Do you have free will, or are you just the product of the patterns in your life and all of the underlying energies happening in and around you?
Often we are driven by impulse. Those impulses are usually patterned behaviors. Things we do unconsciously just because we have always done them. When we refuse to feel our feelings and be present, we become susceptible to the patterns running in the background. These are bioenergetic algorithms that dictate where on the decision space we end up.
The Three Pattern Skills
There are three skills we need for life: pattern recognition, pattern utilization, and pattern creation.
Breaking bad habits starts with recognition. That awareness comes from learning to be present. When we are present, we become much more aware of things that have historically run unnoticed in the background.
Pattern utilization is recognizing that sometimes we have good habits that actually serve us. Once going to the gym is a pattern your energy field is used to, you just go. It doesn’t feel like a slog. It’s part of who you are.
Pattern creation is where you exercise some semblance of free will. But free will isn’t in the decision you’re making right now. It’s in the readying yourself for the decision. The mental and emotional work that allows you to actually choose something new.
This is where consciousness meets choice.
Explore the emotional processing practices for becoming bigger than your patterns.
Vasanas: The Subtle Karmic Energies
The patterns I’m most interested in are the ones happening under the surface. The subtle energy patterns. In the East they’re called vasanas. These are the subtle karmic energies that rule your life.
These are all the things that happened to you in this life and maybe beyond that required some level of consciousness to process out. Because that consciousness wasn’t there, you went out of body when these things happened. That energy got solidified into your system.
It’s going to stay there and keep calling forth situations designed to catalyze that stagnant energy and release it. That’s what gets related to Law of Attraction. Reality is a mirror. Whatever is happening within you energetically broadcasts itself on the mirror of reality.
Growing the Pipes of Your Nervous System
If you can learn to breathe deeply and let some of that manic energy come to the surface and breathe through it, you can start breaking bad habits without even intellectualizing how you’re doing it.
Your nervous system is like a muscle. It will feel temporarily uncomfortable just like going to the gym. But ultimately the pipes of your nervous system get bigger. It makes you more capable.
Reality puts opportunities in the hands of people capable of handling them. The more capable your nervous system is, the more reality says: here is a node that can handle this big opportunity. You want to be someone capable of holding a big experience.
Be Bigger Than the Pattern
You have to be bigger than the pattern to choose something new. Until you have awareness of a pattern and recognize that it’s the pattern driving the show, you’re not going to make a new choice. You can’t. Your choices are still being dictated by the pattern.
That’s the real secret to breaking bad habits. Grow the pipes. Sit with yourself. Feel through the discomfort. Then you become someone ready to be lucky.