You know those parts of yourself that you don’t like? The snarky attitude you assume, the judging tone of voice you use, the way you procrastinate, the ways that you derail your progress when you get scared of change. Whatever your bugaboos are – do you embrace them? Or do you push them away, to the far edges of your awareness? Can you look at your bugaboos up close and hold them, honor them for what they are?
What are they, you ask? What in heaven’s name am I honoring?
They’re the ways you learned to keep yourself safe, contained, secure and out of the fray of whatever your life circumstances were when you were little.
They’re learned behaviors, not core self. They’re workarounds, not truth. They’re programming, not authentic choice.
Why embrace what’s not core, truth, authentic? Because you’re doing these things in spite of what’s core, true and authentic. These behaviors are a way that you’re insulating yourself from the world around you. They keep you at a distance from yourself and your authentic choice.
So? Why embrace them? Because these behaviors, when tucked into the seams of the energy body will operate without conscious awareness. You’ll find yourself snarking at a new friend who innocently touched a tender spot in your psyche. You’ll judge another person and not realize until later that you didn’t have enough information to make the judgment you made.
One of CK’s friends once sent CK an email with a posting for the ideal job that she had spent years wishing would come available. Now the job was available, and instead of rushing her resume to the organization, CK’s friend procrastinated her way right through the posting deadline. Her dream job fell through her fingers because she unconsciously sabotaged the opportunity to be truly fulfilled.
What happens when you unpack these workarounds and programmed responses and tuck them right in to your conscious awareness? I know, this part isn’t that great, but bear with me.
What happens is – you see yourself doing them routinely. They become noisy, in-your-face, do you see what you’re doing to yourself experiences. You then can consciously answer the question: How’s that working for you?
Yeah, uncomfortable and squirrely feelings abound at this stage. Conscious awareness’ll do that to you. Trust me, CK’s done her fair share of squirming in her life.
But what else happens?
You start to galvanize; your awareness helps you to decide that you’re ready to make a change. You trace the behavior back to the root cause – safety, containment, protection. And you’ll discover that you can’t help but embrace the little one inside of you, too. He or she needed those props and behaviors to hold on, hang on and hang in when the proverbial you know what hit the fan. You acknowledge that the behavior is a holdover from the there and then, operating in the here and now.
And then, in the here and now, you change it. You do the work of dropping the defenses, the workarounds, the protections that kept you safe and tucked in to a hard-shelled exterior.
And the new, pink, rosy self peeks his or her head out of the cracked and decaying shell and you’re on your way to a more authentic you.
Conscious awareness does keep you attuned to the details and the minutiae of your experience, and our authentic natures are readily apparent in the small things we do and say.
So rather than pushing your bugaboos into the recesses of your energy field, consider bringing them up close and personal. Yes indeed, get them right into your face so you can learn to do and say what you really feel. In so doing, you fix what you’ve embraced. And your little one inside you matures and lets your conscious self drive your interactions.
Embrace it to fix it – that’s the ticket. And keep your vital energy flowing!
