He said: ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Meaning: Deep-seated beliefs and parts of your personality that you aren’t even aware of are controlling the events of your life, and you don’t even know it. 

Until you make them conscious, you’ll just think that life is hard, that the struggle is real or that the world is an unfriendly place.

We call the most pervasive, most deep-seated, unconscious beliefs that pave the landscape of our lives “trances”, because: 

• they are constant and absolute
• they are so unconscious that they run in the background of all our waking — and sleeping — moments, and 
• they direct our own actions, emotions, decisions, perspectives and even the events and circumstances we create or attract.

Here are just two of the most common, most devastating trances:

1. The trance of scarcity. This is the trance of “there’s not enough to go around” and “life is hard.”

The trance of scarcity is opposite of the truth that, actually, billions of miracles occur every single day simply to support your personal, individual survival, existence and thriving. 

It also opposes the reality that this world is totally riddled and abundant with resources, that there are plenty to go around, and that actually the less we strain and struggle the more easefully the resources we need flow our way.

You can make your own unconscious trance of scarcity conscious by noticing the storylines in your head that chronically go like this: 

“I didn’t get enough sleep.”

“I never get enough sleep.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“The struggle is real.”

“Adulting is hard.”

“I’ve got to be perfect or act perfect or work my heart out or over-perform to keep Really Bad Things from happening.”

You can also notice how often you clench your teeth, grind your jaw, hunch your shoulders as though bracing for catastrophe or (and this used to be my personal go-to) hold your breath.

2. The trance of unworthiness. Any belief that you “should be” different than you are is a page from the book of unworthiness. The trance of unworthiness will convince you that it’s not okay to relax all the way, ever. Or that there’s a little bit something wrong with you, so you have to be perfect. Or that people will reject you if you’re anything but totally beyond criticism, 100% of the time.

This often shows up in perfectionism, self-criticism and the resulting symptoms of overeating, over-drinking and over-working.

The trance of unworthiness also shows up as what John Welwood calls the “mood of unlove”: the failure to understand that you are deeply lovable, exactly as you are. This can make it very hard to let love all the way in. 

Welwood says people with a mood of unlove “imagine that they are insignificant, unattractive, deficient, lacking in some essential way. And all human greed, jealousy, aggression, and violence arise from there.”

You wake up from the trance of unworthiness by radically accepting yourself, your history and your life and even the way the world is and works. 

This does not mean you can’t transform your life — and impact the world — in wonderful ways. 

In fact, the most powerful platform for changing your life is to practice being what one of my teachers describes as “satisfied with what is andeager for more.”

Waking up from these trances is possible. Just by making the unconscious conscious, you begin the process of learning to see the world very differently and upgrading your beliefs.

Upgrading these beliefs is a journey of moment after moment of clarity, as you see the inner narratives that have been guiding your life. (These stories might even have been controlling your whole family or culture, sometimes for generations.)

Upgrading these beliefs is a process. And it takes time. And you must be gentle and easy with yourself along the way. Because each step of this process feels a little like the end of the world as you know it .

Let me rephrase. Each step of awakening from these trances is, actually, the end of the world as you’ve known it if the world as you’ve known it has been cold, mean or struggle-filled. 

This can be disorienting, and can even make you occasionally yearn for the comfort of your old, harsh, limiting, stressful worldview. 

But then one day, or maybe a little bit at a time on a thousand different days, it will occur to you that you’ve acquired the ability to intentionally choose how you live your life. 

Albert Einstein laid out our options for choosing how to live very clearly. He said, “there are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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