How to Get Out of Your Own Way

I’ve been in New Orleans the past few days with my husband and his 15 year old daughter who is on Spring Break.  I’ve never been to this city but I am always up for new experiences.

As an avid student of the human condition, it was another opportunity to observe people from all walks of life as I reflect on a question that I’ve been mulling over for myself and my clients. How do we get out of our own way?

Block after block of musicians, artists, shop keepers, tourists and vagrant travelers begging for money, filled the landscape.  Every turn produced different characters. Every turn a possibility for acts of kindness and the shadow cousin, altercation.  We observed the entire spectrum…polarity at its finest! Turns out, there is no better place to observe the playing out of my reflection than the energy of a city with hundreds of thousands of people from varying ethnicities and backgrounds doing so many different things.

Now before I can explore ‘getting out of your own way’ I must first touch upon what puts us there to begin with. “There” meaning smack dab in the middle of the path we wish to walk down, as an obstacle not an observer.

We came into the world completely whole, little bundles of love but we were born to parents, who as adults, were often deeply entrenched in the illusion of ‘not enough’, or their own lack of awareness. They had long ago forgotten their brilliance and instead navigate life with a sense of woundedness.  (Also a result of their childhood experiences and the choices they stacked on top of their reaction to those experiences.)

So we arrive complete and whole but as children we are very much dependent upon our parents for safety and security.  We also want to feel loved and accepted.  They do their best (given who they are and what they had to work with) but inevitably we leave childhood with wounds and shadows that unfortunately become our Achilles heel for the remainder of our journey.  Love and security often become hidden motivators that lie under the surface influencing everything we do subconsciously. Our adult choices than become tainted with an underlying need for approval, validation, self-esteem and worth.

The pieces of ourselves we’ve judged and made wrong, our shadows, influence how we project judgement onto others as well as highlight our sensitivities. We limit and restrict ourselves because acceptance means acknowledging the dark and hidden parts, the aspects that someone once shamed us about.

So all of this is quietly running in our operating system, influencing our perspective for how we perceive life and how we create in our life through choice.  Now, as adults we become responsible for bringing light to all of these aspects of ourselves so that we may begin to heal.  And this is where the difficulty lies for most people, taking responsibility and where our discussion now shifts from the physical to the spiritual.

Spiritually, there are some understandings that make the process easier to navigate. We can of course, push back, deny and rationalize why we are the victim but this does nothing but serve to keep us dis-empowered.

Understandings: We chose this incarnation. Where we began our journey (our family of origin) was very much determined by the choices we made in our previous life. That’s a hard pill for some to swallow, especially if they energetically aligned with a family that had a lot of abuse present. All things (including our relationships with others) are governed by vibrational resonance to a level of consciousness and energetic frequency. This is known as the law of vibration.

So where we started our journey says a lot about how we showed up in terms of alignment to our Divine nature last time around. Our childhoods were a continuation of that resonance. Now, as adults, we step into (hopefully) greater levels of consciousness and have the wonderful opportunity to begin to clear out the issues and wounds that have been accumulating for some time. This does require effort! If getting out of our own way were easy, we wouldn’t see so many people tripped up by it.

So what are some things that can assist us?

Awareness

As with most things in life, we can’t change something we aren’t aware of. Gaining awareness of how we get in our own way can be tricky because the habitual patterns we repeat may or may not be so easy for us to see about ourselves. Asking those who are closest to us can be helpful, just be ready to have a large notebook present to write it all down as well as your Soul Armor for the day. Getting feedback from others can bring out our sensitivity because the majority of us also suffer from an addiction to being perfect and being right. We tend to get triggered when someone brings up a perceived ‘criticism’ especially when that issue is part of our wounded self or shadow. Having this conversation with someone you trust and can be vulnerable with, is most helpful.

Ownership

Once we begin to expand our awareness about the insidious patterns we’ve been repeating, acknowledgement happens which will eventually lead us to ownership. It’s a very powerful thing to ‘own’ your stuff. Again, we can’t shift something if we’ve been busy playing the blame game or passing the responsibility on to others who ‘did this to us’. They would need to change for us to be able to change. That interdependence isn’t needed in the equation if we take responsibility and ownership for ourselves.

Action

With awareness and ownership on board, we can begin to start the action phase of getting out of our own way. If we start to pay attention to the reactive nature we have around specific triggers, we can more deeply explore these triggers with a therapist, intuitive or practitioner. There are many modalities that can be used to do this work. Obviously I’m a fan of the Akashic Records because you can connect in with the root cause of the wound, belief or trigger as well as energetically clear it so it’s no longer a part of what you resonate to. This opens the door for you to begin showing up differently when the same trigger presents itself. Now instead of ‘getting in your own way’ you can show up as a person who embodies their Divine Self Expression, who feels an internal sense of love and validation instead of seeking it from the outside. You can replace limiting beliefs of lack and struggle with more expansive beliefs of abundance and possibility.

Getting out of your own way opens up your life so you are no longer driving around with one foot on the break and one foot on the gas. Just think how effective you could be if all parts of you were moving you towards your full potential and expression!

To further explore ‘getting out of your own way’, please reach out to me for a complimentary Discovery Session at rebecca@yoursacredtruth.com