The Hidden Enemy of Your Desired Life: Avoidance E148
June 4, 2024
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Something that we all do is the hidden enemy that is holding us back from living our dream life. And today, you’ll discover it. And once discovered, you won’t ever look at your life the same way again. You’ll love it!
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It’s so hidden, that you don’t even know about it
Today I’m going to share with you something most of us are doing – but we are not even aware of it. It’s a hidden avoidance strategy that is stopping you from experiencing the life you truly want to have. This process comes so naturally to us but we are not aware of what we are doing to ourselves. We don’t know the consequences but ask ourselves why we are not happier in our lives.
I’ve rediscovered the most amazing metaphor to explain this hidden strategy. And this is thanks to rereading Michael Singer’s book “The Untethered Soul”. He describes this in such beautiful words and pictures and I remembered that I used this metaphor a long time ago in one of the first episodes. But I wanted to expand on this and share it again. It’s just too mind-blowing to keep it for myself.
The hidden strategy revealed
The hidden strategy that we all use and that I will share with you today has to do with how we “solve” negative emotions, situations or problems in our lives. We usually solve all of these by using the hidden strategy of protecting ourselves. But it’s actually getting ourselves into even deeper trouble and as the title of the episode mentions, it keeps us from living our ideal life. In order to understand how this avoidance strategy works, let’s get into the powerful metaphor.
Imagine you have a thorn somewhere in your body that is in direct contact with a nerve. Every time the thorn is touched or moved, it touches the nerve and you feel a lot of pain. And because it hurts so much, the thorn stuck in your body is a huge problem. You have trouble moving freely. You struggle to sleep because when you move, the thorn touches the nerve. You are even afraid of meeting people in fear of them touching the thorn. As you can imagine, this thorn is a pretty big issue and you have 2 options now to choose from on what to do about it.
What are my options?
The first option is probably the obvious one: by yourself or by the help of a medical professional get the thorn out of your body even if the process of removing it will hurt like hell. But then it’s gone and doesn’t restrict your life anymore. The second option is to make sure that nothing touches the area of your body where the thorn is lodged. This means avoiding any contact, movement or situation where the thorn could be moved and cause you pain by touching the nerve. Believe it or not, what we will discover is that the hidden strategy that we all use is Option 2 to do everything possible to avoid the pain. We don’t go for Option 1 because most of us don’t even know about it.
So let’s go down the rabbit hole of this metaphor and talk about Option 2 and the hidden strategy of avoidance. If you decide to keep the thorn where it is and keep things from touching it, then that becomes the focus of your life. Every time you go somewhere you have to consider how to get there without touching the thorn and feeling pain. To be able to sleep, you have to come up with a solution to not touch the thorn by mistake. So you build a construct in your bed that does not allow you to move freely in your sleep.
You “think” you have solved your problems
If you put lots of energy into it and your solution seems to work, you think that you have solved your problem. You might even be so happy and proud, that you tell others about your amazing construct. Maybe you can even sell it to anyone who has the thorn problem, too. Amazing!
Now you have your whole life built around this thorn and you don’t even realize what you have done. You just move in certain ways to avoid the thorn, you sleep just with your construct and obviously only in your own bed. You can’t go somewhere else where they don’t have this exact construct. But life seems fine – as long as the thorn is not touched. But you took care of everything and made sure it wasn’t.
What if something changes?
But what if something changes? Let’s say you meet someone and fall in love. This is of course an issue because you can only be touched in certain ways and you don’t really have space in your bed to sleep next to another person. What if they move in their sleep and touch the thorn by mistake? So you need to build another few constructs that allow you to be with another person. A new one for the bed where you are still fully protected and one for the daytime so you can live with another person. You know what, let’s imagine you came up with such an amazing machine that allows you to do all of that in one. So you never need to take it off and you are always protected.
Obviously, you had to change a few things in your house to be able to wear this machine. But at least now you can live your life. You can work, you can sleep and get close to people again. So you announce to the world: I have solved my problem. I am a free person. I can do whatever I want. This thorn used to run my life. Now it doesn’t run anything.
Your problems run your life
The truth is, the thorn runs everything in your life. It affects all of your choices, decisions and experiences. You have to consider where you go, whom you have around you, and in what situation you can be comfortable with your machine. It determines where you can work, where you can live and what kind of furniture you have in your home. In the end, that thorn is running every aspect of your life.
As you can see now, the life of protecting yourself from your negative emotions, situations and problems becomes a perfect reflection of the emotion, situation or problem itself. You didn’t solve anything. If you only attempt to protect yourself from the emotion or problem, it ends up running your life. But you are not even aware of it. You think you solved the problem because you avoid any situation that makes you feel negative emotions or reminds you of a challenging situation in the past. But it is not solved. All you did was devote your life to avoiding it. It is now the centre of your universe. It’s all that you care about.
