?? Overcoming Conditioning and Programming ??

Hello, my friends!

Today, I share with you a piece from my 16-wk pathways in consciousness course. This is an excerpt from the week 11 lesson on Understanding Personal Power.

I hope you enjoy!

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Overcoming Conditioning and Programming

So, what is conditioning?

How does it work?

The best material that I’ve found thus far on personal power comes from the Toltec teachings.

One excellent book on this aspect of conditioning in relation to personal power comes from Don Miguel Ruiz’s book, A Mastery of Love.

I would highly recommend you read his work yourself to gain benefit from this teacher’s perspective.

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For now, I will say that we learn a set of rules about how we are supposed to behave.

We learn them as soon as we begin interacting with other humans.

We learn that some things will cause us to be judged or not accepted.

We learn that some things are not permitted, and some things are done only in one specific way.

We learn, through emotional pain, when we have done something that will cause us to be unloved, to lose that sense of loving connection which is fundamental to all human beings and closest to the surface in innocent children.

We may do something that father yells at us for, and then we learn that to do this thing hurts.

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If we suppress that pain and story, if we are forced to behave a certain way and deny our emotional experience, we will push it, and the story of what happened to us, down where it doesn’t hurt so much.

Down where we can’t see it or feel it so clearly.

But it will still be there.

And whenever a situation similar to the original comes up, we get a dose of that same pain we felt way back then, made confusing and more intense because of its time growing in the darkness of our subconscious.

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While this story is suppressed and linked to emotional charge, it will shape how we see the world.

It will cause us to make certain decisions and respond in certain ways.

It is a form of conditioning by pain, emotional pain that was unprocessed because our natural expression has been restricted.

So conditioning, which we could just as easily call programming, happens unconsciously as we learn lessons based on our experiences.

We learn to not do that thing because it will hurt, but then we forget about it.

The initial impulse transforms into a habit, and the habit transforms into a way of life, a way of experiencing the world.

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In these cases, we are not in our sovereign state.

We do not have free will.

Instead, our will has been colonized, much like the will of an addict is colonized by their relation with the drug and the experience it offers.

So, we each come to a point in life of recognizing that we are conditioned and that we have been using our will to create experiences that reflect this conditioning.

Whenever you encounter an experience in life, whether you enjoy or dislike that experience, ask yourself who chose it.

You did, of course. But what stories, what expectations, what lessons moved you to choose this experience?

Ask yourself, how did you get here?

What choices did you make along the way that led you here, and what values were you serving with these choices?

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Our conditioning is unconscious.

That means it is invisible to us except upon self-review.

So, remember how powerful you are.

You have created this situation, manifested it, navigated to it, contributed to its creation.

You got yourself here, a co-creator in partnership with the universe.

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So anytime you find yourself somewhere you don’t like, remember to look within, critically examine your stories and expectations.

Seek out your unhealthy conditioning, all those inner stories and feelings that move you to create situations that you no longer wish to experience.

Learn the lesson in the old challenge, and it will offer you both power and freedom.

Power, in the piece of gold it presents, the wisdom, the clarity, the compassion, that comes from integrating a challenging experience.

Freedom, in that once an experience is integrated, it no longer calls the shots from behind the curtain.

Freedom, in that you are now released from the recurring cycles of outer activity which have forced you to play out this inner story again and again.

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The simple beginning to bringing your conditioning into view of the conscious mind is to ask, in each moment you notice, who’s choosing?

And then, consider what you are choosing right now, what you want, and how you can get those two things more fully aligned."

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I hope you have enjoyed this discussion of conditioning and programing.

If you would like to explore further, feel free to reach out. In addition to teaching this in course, I have a list of excellent reading recommendations for those who prefer to do their own study.

Thanks and blessings, beautiful beings!