Hello!

For the next few weeks I want to talk about something that I feel isn’t talked about enough in our spirituality/self help world.

Which is the idea that sometimes there’s no path of least resistance - no path that’s easy, blissful or feels like flow.

Rather, there’s just choosing between the hard options available.

I want to talk about the realities of change, and the realities of just being a human who is alive today that I feel our spirituality and self help modalities often ignore or try to find a ‘hack’ for avoiding - which is the reality that most of the time true change and true progress in life is going to come through effort.

I want to talk about the fact that change is often hard, scary and uncomfortable - even when we have done our best to prepare and to be ‘in alignment’.

I want to give validation to the fact that we aren’t always going to be able to find ease - and that this DOESN’T mean we’re doing something wrong or that we are off our path - and in fact it can actually mean that we’re doing the exact RIGHT thing.

The reality is, sometimes, despite what those who preach perfect alignment and ideal manifestation would have you believe - there isn’t an option that’s going to ‘feel good.’ 

There isn’t going to be a step that feels safe or comfortable. 

We’re not going to know how things are going to work out or have a clear direction we know we’re heading in with our next steps.

Sometimes, in this life, what we need to trust is ourselves to figure things out.

This is one of those difficult realities that a LOT of people in self help/spirituality/wellness shy away from - because it’s not going to sell books, tour tickets or make for a shiny Instagram post.

It’s not a popular concept to talk about, because it doesn’t fit into our current marketplace where what is sold is valued based on how well it works to take us OUT of our human pain and INTO immediate pleasure and a feeling of success. It’s not popular because it means talking about the ‘messy middle’ that ALL of us are going to experience in life many, many times as we grow, change and simply are affected by life - but that NO ONE wants to talk about because it’s filled with so much darkness, chaos, confusion and usually, pain! 

It’s not popular because none of us can really make a guarantee for anyone around when these periods of messy middle will end, or if they will end in that ‘amazing after’ we are striving for. No one can actually promise us a clear way through - and we aren’t a humanity that really likes to embrace the sometimes deeply uncomfortable realities of change and growth, but rather we want to believe that there’s a secret available to help us AVOID these feelings and experiences. 

The fact that there is sometimes no easy way and the fact that we are going to go through times where we are lost, feel hopeless, feel confused, where the unknown is overwhelming, where we are ‘failing’ but not sure of what to do about it is SO challenging to admit to ourselves and to surrender into, because it means that we have to accept that there isn’t an easy way - and again who wants to admit that? Who wants to accept that? Especially in this world that is constantly selling us on the idea that there IS a quick/easy/simple solution to all of our problems?

I want to explore this and the many reasons WHY this is reality for a lot of us at different times on our path, and I want to talk about how we can support ourselves through these challenging times without falling into shame/blame/guilt spirals that tell us we must be ‘doing something wrong’ or falling into continually looking for that easy exit/answer - which means we get stuck not actually being able to get THROUGH what we need to get through because we’re looking for a solution that doesn’t actually exist.

When we can embrace the tough reality that there isn’t an easy way when this is what we’re facing, we actually give ourselves a leg up in life - we give ourselves the ability to center and ground into the reality we’re facing, and we give ourselves the chance to find the ACTUAL steps that are ahead of us - and although they may not be what we want them to be and although they may not give us the results we want to get - we will find that they are the BEST things we have - and that in real reality the alternative wasn’t something ‘easier’ but rather the alternative was to exist in a state of pain looking for a step that didn’t exist and thus staying stuck where we are.

This is one of those really though things on the path of growth and maturity - accepting that the reality we WANT to exist doesn’t actually exist - accepting that the easy path we are looking for isn’t actually available - and being able to work WITH that and take the steps that ARE available to us, vs. continually RESISTING this idea and holding onto the hope that the easy path is going to appear if we keep fighting to find it.

Letting go of the idea that there is an OPTION to take the easy path, and that taking the hard path is the ‘wrong choice’ and accepting that there’s only the hard path, or no path at all. 

Letting go of the idea that if we just keep resisting what is, we can MAKE an easy way appear and settle into the challenge ahead of us - with all that that entails.

I want to validate the reality of all of this, and give you real tools to work through it - because to pretend that reality is something different, and to fill our tool-box with items that are only going to work in a reality that doesn’t actually exist doesn’t then mean the reality we WANT to exist will appear - it just means we are going to be ill-equipped for reality.

I want to give you some realistic vantage points and tools to apply when life gets hard, instead of telling you there’s always a way around it or an easy path, so that when life inevitably gets hard and complex, you have something to lean on for support - as unpopular, unshiny and unglamorous as all of this may be.

