Open Heart

When we are born, we are only equipped with our emotions to navigate the world.  We can only make decisions and choices based on how we feel. We are still working on developing a logical brain, which only comes into full force in our mid to late 20s.  We don't understand ulterior motives, manipulation, and negative behaviors.  As a child, we operate from a place of pure emotion but deal with others who benefit from total capacity, using their hearts and minds.  

This puts children at a disadvantage when dealing with people with access to their minds and emotions.  As children, we end up being subjected to people not operating from an emotionally and mentally balanced place, and these imbalances become a challenge and burden for us.  We navigate these imbalances by what feels good and doesn't; we are constantly tap-dancing around these emotions.  We are not equipped to understand and process our emotions yet (which requires your mind), so we learn imbalanced ways of behaving, enabling us to adapt or even survive our environment emotionally.  These behavior patterns become part of who we are, serving a purpose for us in specific environments.  These behavior patterns are a survival mechanism to mitigate feeling bad in our imbalanced environment.   When we become adults and have more autonomy to choose our environments, we need to look back at the patterns of behavior and see if we can figure out who we are versus who we learned to become to adapt to an imbalanced environment.  This can take a lot of time and inner reflection because you could have taken on a persona for years, maybe most of your life, that doesn't reflect who you are.  You may not know the difference between the "learned you" and the authentic you.  

For example, if you were raised in a household with a parent/parents that were overly critical and constantly corrected you without some praise to balance it out, this created an extreme environment for you.  This environment creates some extreme "learned" behaviors from you in response to counterbalance to feel better in this environment.  Some of these behaviors may have been to strive for perfection to avoid criticism or become timid to avoid interaction to mitigate any negative feedback.   Your parent's imbalanced behaviors created a learned imbalanced response from you to balance the situation. Now you go through life thinking you are a perfectionist or timid.  We claim these as our personality traits and accept this is who we are, not realizing we learned to be this way to adapt to our environment to feel as good as we can in it.  

This wasn't from any ill intent from our parents or the people around us.  They were suffering from their own imbalances and had adopted their imbalanced behavior patterns as children/adults to survive their environment.  This cycle continues until we become conscious and understand what is happening.  We have to see something before we can fix it.  You usually recognize this moment of consciousness when you observe yourself in relation to others. There is a moment when you can observe the dynamic with another instead of just feeling it.  This is where you use both your mind and emotions to experience the dynamic.  This is the beginning of working with your mind and emotions in balance......where you aren't just feeling the emotional triggers without thought but can recognize them now and see how behavior patterns impact the interaction.  This is a moment of freedom because now you have become aware.  You can now start to unravel these imbalanced behaviors and learn how to interact more consciously with the world.  You are on the path of engaging with the world from a place of authenticity (your true self) versus from a place of patterned behaviors and who you learned to be based on your conditioning.   Your emotions become more authentic, and you aren't operating from triggers.  You realize that you are not your behaviors, and your responses become more natural and more authentically aligned with who you are.  You start living life versus mitigating it.  

When we get to this place of consciousness, our relationships can improve exponentially.  We get in touch with our true feelings and engage from our authentic selves, and people respond differently to this.  You will respond differently to them too.  You will become adept at feeling when others are not engaging from their authentic selves, and those relationships won't feel as good to you.  You may lose interest in people you have had relationships with for years because dealing with someone's unconscious triggers and unproductive behavior patterns becomes exhausting.  When we are unconscious of our behavior patterns, we end up making our internal imbalances someone else's challenge or burden.   When we start taking responsibility for our imbalances, not to make it the problem of others, it gets more noticeable when others don't do the same.  The more balanced we become, we get almost allergic to imbalanced people and relationships with them.  We start to get more discerning about our relationships because we crave authenticity, and we get very clear on what relationships feel good to us.  Your relationships become more intentional, and we don't fall into relationships anymore......we consciously choose them.