6. How is our authenticity affected by either/or perception?
Hi fellow authenticity explorer! I was thinking about you and how much I enjoy contemplating you relaxing and feeling free inside to be who you always wanted to be. It brings up the question for this exploration.
Today’s Question:
How can we notice our internal body/mind states of either/or or both/and as a shift tool to bring us back into our authenticity?
Today is a big, huge, larger than life kind of exploration so put your gear on, your courage, tenaciousness, willingness to discover novel things, your wonder, imagination, and your compassionate understanding for yourself. These Essence qualities and many others inside of you are your adventure gear for your internal explorations. You’re going to need them as we intrepidly step into the world of sense of self threat.
Sense of self threats are imprinted in us whenever our caretakers met our Essence with their either/or body/mind states. That means that when our parents automatically reacted into their own fears, they guarded themselves in defensive strategies instead of trusting their Essence to do the job of teaching us right and wrong. You see teaching a child what’s right and what’s wrong is a major part of parenting. Most parents don’t know that much of their parenting erupts from what was done to them even though the same parent promised themselves they wouldn’t do that same thing that caused them harm to their kids. Promising ourselves doesn’t transform our Unconscious Procedural Manuals.
Our Unconscious Procedural Manuals are our implicit memory. It’s a memory system that runs under our awareness and communicates with us through body sensations and connections to our past instead of images from the past. Our Unconscious Procedural Manuals run 95% of us each moment so our conscious mind can be freed up to create what we want to create in our lives. Could be we want to create deep connection with others, could be we want to create a trusting community where we can feel safe belonging, or could be we want to create a new process or thing that makes everybody’s life more Essencey.
Our Unconscious Procedural Manual is imprinted with all the procedures we need to function like how to swallow fluids and how to move our body when we want to run. It also holds all the beliefs about our sense of self like whether we’re lovable if we act differently from those around us or whether we’re adequate and capable of a new challenging task. Our Unconscious Procedural Manual is trained-in by our caretaker’s Unconscious Procedural Manual. Wha?! Wait a minute. I’m kidding right? No, the hing that that holds your deepest fears about you was trained-in by the thing that holds the deepest fears about your parents. Yikesola unfairabola!
What does this mean for our Authenticity? There’s a lot inside of us that needs to be transformed in order for us to know and trust our authenticity. Remember our exploration of the Window of Openness from a few explorations back? The Window of Openness gives you a visual image of your Unconscious Procedural Manual in action. For example, In the Window of Openness you are perceiving no threat to your sense of self even if someone is threatening you by attacking your character. Your Unconscious Procedural Manual is registering no threat to your sense of self.
In the dysregulation zones and hyper- and hypo- arousal zones your Unconscious Procedural Manual is perceiving a threat to your sense of self and is deploying you into defensive strategies and their either/or perception. In either/or perception we’re all distorting reality by perceiving in extremes. Extremes is not where the truth lives because the extremes without the middle section is not the whole of reality. The extremes are beliefs like I’m good OR bad, I’m worthy OR unworthy, I’m lovable OR unlovable while the middle ground of both/and is I’m good AND I make mistakes, I’m worthy AND sometimes others can’t see it, and I’m lovable AND other’s can’t be loving in either/or perception. Once you realize that others are shifting out of their Window of Openness and into their defensive either/or perception, it’s a lot easier not to take the way they are seeing you in that moment personally. They are seeing you through their own unworthiness or incapable fears. Once you understand that others are not in touch with their Essence qualities inside when they automatically get activated into their own dysregualted defensive strategy zones, it’s a whole lot easier to understand that their withdrawing from their own loving and kind Essencey energy to go on guard, and not withdrawing everything that’s good from you. Once you expand your awareness about everyone’s trained-in fears, including your own, you can more easily understand how people can be so cruel and mean to one another. We are misunderstanding and misinterpreting each other through our own fears and don’t even know it.
Here’s an example: Let’s say I’m now a parent and I was raised with an either/or belief of you’re either with me or you’re against me from my own caretakers. That means that anytime I tried to be who I was in a way that was different from my caretakers, they would have reeled me back in with a judgment of maybe even blame so I never made them uncomfortable inside with my own autonomy.
Special Note: Being uncomfortable or feeling vulnerable is moment in time where we’re feeling an either/or belief pop up inside of us. Most of us have been trained to try to avoid feeling that way instead of realizing the extraordinary opportunity we have in that moment to free ourselves from the unconscious limiting either/or belief.
Back to regular programming: My parents managing me unconsciously so they didn’t feel uncomfortable inside taught me to be either a people pleaser or a rebel. Let’s say I became a rebel and pushed back on my parents and did the opposite of anything they told me to do. I would simple be trying to feel some kind of power in a very powerless situation. Now I become a parent and don’t realize I have an Unconscious Procedural Manual that can kick in and knock me out of my authentic Window of Openness at any time and send me back into my old training. ‘Cause when my manual was programmed-in not only was it programmed with the powerlessness of I’m not okay being different from you, but also with the either/or belief of you’re either with me or you’re against me. So, unbeknownst to my conscious mind I will do to my children what was done to me running under my awareness. I will accuse my children of attacking me whenever they try to be different than me: whenever they are simply trying to be their authentic self.
How can we know this is true? Ask any spouse if they’ve seen their partner do to their child what they hated that their parents did to them and you will get a resounding Yes! How many generations has then been passed down through our lineage’s Unconscious Procedural Manuals?
Contemplate what this means for the good of us all. Our Unconscious Procedural Manuals can be transformed once we become aware of them. Our Procedural Manuals are filled with untrue, but very convincing either/or fear beliefs about us that scare us into thinking we need to guard ourselves instead of just be ourselves. Use the Window of Openness graphic (from previous explorations) to envision where your mind and body are located inside of you. Speak this Simple Truth to yourself when you’re automatically activated outside of your Window of Openness: I’m realizing we can’t trust the way we’re perceiving this situation unless we settle our fears so we can slide back into the Window of Openness. Notice how your inner body responds to hearing this truth. Remember, the noticing how your body responds part is one of the shift moves that transforms you back into the Window of Openness.
