What Choices do you make at your Trigger Point?

This month I want to write about something that has been occurring in my life on a regular basis. People are getting stuck in their lives and falling back on their ‘known’ story and so often such stories are full of drama because of the origin of those stories. This problem is occurring with people who are becoming conscious and honestly sincere in their evolution towards love. I believe that there is a mirror here for me and I’m exploring this as it isn’t just one client and I’m feeling stuck with my clients who are stuck! Oh MY!

I have been involved with several shows on ‘The Story of ME’ and it was the subject of my last blog.  And I have had several more shows since then with Christopher Papadopoulos, Thomas Campbell, and Jean Adrienne where we have also discussed this topic. So, we understand that this ‘story’ is not a representation of our truth, but really our story is from our perspectives that are due to our experiences that come from our egoic thinking mind. It typically has some level of insecurity, lack of self-confidence, inability to forgive or our trying to justify our actions or emotions. But we get stuck in the process and fall back into our ‘stories’!

What I want to explore is the moment we have that will allow us to make an easier shift towards getting out of our heads and into our bodies, heart and gut, where we can make present moment decisions that will not expedite our journey into full drama. That moment where we are first triggered. That moment when we are anxious or first feeling insecure, whatever the initial trigger is. That is the moment when we can head off the full blown drama attack.

So what is our ‘thinking mind’ really doing in that ‘trigger moment’? We’re trying to control and manipulate things so that they are the way we want them to be or believe we want them to be. But really the only thing we have any sort of control over, or have some sense of being in charge of, is our emotions (which our thinking mind doesn’t believe because it doesn’t deal with emotions but only thoughts and the memories of emotions).

So in the trigger moments I always say there is a choice! When that first moment of our trigger happens we can still make a rational choice. But after that we are in full blown attack and our rational mind is nowhere to be seen! Sometimes we just have to ride the wave and hope to come through the drama attack without too much damage.

So what is the choice you ask? It is to acknowledge we are feeling anxious. And to acknowledge that this anxiety creates a deeper fear within us that isn’t based on truth but rather a perceived misunderstanding that has been accepted as truth due to our past experiences. It means we can choose not to do the thing that makes it worse … you know grabbing food to fill the void or doing the thing that has the impact to push you to breaking point. It is the moment we can make a choice before the choice is appearing to be taken away from us. (The choice isn’t really taken away, it just feels like that.) It is that moment when we still have a choice to acknowledge that we are feeling uncomfortable before going over the edge. And if we can bring awareness into that feeling of discomfort we are conscious enough to bring ourselves into the now moment. Christopher Papadopoulos offered an amazing meditation in our last interview on this exact topic, it will allow us to move into our bodies to release the anxious energy. A must listen.

What I have learned from this whole experience was pretty impressive.  One of my longest term clients (and dear friend) who probably has triggered me the most due to the fact that our ‘stories’ are the same [we were both abandoned at a young age] inspired me to look deeper into this. I realized that what our ‘thinking mind’ is really doing is trying to put the blame or projecting the problem onto someone or something else; the closest thing for me is my health; for her it was an ex. These represent what we need to heal or accept within ourselves.

You see, we project our deepest core issues onto others when our core issue is much deeper and goes to a time when we weren’t conscious enough or emotionally mature enough to understand what was happening. I’ve been abandoning myself by making the wrong choices in my diet (filling the void with poor choices) and not being able to build my energy again. My client/friend had been making her issues about someone else when in fact the problem is never someone or something else… it is always our own issue.

So in a way our ego is just helping us heal or accept a deeper truth but our thinking mind goes to lay blame elsewhere! I think this is a normal response. It is just that if we can see the bigger picture then we can understand that our patterns and ‘stories’ were created before the age of 7 – before we were emotionally mature enough to comprehend what was happening, and unable to see that it wasn’t personal. As a spiritual Being we are able to understand mentally most concepts and feel into our emotions but as a child we had no reference point: we could only establish our own misunderstandings. And since we felt dependent on our parents we concluded, from a conceptual basis, this must be love.

To heal these wounds we have had to make different choices… and when we don’t realize that we continue with the same ‘stories’ as created by our young selves. We are unaware that what is happening isn’t just a re-enactment of the same core fear: these incidents continue to play out to assist us to create a different story.

At any point in the process we can create another story, choose to respond differently, see that it isn’t the other person or thing that is the problem but rather a belief we made before the age of 7 that is showing up to help us grow. Can you make the decision then – next time something ‘happens’ to you – to see the ‘bigger picture’ and choose to respond by becoming conscious and present?