Frozen Nowhere

One thing I learned, long ago, is that all action starts with the idea… the thought-form that you transform through pure will and guts to produce something physical. Sometimes, though, I think that my professor (all those long long years ago) missed something essential.

Or maybe it’s just me.

Change is epiphany motivated, that spiritual call or push or yearning that gets you thinking about WHY things are the way they are. It has always been the brilliant flashes out of nowhere, the soul sparks, and the sudden realizations that have lead to determining what lead to the state of affairs in which you find your life. They are the tiny squiggles of pure happiness as you realize new ways of looking at and doing things that guide you in the direction of change.

Cause and Effect are not always CLEAR in our lives

It is easy to get so caught up in EVERYTHING that we miss the connections between parts of our lives. Consequences sometimes feel like “karma” – the actions seem far removed from the resulting effect – and we keep doing the same things over and over. The patterns are created in our lives, road maps and recipes for activities, and it isn’t until something gives us pause to reflect that we see how these rote actions really affect us.

When a pattern starts causing a problem we seek answers

As long as things seem to be working away as we expect them to (good OR bad) we don’t pay attention to the patterns and assumptions that we make about ourselves, our choices, or our lives. It’s not always immediately clear that we are doing the same things over and over in our lives, causing the same things to happen over and over, until we finally notice “this has happened before”.

Epiphanies are sometimes described as lightning bolt moments, something so life altering that we just have to sit up and take notice. But epiphanies can be gentle, tiptoe to awareness, tap on the shoulder, a gentle hug or a shift of awareness that sidles up to you and infuses you with a need. They are our soul’s way of telling us that we need to slow down and take a look at what’s happening – and if all else fails our souls will try the “burning bush” approach that will DEFINITELY get our attention.

Sometimes we don’t accept the news until it beats us over the head with the obvious stick.

Lately my life has been ruled by a lot of sudden epiphanies – some subtle nudges, others more of the beat-over-the-head obviousness type – which have radically changed my personal life direction. I recognized that for years I have been rushing through my life, stressing about the things that I thought really mattered, trying desperately to make myself fit in SOMEWHERE… ANYWHERE, and I was so busy trying to cram the square-peg of my life into the round holes around me, that I wasn’t aware that I had tried the same thing over and over, always with eerily similar results.

What is that quote that everyone uses? Oh, yeah:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein) 

 

No wonder it was “crazy making” I was unconsciously leading myself around in circles, starting and ending in the same spots, and yet kicking myself for the very fact that I had not gotten anywhere. Every repeat of the pattern brought the similar results, and every time I would curse my “luck”… and then do it again.

Until, sitting with myself and listening to my soul-voice one night, I realized that there was a PATTERN there, and that I wasn’t learning my lesson and changing what I was doing. I realized that I was drifting through my life thinking that I had not been making decisions or choosing a path, but unconsciously I was just living out a pattern over and over…

AND GETTING THE SAME MISERABLE RESULTS!

Awareness of a pattern is just the FIRST step. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that noticing that there is a pattern at work is the same as solving the issue! It’s not as simple as that!

Once a painful pattern (because, obviously, if the pattern is working FOR us there is much LESS need to delve into what it is doing) becomes obvious to our conscious minds, it is necessary to observe the history of this pattern in our lives. Although this might sound like a waste of time, after all you now SEE that there is a pattern of behavior there, but reviewing past behavior not only reinforces the pattern in your mind, but might actually lead back to when the pattern STARTED.

For me the biggest epiphanies happen once I notice WHERE a pattern started and HOW I can do things differently. There isn’t much point in seeing a pattern if you are just going to keep repeating it because you don’t fully understand WHY you do things the way you do? The whole point is to see what needs to or can be done differently, make the change, and see the different results.

So how DO you go about finding the source of the pattern?

I don’t believe that my behavioral patterns are rooted in my DNA, or that they are a foregone conclusion set about at the moment of my birth by some divine plan. As a student of the social sciences I know that we are creatures of both nature (DNA, hormones, etc) and nurture (past, family, society) that sometimes makes untangling the knots of patterns extraordinarily difficult. Not IMPOSSIBLE, just difficult.  Sometimes it isn’t necessary to go all the way back, sometimes it is. Sometimes we need to understand the traumas that led to choosing to do things one way or another… sometimes it’s enough to know that there IS a pattern and that it has been repeating itself so that we can move on.

For myself, the process of finding the patterns (and the pattern sources) involves writing.

• I journal,
•  I blog,
•  I scribble madly,
•  I consult the tarot (and note it down),
•  I look back at past journal entries and blog posts,
• I ask friends and family.
• I make mind maps.
• I draw connections between words.
•  I create networks in my books… and pathways in my neural networks.
• I draw timelines.
•  I note trends in events.
• I use calendars to visualize time and events
• I note how I react to other people (journaling)

 

And I see how things relate, what events are similar every time (therefore part of the pattern), and which things vary (and therefore either part of other patterns or not necessary for the pattern). I then FEEL my way through the pattern, to see where the “red flags” came up, and what they were, and how they felt.

It is a process of trusting yourself, even retroactively.

And I see what happened, over and over. It hits me. Not just intellectually, but emotionally and, often, physically. And I suddenly BELIEVE the pattern is real.

Because I believe I can find patterns I also believe I can change the patterns.

The realization of what needs to change, what has been going wrong, and that you really can change  the pattern is the grain of the epiphany (an epiphany seed, if you will). For me (and YMMV) the power of the epiphany is not so much in the new realization, as in the new realization that THINGS CAN CHANGE… that the force of Will (mindful determination/intention) can change things in my life.

I am not powerless to a force greater than myself… not for MOST things anyway.

I am working on myself and finding my way through the maze of things I want to change in my life. Right now there are days where it seems NOTHING is right at all, where all I see are the patterns staring me straight in the face and telling me “you can’t change who you are”. I’m working on self-empowerment, and it’s a long and difficult process.

My patterns have controlled me in the past, but they don’t control me anymore.

 I have patterns. I have a lot of patterns. Some days the thought of fighting against the tangle of the patterns scares the crap out of me, some days I feel so beaten down that I can barely get out of bed,  some days I want nothing more than someone to tell me they love me (and mean it, not just say it because they feel they should.

Other days I feel like I can do ANYTHING, that I can change my world for the better. That I can find love, within myself and from another person, that I can better myself and my world, that I can be a change in the world and that the changes I need to make aren’t as hard as they appeared yesterday.

It’s all a journey… (and that’s an epiphany TOO)

Tags: as-I-see-it, communication, feelings, moving on, relationships