“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
– Audre Lorde
TODAY'S INTENTION
Today, let's review the role of our reactive patterns of behavior and respond to feel, heal, and release them.
In review,
🤯 patterns form around traumatic experiences
😶 patterns are based on incompleted experiences
🤖 patterns operate mechanically and unconsciously
😫 patterns operation creates suffering in our life
🧐 patterns serve to show us where we are not yet free
😅 patterns can be released with mindful awareness
HAVE YOU NOTICED?
When living in a pattern, attention is passive.
In passivity, we experience a sense of separation—a feeling of incompleteness. The incompleteness is not what we are but what happens when we are unable to maintain awareness. This sense of incompleteness makes us feel less inside, internally empty, or separate from our projected world.
Enter, our meditation practice.
Meditation is a time for remembered wholeness. Through surrendered stillness, we light the way back to who we are, which is always whole, worthy, and enough.
COURAGEOUS ACTION
We can do one of two things when a pattern formed by a traumatic pattern is triggered by a similar experience:
- REACT ~ Reinforce the pattern by shutting down to these feelings and look for something that will make us feel complete.
- RESPOND ~ Dismantle the pattern by opening to these feelings and moving into the mystery of being.
LET'S PRACTICE
Dismantling reactive patterns is a ‘simple' matter of feeling what wants to be felt:
- Take a reactive behavior, a position, or a belief.
- Hold it in attention until you become aware of the feelings and tactic understanding implicit in the position or belief
- Hold feelings and understanding until you see the attachments and the ideas on which the pattern is based.
- Courageously allow any waves of feeling to be felt.
- Enjoy the spaciousness as the reactive behavior dissolves back to open space with the use of attention.
AFFIRMATION
I am nourished by my true self.
(In Sanskrit: Om Sva Bhaksha.)
I turn my attention inward and offer compassion to what I see.
I see how far I have come and honor myself as a journey.
With positive input, I am strengthened.
With appreciation, I am lightened.
COMMUNITY CONVERSATION
Do you have a helpful method for responding, rather than reacting, when a pattern is triggered?
We'd love to hear in the comments.