Everything in your life is based on your perception of reality. What you call reality is only a collection of beliefs you have about how things are supposed to work. If you change those beliefs then your reality changes.
Your environment determines what set of beliefs you develop. The beliefs you hold determine the filters you apply to perceiving the world around you. The way you perceive the world around you determines the way you will interact and behave in that world. The way you behave and interact with your world shapes your environment and those reinforce your beliefs. Ad infinitum.
A belief is simply an automatic thought. It is a thought that you’ve thought so many times it is almost effortless to think it.
Your environnement begins to affect you the second you become a zygote. Fecundation has occurred and you now exist in physical reality. Anything that happens henceforth will influence your beliefs. Your development in the womb, the way you are raised by your parents, the attachement styles you take on, what teachers you have, what friends you have, all the suffering you endure, all of it shapes the way you will think and what you will believe. And beliefs are one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Thoughts have power. It’s about thinking and growing rich. The beliefs you learn as a child that helped you survive will surface in unconscious ways the rest of your life as long as you do not become aware of them. You can bet on that.
Those beliefs will manifest themselves through your behaviours and in your environment in ways you cannot understand. An interesting thing to note is that your being always tries to figure out how to become whole, how to become it’s best version. Every time you move away from this higher self, you feel resistance and suffer. Any time you move towards it you feel better.
Situations will keep repeating themselves until you realise what is going on and that something is repeating. And situations will keep getting worse and worse until you are fed up with suffering and decide it might be time to make a change. Once you become aware of your patterns, you can examine them and figure out why you are actually doing the stuff you are doing and if it is really the best thing for you to be doing. Or you can just choose, as most people do, to numb yourself out with distractions and addictions. Whatever floats your boat. It’s your choice. The dirty secret is that unless you face your shit you will either be miserable the rest of your life while you pretend not to be, or, if you perceive your situation as completely hopeless you’ll die from some disease or choose to kill yourself. I strongly recommend facing your own shit.
Very often it takes great amounts of suffering for you to be willing to even consider that maybe what you’ve been doing up till now hasn’t been working that well. In your desperation you open your mind to other possibilities. You start seeking solutions to your problems.
Rather than denying your suffering you decide to look straight into the eye of the storm and you feel terrified, but hey, you don’t have much to loose anymore because you’ve suffered so much that you figure you don’t really have a choice. You’ve already been there and done that. Time for something new.
The world that awaits you after you’re willing to go through the storm and have had the courage to feel your pain and face your shadows is quite incredible to your older self, quite literally. This is the Hero’s Journey Joseph Campbell talks about, this is the story every human must live for himself. It can be understood intellectually but it is only once it has been experienced that you really understand what it means. It has been called many names over the centuries ranging from Shadow Work, to digging into the unconscious, to facing your demons, to facing your insecurities, to airing the dirty laundry you’ve been keeping hidden from other people your whole life, including yourself. It’s time for you to start smelling your own shit and owning it. Staring at it wholeheartedly and in full acceptance. Once you begin this process you realise how liberating it is. A whole new world opens up.
Once you stop running and start standing still you get to experience what it means to be alive. You get to feel the terror, the shame, the guilt, the fear, the sadness, the blame, the self-hate, the anger and all the other emotions you’ve repressed your whole life. Once you really feel those then you get to feel the connection, the abundance and the joy you’ve hidden from by virtue of your ignorance.
I can only wish that you start looking at your Shadow. It is only when you start looking at your darkness that you are able to see your light.