Soul guidance is a set of 5 easy steps to shift your focus so that you can have your heart center guide your path.
Anxiety and guilt wreak havoc on the human spirit and lead to breath-holding, inflexibility, and burning off of true soul guidance.
To see your way through these two habitual ways of letting fear separate you from your true self and true path –
1st. begin with a simple review of your breath,your senses, your emotions, and your muscles. What ever you find notice it – tension, flexibility an inner grimace, tightness –
2nd connect these – emotion to breath holding, and tightness or rigidity in movement
3rd Discern which aspects of your inner sensory guidance system reveals intuition and which reveal fear -here are the most common: Fear: pit of stomach tightness-fear, anxiety in chest breath holding-fear, inflexibility in hips-fear (trauma), inability to think clearly and utilize mindfulness-fear Intuition: quiet light voice in the center of your being-intuition – may be in you heart or your mind, this has a sense of ringing clear through your spiritual, emotional physical field – it allows openness, neutrality, space, and mindfulness.
4th Now feed the intuition
5th release the fear.
Breath is the key. Breathing through to trust and have faith in your knowing requires deep full breathing drawing into you the power of the knowing. Breathing through as you release the fear, allowing it to disconnect from you, letting go as you release the lack of power.
Simple and easy
If you shift your energy slightly, you can change your life in a big way! Try it with something small first to practice your skills of letting go – then increase your intention and focus until each day you simply adjust and release and follow your inner guidance
Love the simplicity? It’s all within you, pay attention when something seems to go in crooked or doesn’t feel right or causes you to withdraw – this is a message from your sensory guidance system. Respond accordingly. Engage your critical thinking and your mindfulness, and respond to what you discover. When you feel stuck, unworthy, anxiety or fear, breathe, and go through these steps to release the fear and embrace your inner knowing.
Listen to your true voice – the sound will be sure and firm, loving and compassionate, light and quiet.
Ignore the loud fear-filled, guilt-filled, anxiety voice. Avoid defensiveness deciding your course of action.
Choose the sweet loving inner smile of love and joy – live there and everything you desire will be at your fingertips to create.
This honors you and creates an opportunity for your inner being to guide your life and results in resilient, flexible powerful action.in love and light, beth
Habits and paradigms are tricky. A habit can be defined as something that guides you toward success or shifts you into a rut out of which you are always struggling to evolve. Paradigms give you your first structure of morality, right/wrong stories, and modes to interpret the world. Habits and paradigms work right up to the point they become obsolete. When you feel stuck or clinging to a habit or paradigm that feeling may be a sign that you need to birth through to the next way.
Challenging your paradigmatic perspective including your habitual reaction patterns allows you to discover a deeper and fuller experience in your relationships and work environment.
Not long ago I encountered a dead-end on my path. At least I thought that was what it was at the time.
I had gone as far as I could in the pursuit of something. I had reached a stopping point but not reached the goal. At least that stopping point didn’t look like my picture of the goal. I felt discouraged. I didn’t want to turn around and go back, but I could go no further.
So I sat down where I was. I stopped pushing. I looked around. I looked within. I began breathing and focusing on what I felt as well as what I saw. With my breath and focus the energy around me shifted. It was as if I was vibrating into a new level of consciousness.
As I sat there I felt inconsolable. I had become attached to the goal I was pursuing. At first my attitude didn’t allow for me to see anything positive. I could only see through the eyes of my disillusionment. Then I began to see through an attitude of gratitude. I began to notice some wondrous things around me: extraordinary relationships and family; time and freedom to pursue my dreams; support; love; space; an inner awareness. This awareness, breath, gratitude, and peacefulness filled me and opened up an inner imaginal world filled with plausible creations.
I realized the dead-end was a logical conclusion of my limited thinking and perception – an inner shifting of paradigms and habits.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t reached the goal, it was that my goal had transformed. I had shifted from pursuing an independent, proving, route to experiencing and developing a collaborative, integrative, holistic, path. This required me to shift my perspective, my habits, and my capacity to take in what was around me, to see through a different lens.
At once, with this realization, I noticed a beautiful path that veered off just to edge from my sitting place. It was a slightly elevated pathway that was not immediately noticeable, hidden from view when looking straight ahead or downward. It was light and airy, covered in a material that was vastly different from the path on which I had been walking. I could only see the way, through my new perspective of present moment now and receiving joy.
The hard work, perseverance, and hard choices, the trauma and difficulties of my youth had created a primary paradigm that anything of worth required this set of behaviors. And that I had to prove who I was, a doing, rather than being style of living. What I had endured to get to this point could only bring me this far on my path.
