Hello and Welcome!

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