Opening to Insight
From the space of curiosity, openness and knowledge of our ability to be clear and tune in to our wisdom, the act of reflection helps us to consider and explore our thoughts, familiar feelings, patterns of being and deep rooted beliefs. As we are guided to open up to new ideas and a fresh perspective, we also open up to insight. In the state of openness, we are able to become centred and grounded in presence and in presence, we surrender to a higher awareness that we obstruct access to from the limited mind. In presence and awareness, we are able to investigate our blocks, our behaviour and our beliefs with intention. In the process of self discovery, if we allow our thoughts to flow and intuition and wisdom to guide us in uncovering insights, channelling inspiration, gaining clarity and setting intentions, we find turning inwards allows us to discover more about who we really are, what we want from life and what action we can take to achieve it.
Learning more about ourselves often takes the form of making it our practice to witness our familiar thought processes, physical reactions, motivations and behaviour so that we can decide whether the way we live resonates with us on a soul level and what action we might take to move towards living a life that does. There are times that we are in a flow state and we feel as if we are riding the waves of life with grace, dignity and ease, dismissing unhelpful thoughts and making healthy decisions that increase our sense of wellbeing. There are also times we are caught up in unhelpful thinking and feel the urge to default to past beliefs and behaviour. In these moments we do well to consider our response to life and recognise that we have the option to take a new route.
By making it our practice to reflect on and explore our motivations and ground in how good and natural it feels to live from a state of connection with life, inspired, confident, uplifted, we give ourselves a frame of reference for choosing better in the moments we are urged to return to past perspectives and behaviour that do not serve us. We remind ourselves that we can and that we truly want to. In this way we reprogramme the subconscious mind by replacing limiting beliefs with those that benefit and empower us so that we are aware of our abilities and operating from our knowledge of what is possible for us. We invest in new understanding and create new behaviour to default to in the moments we are not in conscious awareness.
Our experience is subject to filters, biases, perceptions and programming. To be well and to maintain a healthy experience of life, we have to update our understanding of it with new information as it becomes available to us so that we can assess our beliefs and when necessary or beneficial, create new ones. Unless and until we are conscious in our approach, past and conditioned thinking creates our feelings which enforce and influence our state of mind which in turn motivates our behaviour and responses when we feel triggered or urged towards repeating past reactions to how we feel in the present.
Operating from a state of being that allows us to tune in to our ability to be clear and instinctive and open to insight affords us the distance we need to witness how we are feeling in the moment so that we can assess whether our thinking and state of mind are helpful and healthy or not and our assessment of our feelings guiding us towards action that aligns with our truth and deepest values. We are not neutral participants in life but subjective in the creation of our experience which is the result of what we believe and the feelings we identify with in the moment. As the subconscious mind is guided by our thoughts and feelings about life, the more conscious we are of those we follow, energise and invest in, the better we adapt and respond to life in ways that serve us.
When we allow ourselves to witness what we are experiencing, we open up to the space of clarity and wholeness within us that guides us to insight and understanding.
The more we inhabit new states of being, the more we become the people we wish to be because by consciously working to change the way we think and feel, we change the way we experience ourselves and life, seeing and feeling and being in ways that open us up to potential and opportunity rather than keep us invested in what denies them or obscures them from view. In this way we engage our ability to experience distance from unhelpful programmes so that we can override them and take clear and conscious action in life. Until we begin to change the way we think, we are subject to past beliefs systems and paradigms that we unconsciously allow to guide us in life and as they do, change our physical makeup.
To change our physical reality, we have to change our non physical reality first. This is why manifestation practices tell us to believe before we see rather than the other way around so that we open up to new potentials and possibilities. It is why so much self realisation work focuses on changing the way we feel in order to create new experiences within the body that align with our desired way of thinking and being in life. We remove our focus from the physical which means we stop identifying with the experience of our conditioned, limited, habitual thinking and start to change our minds and bodies as a result. We allow feelings but we aren’t motivated by them in to repeating past action, rather we are guided by them to reflect on whether we are thinking clearly or not, on whether we are thinking inline with the experience we want from life or otherwise and from here we get to decide what thoughts we trust in, what state of feeling we generate and energise for ourselves and what action we take.