Only via these new lessons of ease, joy, laughter, love – that lovely concept of flow could I see the way through. An evolution of consciousness was the action required to take my next step. And this evolution comes from a releasing, a relaxing, and a letting go rather than a persevering, pushing attitude. The shift in consciousness creates the new paradigm in a quantum-style movement, rather than a linear movement. Each new paradigm births through its predecessor through a natural shifting of perspective.
If you are feeling stuck or clinging intensely to your habitual style of behaving, thinking, or believing; if you are feeling defensiveness, anger, anxiety or discouraged stop where you are, both metaphorically and physically. Take the time to feel into your ideas, your habits, your goals, and beliefs. Open yourself to the attitude of gratitude, notice everything that is working in your life, environment, relationships, and work. Through this space you will find an evolution in your consciousness so that you can shift your perspective and birth yourself into a new paradigm of living and being. in love and light, beth
Following these steps to increase awareness and allowing creates space to respond effectively and change your behavior.
An easy way to begin is the Stop, Look, and Listen method.
Stop multitasking or whatever action in which you are involved that may split your attention or where you feel you are being pulled along a track in an habitual thinking/behaving way; Look, or pay attention by bringing your attention to the situation at hand, pay attention to the actions of others and yourself and how relevant these are to the whole of the situation; Listen to your inner voice and the style, tone, timber of your and the other’s voice. Stop look and listen is focus, see, and hear in the present moment, the now. This is a simple unambiguous phrase that brings you into mindfulness.
It is a simple way to interrupt habit-reactive firing of behavior. This method slows down your reactive-linking behavior. Through present moment refocusing of your attention you can gather information and then develop a response that meets the present moment situation.
This recovery process can be applied to any habit that has gone awry. What’s really great about this set of actions and behaviors is how they help in every instance when a habit has simply overtaken your life as the driver of your behavior rather than the mechanism of your comfort or alleviation of difficulty.
Here’s how to decipher if you are dealing with a habit reaction pattern.
Check in with your senses and intuition. If you feel that the experience is familiar or a pattern then you may be participating in a habit reaction scenario. If you feel that you have trouble trusting that things can/will go well for you, then your early history of having to survive is coloring your current day choices/actions.
If you have an immediate feeling of anger, like someone has crossed a boundary and your feeling is charged in that the level of emotion (intensity) doesn’t match the situation or boundary crossing, this is a sign that you have been triggered.
In this instance, proceed in your actions with thoughtfulness.
Query yourself on whether your intense feeling is consistent with your overall experience of the person or the environment toward which you are feeling the intense reaction.
Stop, look, and listen – think caution in proceeding.
Invoke mindfulness and centered, present moment attention to the situation.
Work against the pull of the groove into the habit reaction pattern.
This is how you can engage the a more balanced attitude. Focus is the key. If you are in danger, utilizing your reaction skills to get out of the situation is paramount. If you are not in danger but rather caught in a habit reaction pattern then focus your attention on what you want rather than what you fear as the best response.
Use mindfulness to re-view the circumstances in relation to your emotion. This is the stop, look, and listen component, it will help you identify whether this is danger or not. In example, if a stranger is doing something that feels dangerous allow your survivor reactions to move at lightning pace. If however, the situation is with a loving partner, or friend – you need to view your emotion within the context of the relationship in present-time and with clarity and genuineness.
Awareness, Breathe, Wait it out, and Reveal.
The most difficult element of confronting a habit reaction pattern that is driving your behavior is the stopping part.
If your car is out of control, you need to stop its forward movement – this requires first, a recognition that you have lost control of the car, and then second, an action to gain control.
This awareness is key. Once you are aware you can begin to take back control of your thinking and behaving/actions.
Stop look and listen focuses you on increasing your awareness. Breathe, wait it out, and reveal focuses you on how and what to change. It requires a shift in how, and on what, you focus. It requires a re-view of yourself through a centered, mindful attention to yourself, your skills and limitations, what brings you joy and centers you in your best self.
Shifting perspective actually creates the power that you feel you have lost. It is a relaxation of the struggle to survive or fight and a gentle movement into the mindful, balanced living of life. Consider the simple action of relaxing in a hold, this action alone telegraphs to the holder to lighten his grip and causes laxity so that you can wiggle out of the stranglehold.
Lightening your grip, your need for habit reactive linking behavior allows you to move through situations and your environment in a mindful and relaxed way, still nimble in your attention and responses to act if necessary to a dangerous situation but not reactive, held or tight in your nature. in love and light, beth
Having worked for many years with individuals struggling with various forms of anxiety I have identified a coping mechanism I call habit reaction patterns to manage anxiety.
