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Identifying old patterns and staying out of them is difficult.
Being aware, mindful, and present is a recipe for identifying patterns and breaking the cycle.
I find many of these patterns blended with relationships and emotional reactions that are rooted deep in my traumas and my early life.
Relationships and emotions have the tendency to distract me from my higher self. Reactions from relationships and emotions can determine which path I stroll down. My reactions teach me a lot about myself, my patterns, and the course of my life. How I react from here on out will shape my future. I am learning to sit with my emotions before I react from them and am becoming more capable of sharing my translated thoughts and feelings about each emotion.
I have heard about knee-jerk reactions; while I look back at my life, I realize many of my reactions may have just been “jerk reactions.” I call them this because I never held space to allow myself to feel anything within emotional reactions. I simply reacted, with zero thought process, complete autopilot, defending myself, protecting the ego, and fighting back. Basically turning everything around on others and, you guessed it, being a jerk. This never allowed me to find myself within and see where all these reactions were coming from. Fear, the mind killer.
Fear of what exactly? Becoming vulnerable and understanding myself was difficult for someone like me. Someone who searched high and low to find every bit of happiness, pleasure, and comfort outside of myself. Now I’m seeking it within and speaking with my higher self on a daily basis to become vulnerable with myself in order to translate that vulnerability outward, to shed the fear and share my emotions through feelings that others can understand.
This practice alone breaks an old pattern of mine: running away from my emotions and surviving with reactions that do not serve me, my soul, or my growth. For example, I had issues of accountability and I would hide behind my strength of persuasiveness by gaslighting others. I was scared to be vulnerable, look at myself, and hear others. I feared that if I opened up to them, they would abandon me. Many of my patterns are rooted in fear and many of the old patterns do not serve me or my growth. They inhibit growth because they encourage me to fight the change I am so humbly seeking.
Changing my thought process and being present and mindful with each moment every day has given me time to reflect on each pattern as they come to light, making this journey toward happiness within much smoother. I won’t claim that I am able to work through each pattern successfully every single day, because I’m not.
This process is difficult, almost tedious. I’m basically tearing layers of armor off of the ego every time I practice this reflection and attempt to insert new patterns. Journaling all these occurrences helps increase the probability of empowering my new patterns over the old ones. When I start asserting new habits and stepping into fresh patterns, the ego fights back.
The ego is powerful, but I’m finding ways to silence it and remove its power subtly. My ego doesn’t appreciate presence, mindfulness, peace, and love. It’s a busy ego and wants instant gratification, recognition from others, and most of all, pleasure from outside of me. Reading, being present, and practicing mindfulness daily is slowly creating a void where it would normally thrive. As I push through into habits and patterns that lead me away from pain and suffering by making choices that lead me to happiness, I leave the ego powerlessly behind in the dust.
I’m removing fuel from the ego and giving my attention to building the future of my dreams. Releasing old patterns that do not serve me is a good step toward this and sometimes this is painful. Releasing so much trauma, pain, suffering, and anything that seems to engage in the unnecessary reactions from unfiltered and untranslated emotions is cleansing and a struggle within itself. No matter how hard it is, or how draining it may become, the liberation afterward is worth every second.
I am free of old patterns that no longer serve my mind, body, and soul on the journey I am on. My patterns do not define who I am; they are only a guiding light to show me where change is necessary and where the next steps along my path must go.
I will keep the old patterns as reminders of where I was, let them go, and hold on to the new ones like a treasure map, leading me to the gold.
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