This all begins in the realm of imagination, in the non physical arena of the spiritual. We imagine something better for ourselves and from there we take steps to bring it into being in the physical world. The most simple way to do this is to engage in visualisation, to play with our ideas of life, to allow ourselves to dream and feel the experience of our dreams as true and real. To connect with our spiritual wisdom, we have to open up to its existence and surrender to its guidance with the intention of aligning with the states of mind and being that allow for oneness, creativity, inspiration and insight.
When we begin to change the way we view and experience life to reflect who we know ourselves to be and what we are capable of, we begin to control the way we use the powers of thought and feeling. This allows us to consider the beliefs and behaviour we no longer want to engage in so that we are able to see that we have the choice to stop living by past beliefs and do the work we need to, whether alone or with support, to access the awareness that prevents us from confusing what is happening with what has happened before so that we are able to respond to life in the moment, fresh, clear and guided.
We retrain our brains as we practise being aware of the experience we are creating for ourselves in the moment so that we can direct our attention towards our capacity for knowing peace and health and clarity and taking clear and helpful action. Questioning our habits of thought, feelings and behaviour can help us gain insight in to the deep rooted beliefs we hold as well as become more aware of the physical reactions we create to life based on them. Doing so from self love and self respect means we are able to be open to and enlightened by the insights we experience, awed by our ability to connect with our inner wisdom and guided to allow it to transform us.
So often we are confused about who we are because we are unclear about what power we hold and the blocks we have created, keep in place and are identified with.
It is not only in our most challenging moments that we default to who we no longer want to be, to a limited sense of self, repeating reactions to life that were created as a way to deal with real or perceived threat or need. In order to step outside of these patterns, to change the way we view and approach and respond to life, we have to investigate our ideas of who we are, what life has to offer us, what we have to offer life and gently, patiently, lovingly release the patterns of behaviour, the ideas and beliefs that are directing us away from connecting in and with the world so that we are able to imagine and then explore new ways of being that are expansive, healthy, empowered and joyful.
This is the result of practice, of overriding our most familiar states of being in order to default to presence and a conscious understanding and interpretation of what is happening in the moment. Learning that just because it feels real doesn’t mean it is, allows us to explore making it our new normal to remove our focus from the physical experience of past beliefs and familiar thinking in order to let our thoughts flow and peace and stillness to be known to us. Doing so allows us to tune in to our inner wisdom, the intelligence of our spiritual wellbeing and the experience of this in the body so that we are able to be sensitive to and follow our instincts rather than default to practised reactions to familiar states of being,
Becoming aware of our physiological state in order to regulate it from awareness, a clear sense of self, knowledge of choice and the ability to decide how we respond to life, allows us to track how we feel so that our behaviour is not determined by unconscious evaluation of and reaction to the arousal of past states of being but the result of conscious processing of how our physical experience is the direct result of how we are thinking and motivated by our consideration of our feelings to think in the moment. As we do, we find we can be intuitive and instinctual in our responses, able to remember our ability to be clear minded no matter how we feel which eventually leads to clear feeling too.
One way we can experience a clearer state of being is to tune in to our hearts with heart opening practices, meditation, breathwork or simply intention and focus. The brain receives more information from the heart than it delivers. When we are told to drop into the space of love, wholeness, oneness, we are being told to drop out of the limited thinking of the conditioned mind and the experience of it in the body and enter a state of coherence that connects heart and brain and tunes us out of investment in past experiences and connects us with the non physical, moving us beyond limited beliefs into a limitless experience and expression of the energy of life.
