The patterns of our lives are the strongest forces we experience.
When we are young, we are open and our minds are supple.
Then we experience life. We start to make meaning from what we experience. Then the patterns begin to emerge.
What we don’t realize at the time is those patterns are self-reinforcing.
Because we see something one way, we look for that in other things.
Slowly, over time, we see that pattern so much it becomes ingrained in us.
Like a stick drawing a line in the dirt over and over again, soon that line become so deep we can’t change it.
Or the tiny drops of water that continually drip on the stone, wearing it away over centuries.
These patterns become our lives. These experiences create the grooves in our mind that are so instilled we don’t even notice them any more.
We become so set in our thinking and our being that only a true shock to the system can create a change in our lives.
That is, unless we purposely look for experiences and situations that are so outside our usual patterns that we learn to create new ones.
Those new patterns, in turn, become our new default and our new way of being.
Want to know what your defaults are? Just listen to what your mind says to yourself when no one else is around.
Listen to how you talk to yourself. Listen to the things you say to yourself about yourself.
Don’t like what your hearing? Then it is time to create a new pattern…
~ Sam Liebowitz, The Conscious Consultant