We are going to explore how to navigate life when life is just shit and hard, and how we can gently support ourselves in embracing this reality so that we can find the actual steps available to us vs. getting stuck in shame or stuck in looking for a way that can’t be walked.

Our Patterns Are A Thing

First things first - a BIG part of the reason we get stuck in life looking for the ‘easy way’ that doesn’t exist, is because we don’t tend to pay enough attention to the fact that our bodies and brains are ALWAYS going to favor what is comfortable, familiar and routine to us over what’s new, different and novel - at least LONG term. In the short term many of us seek out something new, stimulating and exciting - but when it comes to how we LIVE day to day, our minds and bodies want predictability and what we’ve always had - and I don’t think we pay enough attention to the realities of this.

Meaning, to actually change, to actually do something outside of what’s ‘normal’ for us, to be able to effectively choose new habits and ways of being is a LOT harder than most of us want to give it credit for being.

We have to remember that we’re the descendents of our human ancestors who, for the most part, were able to survive the massively complex environments they existed in with little awareness of how and why things worked how they did, via establishing patterns and repeating those patterns. 

The people who survived long enough to pass on their genes were the ones who were able to ‘program in’ ways of habitually and instinctually responding to their environments in ways that allowed them to get their needs met and avoid becoming prey without having to consciously think through every move they made for their entire lives. In other words the people who were able to develop knee-jerk reactions to life that allowed them to respond QUICKLY to the ever changing environment they were living in without having to do a whole bunch of thinking and reasoning were the ones that passed on their genes to you!

We also have to remember that for MOST of human history, we didn’t have the capacity to fully understand how life worked (this is obviously still the case, but in the past it was MUCH more pronounced and impactful), and a LOT of what was going on around us wasn't something we could properly figure out - so we relied on instinctive reactions to stimuli to keep us going, and we also relied upon our circumstances being FAMILIAR and thus PREDICTABLE in order to survive. 

When our world was easy to predict, we had a MUCH easier time staying alive. 

When the world around us was constantly throwing something new at us, it was more likely that we were going to be caught off guard by something, not have the tools or resources to figure it out and thus would end up being harmed or otherwise killed. 

It worked well for us to have programmed responses to stimuli that cut out the time it usually would have taken to assess our situation and make a conscious choice as to what we were going to do about it - because oftentimes life just moved way too fast for that to be doable. It worked well for us to establish patterns and habits we could just repeat and stay alive because of. It worked well for us to establish predictable circumstances that we were familiar with so that we could simply keep doing what we’d always done and expect that we would be ok. 

It worked well for us to be able to hear a rustle in the bush and be half way up a tree before we could figure out if we were being approached by a lion or not. Because if we had to take the TIME to assess every situation, we likely would have become dinner. The fact that we could be ‘triggered’ into knee-jerk reactions that took us OUT of having to UNDERSTAND what was happening was HIGHLY advantageous. This is even true in the fact that a lot of the time, that rustle in the bush WASN’T a predator - but rather was the wind or a friend approaching. Even if we ‘wasted time’ in some circumstances responding to a reality that didn’t exist - the benefit of being able to respond without thinking when it DID matter totally outweighed that cost.

Now, back to our current day reality - we have to remember/realize that we CURRENTLY have bodies/minds that get ‘programmed’ with instinctual responses to life, mainly in childhood but also as we mature, that, for better or worse, most of us end up simply repeating over and over again until the day we die.

As children, we are literally in a state of hypnosis as far as our brain-chemistry is concerned, and in this state we are taking in all sorts of experiences and stimuli, and using our CHILDHOOD reasoning to process what’s happening to and around us. We have to recognize that during this time we are living in a very much ‘alternate reality’ where we are fully dependent upon our caregivers, and where our caregivers are the arbiters of the reality we experience to a great degree. We aren’t having a one-to-one relationship with actual reality during this time - rather we are getting what we want/being antagonized/being taught who and what we have to be/not getting what we want all within the CONTEXT of what our caregivers think, believe and within the context of their capacity to understand and take care of us.

We are learning in this time that getting our needs met, that being safe, that being loved and being seen ALL comes from following the rules of our households of origin. We are learning what to value. We are learning what elicits a response of care and what elicits a response of neglect or antagonism. We are learning what leads to us getting our needs met and what doesn’t - and a lot of the time we are actually making assumptions about what is and isn’t right/what we do and don’t have to do based on our CHILDHOOD logic, not ACTUAL logic. From our childhood perspective, our caregivers are our SOURCE for all things, and to us it appears as though the only reason they would or wouldn’t provide for us was due to OUR BEHAVIOR - how much they approved or didn’t approve of us. We were learning that getting our needs met came through being loved and understood by those around us - and that being what THEY wanted us to be was the KEY to our survival. 

