How many times have you felt like you're stuck in a loop of time?
It's like no matter what you do to create change, life seems to continue repeating the cycles around you like a torturous groundhog day-esque treadmill.
This is something I hear about on a daily basis as a mindset coach. People feel stuck. You've felt stuck haven't you?
Without fail, whenever I show people what the underlying cause of the pattern is, everything makes sense and the cycle breaks.
Going Unconscious
We all live out our patterns of beliefs and perceptions on a daily basis as a way to grow and evolve.
Patterns are the result of having conscious perceptions becoming unconscious. Think of when you learned to drive. Initially, staying in the lane felt like it required all of your conscious attention let alone, avoiding other cars, indicating and navigating your way to your destination.
But once you nailed down being able to keep the car safely within your lane, you started to flick that ability over to autopilot (your unconscious mind). We do this with all kinds of things in life as a way to manage the overwhelm of daily life. It's a brilliant function of the mind. It allows us to develop these cycles or patterns of operation to make things a little smoother and simpler through each day.
These cycles are sometimes called habits.
Could you imagine being consciously aware of every single thing you do and decide each day? Yeah, just thought of it is overwhelming.
So how does this effect the way we live out our lives and the patterns of our bigger picture experience?
Re-enacting the Play
Here's a simplified version of what happens in the mind. At some stage in your life you experience an event. During that event you have a positive or negative perception of what happened. In that moment, you develop a belief that says "Situations like this lead to a bad experience." Moving forward, anytime you experience an event with similar characteristics unfolding, you unconsciously regress back to the original experience and react in the present moment the same way you did back then.
You reacting or re-enacting in the same way, creates the same outcome.
Now, imagine doing that every time the same situation unfolds, what do you end up experiencing? A pattern. A cycle. A habit.
Why does this happen in spite all of your efforts to change it?
Death Spiral or Life Lesson
Your original perception is polarised. You either see it as good or bad. The thing is that life's events are neutral, yet your perception has been polarised because of the way you've seen it.
If you've seen something as a negative or painful experience it's because you weren't looking at the valuable pieces or beneficial components of the event.
So what if the point of you recreating these events and patterns over and over again if it's happening for a reason?
That reason is to help you change your perception. Recreating these patterns in life, in relationships, in business, in work, with money, in your social life, with your health are all an unconscious attempt to resolve your perception of the original experiences and events of your life.
Believe it or not, your mind, your beliefs and your experiences are all trying to help you break your patterns by repeating the lessons over and over again until you get it.
Think of being in grade four. If you don't get the valuable lessons from that grade, you will continue to repeat the grade and it's lessons until you get it. Once you get it and you show the signs of actually comprehending the lessons, you graduate from grade four and progress to grade five.
The only thing is that this cycle of lesson-learning doesn't end in your schooling career. It never ends. Your learning, growth and evolution doesn't end. It's not meant to.
End The Pattern By Appreciating The Pattern
By balancing out your perceptions of the various defining moments in your past, you set yourself free from your patterns because you're now seeing the neutrality and value of the experience instead of getting stuck in the polarised judgment of what you thought you could see.
The cycles, patterns and habits that you feel that you're caught in, are all trying to help you learn something new about your past. They're trying to help you resolve and grow instead of stay stuck in your lopsided perceptions of the past.
To add a cherry on top, the patterns become increasingly obvious when you make the decision to step outside of your comfort zone. When that happens it's like your mind is trying to show you all of the patterns that are holding you back from following through with stepping outside of your comfort zone and going after your dreams.
Your patterns are not a burden. They're a gift. Find the value in them and appreciate the value of how much they've been serving you up until this point and that's the moment you change them.
You can't change anything completely until you see it and appreciate it.
Don't resent your patterns, see them as the little life-nudges you've been looking for. They're trying to help you.