This is a coping strategy that starts out creating a sense of control over their internal anxiety. The individual will describe that indeed the habit reactive pattern in some way saved her from an extraordinarily stressful situation or circumstance. Unfortunately this anxiety management method produces a false sense of security and overtime the habit reaction pattern serves to drive the individual’s overall behavior and results in a diminished sense of empowerment and a lack of security.
Habits are highly desirable to create structure in a meaningful way. When a habit degrades into a habit reaction pattern it becomes undesirable . Habit reaction patterns lack present moment authenticity. These are reactive in nature, a set of unconscious, unthinking, unchallenged, automatic reactions.
The patterning pulls you into a specific way of behaving. Think of how the groove of a rut pulls you around a circle. It takes an extra exertion of energy to jump out of the rut and choose your course. The habit reaction pattern acts like the groove or furrow, it takes you into the behavior Habit like any reaction in an automatic, non-present-moment-thinking-way (unconscious).
This reaction is not responsive to the present moment situation, it happens in a non-intuitive non-mindful way. Habit reaction patterns can be triggered into reaction; where a trigger acts like the groove that pulls a person into a set of interpretations and actions (reactions) to survive, or to solve a historical problem, or quell anxiety.
Tied into the habit reaction pattern is a highly fine tuned trigger-detection mechanism.
This mechanism is super-sensitive to interpreting danger, hyper-vigilant, hyper-reactive.
The trigger may be linked to an earlier situation in which you felt in danger of severe harm.
The experience trips the trigger and then the habit reaction pattern fires into action – forcing you to behave in a specific way – even when you cognitively feel you do not want to or feel it is inappropriate.
When this set of feelings happen, the habit reaction pattern is now driving your behavior rather than your proactive spiritual-cognitive-behavior processes. You are no longer in the driver seat of your life. It is as if you are simply watching from behind a glass window, rather than responding to the specific, dynamic multi-level issues at hand. You feel powerless to stop yourself from reacting in the manner prescribed by the habit reaction pattern.
In order to get out of the rut, groove, or habit reaction one has to invoke two things, awareness and allowance. This allows for a sense of present moment empowerment and mindfulness.
The habit reaction pattern behavior may have been highly effective when you first developed it. In fact it may be the best thing you could have done to respond to the original anxiety conflict that set of the patterning habit. This makes it difficult for you to let it go.
You may feel like it is the thing that sets you apart in some way or gives you an edge in some way. This internal feeling creates an attachment to that style of being in the world, such that confronting the need to eradicate the ineffective habit reaction pattern may be thwarted. This sets up a difficult and challenging cycle, you continually, automatically, invoke the original survival mechanism without awareness that you are actually diminishing your power through the reactive mechanism.
The most healing thing to do is
to accurately identify how the patterning was beneficial
to accurately identify that the habit is ineffective in your present moment situation and management of anxiety
to place the behavior into your past as a once successful, but not currently successful pattern of reacting to anxiety
and disassemble the coping strategy and its automatic reactive power.
Habits are developed through a series of trial and error. A need arises, a behavior appears to resolve the identified problem and viola a habit develops. This is an excellent mechanism of comfort and structure or meaning-making in action. It is a part of how we develop, learn and integrate, structure behavior. It’s highly effective model to make sense out of the competing needs in society.
When this mechanism goes awry. The insidious quality of a habit overtaking as driver of your behavior is subtle.
First, there is a sense of invention,
then a settling-in of success in using the habit to resolve a conflict.
After a time the habit begins to drive the situation. The action becomes an automatic reaction of if this then that.
Once this internal directive becomes hardwired the habit drives the set of responses available to you in a given situation, so it becomes a reaction, like the jerking of your knee when hit by the doctor’s mallet – kick straight out. This automatic reaction creates a hardwire rut that drives your behavior.
Any awareness process can assist you in getting out of a habit reactive pattern coping strategy toward anxiety.
Mindful meditation,
the practice of Yoga,
Journaling,
are all excellent practices to increase centering, present moment focus, and balanced neutral response to anxiety.
Use the stop look and listen method to increase your awareness.Once you have developed awareness, use the breathe, wait it out, and reveal process to increase your tolerance for allowance.
These two together, awareness and allowance, create space to respond effectively to your anxiety and change your behavior from ineffective habit reactions to mindful responsiveness. You will move from a need for control and a sense of insecurity to self-confidence and a sense of inner empowerment and strength. More on this is the next few blogs, in love and light, beth.
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