In the moment we are connected with life without being contracted by past ideas about who we are and what is possible for us, we experience a oneness, an understanding of and connection with the sacred, we experience the Divine and as the Divine, as part of life, we find we are whole and wise, guided and supported, loved and loving and we are inspired to expand beyond limited concepts of self into a greater experience of who we truly are. This is the process of learning to trust in and default to our capacity for clarity and insight when we are in the physical experience of past thinking.
We can’t control the thoughts that flow through our minds but we can stop believing in and identifying with those that point us away from wellbeing and allow them to pass, understanding them simply as options of where we might take our thinking.
When we do this, we operate more often from a calm and collected state of being, see more clearly and discover a capacity to regulate our feeling state just by noticing where our experience is coming from and how helpful our default reactions to it are in the moment. Until it becomes second nature for us to be guided by our desire to act with respect for our highest truths and values in the moments we find challenging as well as those when we feel at one with and supported by life, we have to actively consider our approach so that we can create a new way of responding to life that we are happy to default to and that does not hurt or harm us or others in any way. The more at ease we are with ourselves and life is an indicator of how successful we are at dealing with our feelings, triggers and conditioning.
There is nothing to judge when we notice we have defaulted to past beliefs and behaviour, we simply realise that we are being directed away from action that is in alignment with our truth. When we refuse to judge ourselves for and identify with unhelpful thinking and instead use our energy to decide on which thoughts we trust and follow and which feelings we energise and act on, we allow ourselves to make healthy changes and we take action from a higher awareness than we experience when we are caught up in self judgement and identifying with the experience of it. Patience and self forgiveness when we default to past perceptions and perspectives, allow for the awareness that we can act otherwise despite them.
We are not our thoughts, our conditioning or even the actions done to us or by us. We can be free and we can change. Choosing to consider our response to life rather than unconsciously reacting to it when we feel ourselves beginning to identify once again with who we have been and what we have known, empowers us to take control of the thoughts we invest in and the feelings we act on. A considered response to life is one we actively choose to engage in when past thinking instructs us to react in past ways so that we are able to be who we really are in our most challenging moments.
Exploring our ability to be our truest selves, allowing intuition and a greater awareness to guide us in making conscious what is not as we uncover our creative power, strengths, skills and magnificence can be challenging and it can light. As we relearn how to inhabit the wholeness that is innate to us and our birthright, we find that we are guided to explore and identify our skills, strengths, talents, enjoyments and desires as well as investigate our habitual reactions to certain concepts and ideas so that in awareness, we can consider whether they serve us in connecting with, honouring and expressing our highest truth.
We learn about ourselves by allowing what comes up to be witnessed and being curious about what lies before, beneath and beyond our habitual and conditioned beliefs and behaviour. When we reflect on the feeling states we are most identified with and invested in to consider what they may be attempting to protect us from experiencing, we also give way to our innate wellbeing, allowing wholeness, clarity and coherence to become known to us. As we reflect on our most familiar ways of being and the beliefs that motivate them and keep them in place, we begin to realise that there is so much more to us than we know from the limited mind and we open up to, access and begin to appreciate the strengths, resources, skills and talents that lie within us.
We can trust our intuition to lead us and we can trust our hearts to love us through the process of self investigation, self realisation and self actualisation.
When we act on feelings and engage in behaviour that do not move us forwards into greater expressions of self, we are not in tune with what is really going on within us, with our motivations and the ideas and beliefs that created them. Taking time for reflection can help us to get clear on why we have created and default to certain reactions in life, what these reactions are actually keeping us from experiencing and uncovering and healing what feels hurt within us so that we can begin to enjoy life in a new way.
There are no right or wrong ways to approach self investigation so be gentle with yourself as you imagine experiencing peace and calm and joy in life and explore ways of bringing this vision into being. We do our best work in love, in trust and in communion with the intelligence of life that is within us and all around us. When we open up and surrender to a truer expression of self, we find out more about who we are not and begin to glimpse and be led by the light within us that is who we really are. As you reflect, allow yourself to show up fresh, noticing your urgent reactions as well as giving room to your more insightful, instinctual and impulsive responses.
REFLECTIONS
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