Get Out of My Way!
Have you ever found yourself ‘tripping over yourself’, stopping yourself from doing something for no apparent reason, finding reasons not to do things, or just having so many things ‘on the go’ that you end up sometimes doing none of them because you don’t know which way to turn?
Sorry, but if you answer ‘No’ – I won’t believe you.
From time to time everyone finds themselves in this situation, even you and I.
Go on, admit it, I do!
This insight is an experiment. I’m writing it at the suggestion of a very dear friend; challenging myself to see if I can write at short notice on a topic suggested to me.
I’m sure I don’t have all the answers on this – or anything for that matter, but let’s just see where this takes me.
You and I ‘get in our own way’ – but the question is – where is it we are going, to get in the ‘way’ of ourselves?
Now let’s say that we do know where we are right now.
And that we do know where it is we are going.
But here’s the thing.
There are an infinite number of ways to get from where we are to where we’re going.
Minus one.
There is one way we cannot go.
You and I cannot travel in a straight line.
Because there is no such thing as a ‘straight’ line.
You might think that a laser beam is a straight line – but it isn’t. It’s a wave. It’s a vibration. It’s an infinite number if infinitesimal ‘course corrections’.
It just ‘looks’ like a straight line – just like a ‘straight line’ drawn in two dimensions on a piece of paper. It’s not a line at all but a connection of an infinite number of one dimensional points, and we see it as a line because it reflects light – another wave – another vibration.
But I’m going off topic. Why do we ‘get in our way’?
To get from where we are to where we’re going we have to make a decision, or a series of decisions.
Which way to go?
The way we decide upon may need us to make further decisions along the way.
But a decision is an odd thing. You and I can ‘decide’ to do something and then not do it.
Three frogs sitting on a lily pad, one decides to jump off. How many frogs are there on the lily pad?
You and I know that the answer is 3 (most people would say 2 by the way) because the frog has only decided to jump off, it hasn’t done it yet.
It hasn’t made the choice to act on its decision.
Something got in its way.
You and I are just the same.
Until we choose to do what we intend to do and do it, it doesn’t matter how many decisions we make, there will always be things in the way of our taking action.
So, we know where we are, we know where we’re going, and we’ve decided which way to go.
But then what happens? We may have not yet chosen to start, or we may be moving along our chosen route; but something gets in the way.
In truth, we get in our own way. We hit a ‘blockage’ – or what seems to us to be a blockage.
- We encounter some sort of inhibition that makes us unsure of whether or not to proceed.
- We find ourselves in an argument about whether or not this is the best way to go or even whether we should be going there in the first place – even after we did make a decision and we did choose to start.
- We come up against imagined blockages that tell us we can’t or shouldn’t do what we’re doing.
- We get distracted into taking a detour that could have a serious impact on reaching our destination.
- Something ‘crops up’ that we ‘trip over’ when it appears to take priority over our previous decision and choice.
And I’m sure there are lots more ‘reasons’ you can think of.
But the thing is –
These ‘blockages’ are all imaginary, they’re not ‘real’ – even though they may seem to be real.
Remember – we made a decision and chose to act on it – but now all this ‘stuff’ comes up.
Doubt, fear, uncertainty, misinformation, disinformation.
“Am I doing the right thing? Maybe I should do this other thing first? Is what I’m doing ‘allowed’? Should I not stop and re-think the whole thing?” And so on.
We just get in our own way and sometimes decide and choose to do something completely different, abandoning our first objective and our higher goal.
And then we regret it.
And then the cycle starts again.
How do we stop it? How do we make sure that when we make a decision and then choose to act on it we don’t get in our own way?
When you and I make a decision of any sort and then act on it we choose to have a particular experience, to create a new reality, to add to our existing ‘bank’ of experiences as a sentient being.
We decide and choose to go where we have not gone before.
Now even if we’ve chosen to repeat something that we have done before, this iteration of that (generic) experience will be different – because we are different, because you and I have moved on from when we last had that type of experience.
Every ‘new’ experience we have is genuinely new, it has never happened before and will never happen again – ‘You can’t step in the same river twice’.
But in that bank of experiences we carry around in our subconscious mind we will find some similar experiences and some counter experiences.
We have information that gets in our way, that gets in the way of having this ‘new’ experience, and, in terms of our previous experience –
- It may be outside our comfort zone and ‘scary’
- It may be ‘risky’ in relation to previous experience
- It may be something in a ‘forbidden zone’
- It may be something that we decided to do before but never chose to do
- It may be something like something we chose to do before that turned out badly (in our view)
All of these things and more.
But sometimes we look at what we’ve decided and chosen to do, and we cannot recall why we are being ‘blocked’ or what is getting in our way – it just ‘is’, and we ‘stop’.
The problem (if you want to call it that) is that these past experiences are not just our immediate past experiences – many, maybe most, of them come from way back.
- From our very early childhood before we were really cognisant of what was going on
- From our ancestors – sometimes called ‘genetic memory’
- From our past lives (yes, we do have them)
And it’s sometimes difficult to clear this stuff out, because a lot of it is definitely no longer relevant.
The good news is that they can be cleared out – but we usually need someone else to help. (At the simplest level hypnotherapy can be useful for example)
But if you know that this is where the blockages are coming from, if you are aware that your intention, the choice you’ve made, may be being interfered with, and if you take the trouble to notice when this starts to happen, you can take avoiding action.
You can get out of your own way and succeed in fulfilling the decisions and choices you make.
Notice what you’re noticing.