Hi Kelli!
I find myself struggling with relationships and dating. The fact that I have never been in a relationship keeps being my reason for why it would never happen in the future either. Going on dates brings up a lot of fear and negative emotions that I just can’t seem to get rid of. In other areas of my life I have felt that I have gotten what I wanted, and I see now that I took aligned action and that I was also being fine if it didn’t happen the way I envisioned or at all really. I just can’t seem to do the same with the fact that I want to be in a relationship and eventually start a family. I feel like it’s impossible to detach. It’s frustrating because I know what I’m doing “wrong” and what I should be thinking, but I struggle to believe it.
So, even though this question talks about relationships specifically, I will discuss the core considerations in a broader context since the main ‘problems’ are the same no matter what we are focusing on in the external world, no matter what the particular ‘want’ seems to be. The shifts in thinking we need to make, the things in the mind we need to explore and such will be the same no matter if we are talking about relationships, money, professional pursuits, etc…
The Challenge of Not Using the Past to Determine the Future
One of the hardest things about really shifting our thinking around a subject and believing things have the potential to change is breaking the deeply ingrained habit of letting current circumstances dictate what we believe about what future circumstances can be like. And the longer things have been the same, the harder it can feel to do this. Your mind uses your experience as it has been up to this point as some sort of ‘proof’ that it is not possible to change, that any thought system that says they can change is a load of crap basically.
And this is where the role of conscious choice comes in…something I talk about often. No matter what teachings you follow, no matter what you do in your ‘journey,’ at the core this work is transitioning yourself from one thought system to another–’ego thought system’to ‘spirit thought system’ or whatever you want to call it.
And in this case, we are being asked to choose between two different ideas.
We have the ego idea telling you what you want must not be possible because you haven’t gotten it yet, and it is probably because of all these external factors that have nothing to do with the contents of your own mind–the fears, the limitations in thinking,etc… The ego thought system will use your experience to prove it is ‘right.’
Then we have the ‘spirit thought system’ telling us our experience up until this point is irrelevant and things can change at any moment–the past has no bearing. ‘Spirit thought system’ will tell us the issue is within our own mind and there is something within us that is resisting the thing we want, that may feel conflicted about getting it. It will tell us we have unresolved emotions we must work through to create space for this thing to materialize.
And one of our biggest problems is we keep deferring to the ego thought system. We keep pointing to how our life has been up until this point to justify thinking the way we do.
And believe me, I get that it can be hard. We are very used to basing our thinking on what we observe outside, on what has already happened. But that it is hard is not really a valid reason. We have to be honest with ourselves about how much effort we are putting into trying to choose in favor of the thought system that serves us, how much we are still indulging the ego thinking.
And this isn’t about beating ourselves up if we find we have been falling woefully short–it is just about honest self-reflection, something that is absolutely crucial for anyone truly committed to changing their thinking and perceptions in any meaningful, lasting, genuine way.
One of our biggest problems in this ‘work’ is nothing more than a stubborn refusal to release the ego thinking, to keep seeing things through its lens. It is very crafty and it is very good at getting you to justify why you should still see things its way no matter the pain and frustration that results.
It highly values being ‘right’ and given the way it thinks and how it comes to its conclusions, it doesn’t have a very hard time at all convincing us it is ‘right.’
But is it truly ‘right?’ There is another thought system that would answer with a very emphatic, a very resounding ‘no.’ And again, herein lies your core task–choosing which thought system you will let guide you.
Exploring the Attachment
Awesome question-asker mentioned that in other areas of life, she seems to have been able to receive more easily. She was more in the ‘flow’ with the process, she didn’t feel any strong attachment to particular outcomes and the like.
That she seemed to be able to receive things more easily to which she had less attachment is no coincidence. Attachment is a core problem to which we must tend.
All our ‘wanting’ is coming from the ego mind–spirit mind could give two flying figs about our worldly experience. And the ego mind always wants from a place of lack, from a place of absolute need. We have all these bad feelings it wants to make go away, making pain-minimization–not well-being maximization–its core motivator.
And the more pain we have, the more it believes the answer to this pain lies in getting something in the external world, the more attachment we are going to have to this thing. And the more attachment we have to this thing, the more challenging it will be to apply spirit-thought-system perspectives to that subject, to that area of our life.