In this time we learn that certain behaviors get this or that response, and we then learn to shift and change ourselves based on the responses we are getting. We learn to tone down parts of our personality that make our caregivers withdraw. We learn to exaggerate parts of ourselves that get approval. We learn not to cry out when we need help if that gets us in trouble, we learn to hide and sneak around, we learn all sorts of patterns that tend to stay with us as we grow up as ‘the way we have to be’ and that turn into our INSTINCTUAL responses whenever we feel threat, pain or isolation - just like the person in the jungle running up the tree every time they hear a rustle in the bush - because for US the biggest THREAT we could face as children was the threat of our caregivers antagonizing/pulling away from us. We learned to try to do whatever we had to do to get that love and safety from them - and the more inconsistent it was, the more we are going to have habits that drive us to cope, numb and self sabotage as our childhood coping skills come online when we are in pain, trying to fix US in hopes that doing so will lead to us getting our needs met/having our pain taken away.

Instead of being able to look at real reality and what’s actually happening, we are caught in loops of feeling that pain means we must be being rejected, and that getting OUT of pain requires that someone love/understand us and then get us out of that pain. These are the loops most of us don’t even SEE that we’re in!

These are our BASE PROGRAMS that many of us don’t even realize are there - because we grow up simply feeling/perceiving that what we have been trained to do and be IS REALITY. We often don’t make the full transition into adulthood where we realize that acceptance/approval of others ISN’T the middle-man between us and getting our needs met anymore because we are now capable adults. Rather we hold onto the programs we got in childhood - how to be, what not to be, what is right and wrong, what’s acceptable and what isn’t - and we LIVE those out for the rest of our lives - whether they actually WORK in real reality or not. 

Many of our programs are based on trying to fit into the patterns of our childhood homes - rather than being based on what our actual needs are and what actual reality is - because in childhood the BEST way to survive and get our needs met WAS to be loved and approved of by our caregivers. Transitioning out of this is really challenging because again, the patterns we learn in childhood get programmed into our BODIES and our PERCEPTIONS get solidified as being ‘what reality is’ vs. being things we can QUESTION. This is why most of us then grow up to create relationship dynamics and lifestyle dynamics that are very similar to our families of origin - because those dynamics are the ones we can predict and feel safe within - even if they are painful.

Our bodies are constantly striving for what is safe and familiar. This is why we repeat our patterns over and over again and seek out situations that are familiar to us. This is why we believe that changing ourselves/our behavior is the MAIN thing we have to do when we are in pain - because in childhood, that is how life appeared to work! Doing the right behavior so that our caregivers would respond to us how we needed them to was our only tool for problem solving and getting our needs met - can you see how impactful this would have been for us?

Also, learning how the world worked from our caregivers was a BIG DEAL. We didn’t have the capacity to really understand that there were other ways of life that could work - and even work better - than the ways we were being taught by our caregivers. We couldn’t challenge the narratives we were being taught about what was right and wrong. We were again making up all sorts of stories about why we were being treated how we were and why what was happening to us was happening that may have had nothing to do with real reality but that matched our childhood understanding of life - and all of this means that again, we grow into our adulthood with all sorts of ways of life that COULD be challenged that we don’t even realize could be challenged!

In fact, studies have shown that by the time most of us are about 25 years old, we have our ‘base programs’ set - we have figured out well enough how to navigate life with what we’ve been given - and from that time forward, we tend to simply do what we’ve always done - repeating our patterns over and over and finding that we simply build upon them rather than being able to make any kind of significant change or shift to the way we are living.

We have our base assumptions about life, we have our experiences from childhood that we have processed through childhood reasoning, we have the expectations of those around us and the feeling that being loved/approved of is VITAL in order to be safe, and we have bodies that have ‘programmed’ in our perceptions and responses to life so that we can automatically change ourselves when we are hurting because our BODIES think this is the best way to get out of pain!

We have to remember that we have bodies that get programmed on a nervous system level, and that a LOT of what we do in a day isn’t coming from our conscious awareness and logical decision making, but rather is being motivated by - you guessed it - what we’ve always done. Because in the past, when we had a much closer, one to one relationship with reality and nature, if a habit we had was truly good for us, it was usually going to mean that repeating that pattern would be GOOD for us, and if something was truly not good for us - if it went against reality and thus against our best interests - we would EXPERIENCE the consequences of that quickly. We would have learned to do what was BEST and to just keep doing that over and over again because it actually WORKED in real reality.

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Let’s take a pause here and come back next week for part two!

<3

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