Man in the Mirror PROJECT: Breaking Patterns/The Emotional Body

There are four lower bodies we wish to focus on in Man in the Mirror PROJECT.  One is the emotional body which is tied to our thoughts.  If you've ever seen "What the Bleep do we Know", you might remember the above clip.  It is our tendency to re-create feelings from previous events and from our childhood.  We are mostly living from our past experience or thinking of our future.  The clip above actually demonstrates the way the energy is transmitted, creating pathways and patterns in our energy fields.  The more they are traveled, the more engrained  that pattern becomes.

We can spend weeks on this subject alone, so lets start with an event I witnessed in my own family.  Like many families we had alcoholics in ours.  Generations of alcoholics and in the middle class family, having a drink equates to "relaxing" or having a "good time."  In many alcoholic families the abuser of the alcohol often becomes emotionally unstable creating a chaotic environment for the rest of the family.  Children are often the witnesses and when they grow older they have already been engrained with a sense that family, love, and home equate to chaos.

In my case, I was at a point in my life that I was able to watch.  Because the person I'm speaking about wasn't my mother or father, but was in my family unit, I was able to remove myself enough to recognize the patterns at play.  I knew the history of the family and when this person in question was met with a sense of lull in her life she literally began to create drama.  It was so specific in nature, I was actually able to pinpoint the next outburst.  Whenever things seemed peaceful, I knew the next outburst was about to erupt.  That simply was not her "normal" state and creating drama made her feel more at "home".

Like most people I know this person never realized why or what she was doing.  Most likely she blamed everyone else for the chaos in her life, never realizing it was she who created it and more importantly why.  In this case she had a habit or an addiction to drama.  It made her feel comfortable and every time she would enter into the cycle again, it re-enforced the habit.

Taking this one instance as an example, how would we begin to unravel the chain of events that lead us down this path if this is indeed something that is happening with us?  If you watch your thoughts today, try to notice what kind of recurring pattern they may be generating that you may be unaware of.
For instance, try to notice if you are trying to find something wrong in your life to think about.  Thinking about someone and how you should make them "pay" for what you perceive they have done to you or even thinking about yourself and how fat you are, how you'll never lose the weight, or how broke you are.

Once you identify what it might be that is a recurring thought, try to identify it's source.  Did someone say it about you and you believed it, were you ridiculed, were you treated that way or made to feel a certain way?  Close your eyes and try to work your way through the chain.

Once you've identified what and where it came from, it's time to start breaking the pattern.  As with most things the pattern you have put in place has been there for a long time, so it only stands to reason that it will also take some time to "re-route" new healthier patterns for yourself.  Here are some guidelines as you begin to make the change:

1. Stop the thought.  Pay attention and once you begin the thought, become conscious of it and counter it.  If the thought is "I'm so fat", counter it with "I have a choice to become thin and have the tools I need within me to make that change"
2. If the feeling is brought about by a person, remove yourself from their presence temporarily.
3. If you notice your feelings are coming from an outside stimulus, like the addiction of smoking when drinking, remove the stimulus.  Don't drink for a while.
4. Change the payoff.  When you embark on these patterns internally you already know the result you seek.  Change it.  If it's the fact that you will relish in the donut you punish yourself with get a really nasty one so you don't enjoy it so much.  This way you change the result and the addiction won't be so appealing.
5. Surround yourself with different stimulus and people.  If I do drugs, this means not hanging out with friends that do them.  If I want to be successful, I stop engaging with the people that don't believe that I can be.

Above all, live in the moment and question your motives, feelings and self about why you are where you are and where you want to be.  Is this the life you wish to create, or is there something more that you are brave enough to explore?  The power and choice is in your hands alone.