What is conditioning and why you want to dissolve it

In a recent post I mentioned that when you have spiritual practice your options become truly  endless.  What I mean by that is that when you have a daily practice that you focus on, your focus goes there and while that is happening you are not ‘allowing’ other repetitive mind activity to creep in.   Your daily practice for example may be: sitting for 5-15 minutes focusing solely on the sensation of your inhale and exhale.   The result of primary focus for a period of time is a spacious mind, knowing yourself better and it cultivates a deeper level of awareness. When you do that day in and day out your mind becomes more and more spacious every single day.  Now imagine NOT doing that! YIKES!!! that thought…freaks me out, I’m not joking!

You see, there is something called conditioning which is the way we learned to be from those who raised us which includes:  how we take action, if we do, how we respond/react, communicate, our habits with friends, work, sleep, food, exercise.  Our thoughts become our conditioning too, what we heard our parents say to us to each other, to others, whatever we heard, saw, experienced repetitively makes up our conditioning.  Now…when we grow older, our conditioning forms our habits and beliefs and the way we live our lives, which is actually kind of scary, not because our upbringing was scary, and maybe it was but maybe it was also amazing…but the scary part is that it is ultimately living in a tunnel without choice or any other options. Why?  because until we have realized we are not our mind, we listen, believe and speak what it says which is automatic and completely unconscious.

When you have a daily practice and create space in your mind, you create space between your thoughts and this is huge, because space between your thoughts allows for new thoughts, inspiration, creativity to enter and once you have some newness on the rise, you will no doubt feel inspired  to live your life in a way that may be more pleasing to you than it ever has been before. That is so exciting!

Now a days if I reflect on my past before some of my conditioning began to dissolve I can see that my responses to people, no matter who they were or what they were saying were most often the same, not as in, the exact same words, but with the same strong emotion behind my words, which was often defensive, angry and annoyed.  In other words, when our buttons are pushed if we have not opened our minds and released some old pent up volatile energy, it will resurface like an automatic response no matter what someone says, all their words have to do is to be in the vicinity of one of our buttons and ‘ping’ we blurt out our words with our harsh unresolved emotions behind them.  There is no need to be concerned about how our daily practice will heal our old wounds, it just does but only when  you commit, all you need to do is do it, every single day. The very action of choosing a daily practice begins to shift your energy, you are silently setting an intention and declaring to your inner-being that you are ready to change now.

About Lara Catherine