Currently, we seem to be in a particular time cycle, in which people are choosing to revert back to their past associations, relationships, destructive habits and unfulfilling jobs.  I’ve noticed this particularly over the last three or four months, where people seem to be re-visiting the things that they once felt had held them stuck.  Even if they’ve been out of those situations for several years already, they are going back to them.  If not the exact same people, places or situations then ones that are so similar that they are almost exact. Clearly there is some learning that they require there, something has not yet been completed.

Some have said to me that they’re not really going back… they just want to see what it’s like to be there again.  It looks as if they’re testing the water but perhaps they are really testing themselves to check that it is no longer a fit for them or perhaps to check that the lessons have in fact been learned.

We know that the mind loves what is familiar – because it feels safe there – and the unfamiliar mostly feels unsafe.   We’re probably unwilling to step away and try something new because it IS exactly that – it’s unfamiliar, uncomfortable and we’d be stepping in to the unknown.  Most people don’t like that feeling let’s be honest, but if I’m not correct that they are going back to check their learning, then I am at a loss to explain why people would genuinely want to go back to a time when they were so unhappy and feeling trapped.  Have they forgotten what it felt like and they need a reminder or are they craving the familiar feeling of that environment or tribe?

But what is it about this time now in particular, that is calling so many back to potentially repeat painful situations?  Do we need to re-visit before we can move on?

The mind is hardwired to keep us safe and to move us away from pain and yet so many of us seem to stay in pain far too long before we are willing to move out and reclaim our freedom.

If we hold the belief that “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” then it will hold us back from stepping into unfamiliar territory – even if, with a little bit of courage that unfamiliar territory might actually lead us to the beautiful life we’ve seen in our dreams.

If we stay in a painful situation we’ll stay stuck, it’s quite simple.  These situations tend to not change much on their own and generally things only change when someone’s hand is forced. The pain that we’re feeling, whether emotional, mental, spiritual or physical is a message from our Higher Self.  It’s telling us that something is not right there… that we need to move away from it and make some changes.   More often than not, our fear takes over and that potentially liberating step towards freedom begins to look like a leap into a precipice – and that’s scary, so… we stay put.

Why does fear take over?
When we are not living in alignment with our higher self or our soul, there will always be a mild underlying feeling of stress in the body. Our natural state is to be connected and heart aligned.  This chronic state of stress will usually progress over time until we are living 24/7 in fight or flight mode and once we’re there, we can’t even hear the messages from our soul or higher self because our brain is muddled and foggy and we often just can’t see a way out.

By this point, we are fearing for our survival and may even have entered what I call the “deer in the headlights” stage which is actually more accurately termed as “freeze” – when we literally feel powerless to move away from the things that hurt us and we’re emotionally shut down.  This state is what the expression “paralysed with fear” is referring to.

Ideally, we need to act before we get to this point as once we’re here things will naturally deteriorate to a feeling of powerless, helpless and hopeless. It is a very debilitating state in which to live and it takes a lot of inner strength to get ourselves out of it. It can be done though and I’ve seen it done many times over.

The first step though is understanding – we can’t fix anything if we don’t understand how we got there in the first place – we need to understand what got us into that situation.  It’s usually that we’ve given our power away to someone else – disempowered ourselves and are unable to claim it back.

Once we have that understanding then everything changes – it all begins to make sense – the subtleties of how our power embed away to the point that we were not strong enough to stand up for ourselves, or speak our truth or follow our own inner guidance.  Once we have this understand, we can begin to change (or actually re-wire) our minds and claim our power back bit by bit, which then creates a completely different outcome in our life.

Change your mind – change your life.  Understanding is Power.

We always act the way we do based upon our beliefs.  Many of these beliefs connect back to fear.  Sometimes it’s a fear of losing something and other times it’s fears that are connected with trying to gain something by acting in a certain way but they’re all really about acquiring a sense of security – we need to feel safe.

We all have archetypal patterns that play out in our life and often when we are challenged we revert back to an archetype that we haven’t yet balanced or one that has played heavily in this lifetime.  Most commonly people revert to one or more of the four main survival archetypes: the prostitute, the victim, the child or the saboteur.  We often negotiate our power in exchange for security through the use of these archetypes and we can see this playing out through the patterns of our life because we all have them.  There is light and dark to these archetypes so they can also play an empowering role in our life once we understand them clearly and have moved out of fear.

Let me give you a few examples of how I’ve more recently seen people revert to their old patterns.