For example, it will be very resistant to the idea of you detaching from this thing emotionally and accepting its absence in your life is not really the true root of your feelings. The more the ego mind wants something, the more fear it has around you adopting any way of thinking that may lead you to not want it anymore. It has an agenda and it does not welcome anything into your world that may interfere with said agenda.
But we must understand that our attachment is not serving any positive purpose. It just makes us sad, angry, anxious, depressed and fearful. And let’s say for argument’s sake that after some deep-dive into your mind, you do decide you no longer want this thing. Then who cares if it never happens? Who cares about not getting things they don’t actually want?
But in reality, you probably still will want the money, the relationship, the better job or whatever else. But it will feel more like a preference than some white-hot burning need on which your entire world depends.
You will be able to better handle the part of your mind that may still feel some degree of attachment to the thing–its thinking and the feelings its thinking has the potential to create will not feel as dominant as they may now.
In circumstances like this, it will be next to impossible to start feeling differently about your circumstances and changing how you may be approaching your pursuit of whatever it is you want, without exploring what lies at the root of the attachment.
Why do you want what you want so badly? Why is not having it so upsetting? What is the story there? What is this whole situation making you think about yourself? If you never got this thing, what would that mean? What feelings do you think getting it would take away? What feelings would it give you? What feelings are you attributing to its absence?
The more brutal honesty with which you can answer these questions, the more quickly you can make some meaningful shifts in your feeling state.
Letting Yourself Feel All That Has Been Building Up
When you have really wanted something for a long time and you still don’t have it, stuff is going to build up emotionally. Oftentimes we are cut off from the extent of the feeling, the strength of it. It has been pressed down pretty far and we may not realize how frustrated we are, how sad we are, how angry we are, how anxious we are.
And because we may not be feeling the feelings strongly at the moment, it is easy to say that we don’t have super-strong emotions about our circumstances. It is easy to downplay the emotional impact of how things have played out thus far.
But like I said before, everything we want in the world is because we see it as a solution to some sort of emotional pain we are experiencing, so there is something there. The ‘amount’ of pain may vary by person for sure, but for most of us, it is probably pretty substantial, or else we wouldn’t feel such an attachment to getting the ‘thing.’
So be open to letting that feeling up. Maybe it has already been ‘up’ and you have been trying to ignore it or distract yourself from it. Don’t do that anymore. They are just feelings, they can’t truly harm you in any way.
If getting what you want is so important to you, this embrace of them will play a key role in making that happen. Ideally, the core motivator for this ‘purge’ is improving your emotional well-being but I get it–most of our inner work is driven by a desire to improve our outer world. It is merely a means to an end. This is something that we definitely want to shift but that is a whole other topic I won’t get into here.
The only way to more deeply internalize teachings and perspectives that will serve us is to create space for them, and feeling our feelings creates that space. If they can’t move down into that deeper level of our being, they remain nothing more than concepts we may intellectually understand and accept, but have no material impact on our lives.
When we let the bad feelings fester, whatever beliefs created them remain dominant because the feelings reinforce them. And then the pain remains because the ideas creating it are still the ones ruling our mind. It is like a vicious cycle and the feeling of the feelings is the only thing that can break it.
Exploring Conflict Around What You Want
The idea that we may feel conflicted about actually receiving the thing we want is one that is easy to dismiss. We clearly want something very badly and we are clearly very upset without it, so the idea we may not be fully on board with this manifestation seems a bit silly to say the least.
But you have to remember that the egoic mind is all sorts of messed up. It has all sorts of weird fears and beliefs that actually can make something that seems very desirable on the surface seem very undesirable on a deeper level.
And this part of your mind may very well indeed feel conflicted about the money, the relationship, the weight loss or the new career path.
When exploring these potential conflicts it is very important you not judge or dismiss anything that comes up. Much of it may seem very cliche. Some fears may seem childish. Some limitations in your thinking may be ones you intellectually understand you shouldn’t harbor any longer based on all of your ‘spiritual knowledge’ but alas you still do. Some things may just seem outright absurd or make no logical sense at all, but that is something that is clearly in your mind.
Your financial struggles may be linked to feeling guilty about receiving money. You worry that if everything in your life goes well, something bad will happen to you so the ego mind prefers to keep one major part of your existence an ongoing struggle–it keeps you safe somehow. You resist a relationship because you fear intimacy.
I guarantee that if you do this exercise, you will find at least one conflict, likely many more than that.
Have a question and would like my two cents? Shoot me an email at kellicooper1102@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you!
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