacting with life. The parts of us that are directly plugged into our own life are mostly our subconscious and our body. The subconscious takes about 95% of our decisions based on information gathered between 0 and 5 years old (for the most part). It also doesn’t respond to cognitive thinking, and will not communicate linearly. In other words, the only avenues that your subconscious has to communicate with you is by creating a life that shows you what it believes, and through your dreams. The only avenues that you have to communicate with your subconscious is sensory experience, metaphor and stories.
The way that I understand it is this : we have a field of resonance emanating from our subconscious and our body, that is constantly attracting things, people, events, etc, that resonate at the same frequency. One of the practitioners I work with calls it our melody, and I think that is the most fitting term I’ve heard. IT IS NOT LAW OF ATTRACTION. The idea that you can change what you attract with your mind is ludicrous, especially if you’ve been through a lot of trauma, systemic oppression, etc. It is not “signs from the universe” either. That desire just stems from the need to be reassured that “we’re doing the right thing”. Both LOA and the compulsive looking for signs are just a way to remain in a cognitive understanding of the world, and to keep the illusion that our mind is in control of our life.
What happens with the subconscious and nervous system (body) is just resonance. Everything that happens or exists in the world has a resonance that begins way before the things itself is formed. Resonance attracts same. So if you look around you, at your life, at your people, at what is happening, you can get a pretty good view of your own unconscious blueprint, and what is active for you, or is going to be active shortly. And when you’ve been working on yourself a long time, it becomes easier and easier to see it, and turn towards it in yourself, or to at least stay open in the question “huh, I wonder what this is telling me about ?”. And then our life becomes our partner in figuring out our own making, and slowly including, shifting, healing, transforming, responding to ourselves, so that our resonance might change and in turn our life might as well.
If you’d like to hear more about this, it’s one of the topics we touched on in my interview with Rachel Astarte below.