• One lady going back to a job she hates. This was a job that put this lady on 9 months stress leave yet she feels that she’s to blame because she let their employer down by getting sick.  She believes that it’s just that she was just not good enough to keep up with the workload so she must step up and prove herself to be more capable this time around.  She comes from a very high achieving and competitive family and as a child she was punished for under-achieving. Archetypes at play:  prostitute, victim, child, saboteur.
• Another lady is going into a new relationship that looks exactly like the last one. He talks down to her, abuses her, belittles her, ignores her calls and messages for hours or days but demands instant answers to his.  She stays because “it feels like they’ve known each other for ever” she says, and she also has a spiritual belief that they were meant to be together to accomplish something important because a psychic told her that, even though in her own words, “this relationship feels like sh*t”.
  She likes this familiar pattern in her life – it’s one she saw her parents play out and all her previous relationships have looked the same.  She is prostituting herself to avoid being alone and also playing the martyr archetype for this spiritual belief that she picked up, actually from a psychic in a health food store! She’s also a victim to this spiritual message, which, let’s be honest, we don’t really even know if it’s accurate or not.  The bottom line though is that she is unhappy in this relationship, unhappy in her life but feels she can’t get out of it because there is some spiritual contract.

• Another lady is going back to a spiritual teacher who severely abused her – energetically, psychically and emotionally. She’s going back because she knows those teachings and those words so well and everything there feels so familiar to her.  She believes this will be a new and exciting teaching for this new age now and she wants to be able to share this with others.  She has offered repentance and asked to be taken back into the fold, even though her training has to start from the beginning again now because “the Master” has dismissed her and she will have to work her way back up to be accepted into his inner circle again.
  Last time, she left the fold she was broke and broken, yet something has called her back.  She misses her friends there and this is common amongst these spiritual groups.  Archetypes at play here:  victim, prostitute, child, saboteur.

(Actually I have heard from three clients just this week alone, that they have never quite got over leaving their spiritual friends behind when their training was completed.  We all love to feel connected and being alone, without a tribe is one of our core fears, although not all of us feel it quite as deeply as others).

All of these involve survival archetypes in their shadow form.

Why do we want to revisit the past like this? – particularly if it was a past that was so painful?  Would we not want to move forwards and create a new, more empowering or liberating future? Is the unknown future so scary that we have to hold on to things from the past to make us feel safe even if we were not really safe there at all?

I strongly believe that we are not meant to live in pain and we are not required to fulfil contracts that feel like torture.  I’ve done a lot of work with clients to help them break these types of spiritual contracts but it all comes down to belief in the end and we are free to believe whatever we choose to.

Now let’s go quantum for a moment
If you walk into a room of mirrors, you will see yourself reflected back at you an infinite amount of times coming at you from all 360 degrees.  This is the amount of potentials that exist for you in the quantum field – well actually there are infinite potentials.  If you stepped into each one and experienced it just for a few minutes and felt into it, you would know immediately if it was a potential timeline that you would want to experience or continue to live in or whether you would rather step out of it into something that feels better.

Imagine if you could try it on for size and step out at any time.
Try to feel your way into a different potential future – what would it feel like?  What would it look like?  Who would be there with you? Does it feel good?  Is it somewhere you would like to stay – a feeling you would like to continue feeling?

Now compare this to your current life.

This is a holographic universe.  If you consider that we live in a world of infinite potential with unlimited possibilities…  could it be possible that this life you are living now isn’t even real?  Perhaps you have stepped into a reality to feel and experience it for a while but have got so engrossed in it that you forgot to step back out?

Did you forget to step out of something that doesn’t feel good to you anymore? Did you forget that you can change it – you can change your life and what you choose to experience?

In spiritual circles, it’s often said that we choose to come here – to experience this life here on this planet.  Some say that “we are spirit having a human experience” and that when we drop this physical body we go back to spirit and then we might choose to come again to experience something different.  But what if we could do that now?  What if we could have a different experience of life now, without having to drop this physical body first?  What if you could change your life right now?

Well we can.  As you read, or listen to this, there is a part of your consciousness that is hearing this and it knows the truth of which I speak.  It understands that we only have the now moment.  There is no such thing as time, as we know it, outside of this reality.  When we get outside of time, (which is really into the quantum field) we can heal our body in an instant.  In fact we can see our body healed – in our meditations – and we can see our beautiful happy lives – in our meditations.  Time passes in a flash – it can seem like hours that we were gone and yet it’s just a few minutes – or vice versa.  That’s because we are outside of space and time as we understand it.  We are in a different reality.  One of creation.  We create with our thoughts and feelings there.

But when we end our meditation, it seems we come back to earth with a bump.  We feel the weight of our body and the weight of our burdens and rather than holding our meditation visions as a potential that we can create with our mind and using the energy of feeling we can make manifest here in this reality… instead of that we slot right back into our life with acceptance that there’s nothing we can do about it.  But that’s incorrect.  There’s lots we can do about it, IF we have a mind to do it.

If there’s anything that’s not working in your life at the moment, it’s because you are giving your mind the wrong messages.  When we are resigned to an unhappy life.  Accepting of limitations and unable or unwilling to see a way out then we really are stuck.  Feeling hopeless and helpless is really debilitating but there is a way back if we want one.

I dare you to dream.  I dare you to imagine an alternative life.  I dare you to ask What if…? And then I dare you to explore and just ask your heart:

What is possible for me in this life?

And then commit to follow the steps that are shown to you, without fear.

Find your courage to follow your dreams and embrace a life of health and happiness.

From my heart to yours,
Karen