Your negative emotions run your life
So let’s apply the analogy of the thorn to a so-called negative emotion. Let’s use guilt. Let’s say you have a very deep sense of feeling guilty. You have felt guilty so many times before in your life, that’s is now deeply wedged inside of you. It has become an automated, deeply programmed emotional reaction. It makes you very sensitive to certain situations, people and places. You are very conscious of all the kinds of situations, relationships and people that cause you to feel guilty inside of you.
You have trouble staying focused in your job because you have to keep a certain amount of focus to not do something that would cause you to feel guilty. So you alter your behaviours. You struggle to make connections with people because you don’t want to feel guilty for saying or doing the wrong. So you people please as much as you can, so nobody is ever upset with you and you don’t feel guilty for upsetting them. And when you take a minute to reflect that you are limiting your life to certain situations, places and people you feel guilty again for doing so.
Avoidance of negative emotions is not the solution
You see, your guilt is just like the thorn. It causes pain and limitation in all aspects of your life. And consider that the guilt is only one of many thorns inside of you. What other low-vibrating emotions do you avoid feeling because they are too painful? What about loneliness, anger, rejection, grief, hate or shame? We are walking around with lots of thorns touching our nerves. At any moment something can touch the nerve and cause you pain.
You have the same 2 options with the inner thorns as you did with the thorn stuck in your body. I am sure you agree that it would have been much better to take the thorn out. There is no reason to spend your life protecting the thorn from getting touched when you can just remove it in a small procedure. Once the thorn has been removed, that’s when you are truly free. The same is true with your inner thorns aka your emotions. They can be removed, too. But if you choose to keep them inside and do everything in your power to not trigger them, you will modify your life to avoid situations, places and people that would trigger you feeling these emotions.
If you avoid feeling lonely, you avoid going to places where there are lots of couples. If you are afraid of being rejected, you avoid getting close to people. If you avoid feeling guilty, you please everyone around you so they never get upset with you.
You might discover this hidden enemy just now
You might have never asked yourself how to remove the negative emotion once and for all. What you probably have done is ask yourself what to do to not feel it. What can you say, do or change in order to not feel the negative emotion again? Notice that you aren’t asking how to get rid of the emotion, no, you are asking how to protect yourself from feeling it.
And you do this either by avoiding situations or by using people, places and things as a protective shield. You are going to end up just like the person with the thorn. The emotion will run your entire life. If you do not remove the inner thorn aka the deeply programmed emotional reaction, you will end up responsible for living with the emotion and building a life in an attempt to avoid it.
Like I said at the beginning, you have just not been aware of this. It has never dawned on you, to remove this emotional reaction inside of you. Instead, the only solution you saw was to try to avoid feeling the emotion. You believed that this was your only option. But it’s not. It’s your choice now. You can keep compensating for the emotional reaction to avoid feeling it, or you can simply remove the emotional reaction and not focus your entire life on it.
You can remove your negative emotions once and for all
And please don’t think that you cannot remove this emotion. You can! It really can go away. If you are truly honest with yourself and you decide to let go of this emotion you can free yourself. Imagine talking to people openly and honestly instead of avoiding saying certain things to not guilt or shame yourself. Imagine being able to connect with people easily instead of keeping your distance because you are afraid of being rejected.
If you want, you can simply allow the emotion to come up and you can release and let go of it. Since these emotions are simply blocked energies from past events, they can be released. Until now you either avoided situations that would trigger them or you push them back down in the name of protecting yourself. These emotions are just part of the nature of being human. If you pay attention you will see that they are not you. They are just something you are experiencing. You are safe in there even if you feel the emotion. Feeling the emotion does not make you unprotected.
If you allow yourself to feel this emotion openly, welcoming and without any judgement, fear or making adjustments for it, you will release it. That is the small procedure that hurts like hell for a few minutes and then it will never bother you again. Now you have 2 options where there was just one before.
Learn how to remove emotions inside Energy Academy
If you want to learn once and for all how to remove these blocked energies and negative emotional reactions from inside of you, join my program Energy Academy where I teach you how to do it. You cannot even imagine how my life has changed since I released these emotions once and for all. I know my former self would have never been able to imagine how free you can feel without this junk inside of you. And this is not even the end. I work on releasing this stuff all the time.
Head over to Energy Academy to learn more. Choose option 1 instead of option 2. Choose yourself and not the automated emotion inside of you.
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