Podcast Episode 42 - How All That Self-Awareness Might Actually Be Keeping You Stuck

This is going to be a discussion on stuckness. I want to talk about stuckness because I had such a major breakthrough the other day when I was in a class for my RRT training. That's Rapid Resolution Therapy for anyone who is curious. I did a couple of sessions forever ago, and I enjoyed it. It's a really amazing healing modality that blends things like neurolinguistic programming and hypnosis to really get to the core of grief, of anger, of shame, of really big emotions that are blocking us from taking action. 

If you look at your gene keys, your sphere of purpose is your unconscious earth, and what connects me to a source where I feel the most powerful and where I have a lot of grounding energy that I can give to other people is in gate 37. In gate 37, we have actually the Siddhi of tenderness; there's this emotionality. Since I'm an emotional authority, it's a big part of the work that I do, and I've been thinking about how everyone has to wait for emotional clarity, regardless of what your inner authority is. If you're an emotional authority, you have to wait through your emotional wave. If you are a sacral authority, you have to make sure that you're not picking up on emotions that are distracting you from hearing your sacral authority. If you're a splenic authority, you have to sort through the emotions and make sure that you are not getting distracted by how you feel and what you're picking up on and amplifying, so you can hear that splenic intuition. Literally everybody is designed to make decisions from a space of emotional clarity. I've just been thinking about that and how really nervous system regulation and emotional regulation, it's so important because it's where a lot of the conditioning is. 

I was in an RRT training the other day, and we're going through some of the signs of stuckness. This one sign of stuckness really just jumped out at me and snagged me and blew my mind and called me out in just the best way ever. It's called introspection. When intelligent people, people who have a high sense of awareness, people who have been in the personal development world for a while, you've probably learned some psychology, maybe you know some metaphysics, whatever it is you're doing, you have a sense of understanding of how your brain works. Especially once we get into this world, there's this essence or conversation that says you create your reality, your thoughts are really important, what you focus on expands. Suddenly, there's an importance on what you're thinking, what you're focusing on, your behavior.

Something that I have heard over and over and over again from healers, from mentors, from coaches, from just people in my world is, “Wow, you're so self-aware. Your level of self-awareness just blows my mind. You just recognize the patterns. You just see it so, so strongly,” and there's always been a little bit of disappointment of yeah, I can point out the problem, but I still feel stuck. I can point out and tell you exactly what happened in the past, and I can tell you how my childhood shaped this and why this behavior is here, I can analyze it, I can show you what happened, and I can process present experiences and also simultaneously see the mirror effect of like how that showed up in my past. 

An example of this would be if I am experiencing some constriction in my life or business, I'll feel that and know the trauma that it’s coming from or the first time I experienced this feeling was at this age. At that moment, I am feeling overwhelmed, or I am feeling some kind of emotion. I am feeling that stuckness in that constriction, and instead of just moving through the constriction in the present moment, I feel that constriction. I dive into looking at the old pattern.

I'll have all this understanding, this reasoning, and this mental perspective of what's going on under the surface, but I have completely ignored the problem. I've completely ignored what was actually right in front of me, and what was in front of me was in this moment I'm feeling a little bit of stuckness, or I'm feeling a little bit of constriction, and I did not process that constriction. My evasive mind avoids the problem and goes in a different direction and does this whole mind map of this is why, and this is why, and here's the rationale and here's the logic behind the feeling that you're feeling. I get in my head. I get in my consciousness. I get in my awareness. I get in my logic, and I get away from my body.

What this has done and the reason this is a sign of stuckness is because healthy people don't just spend their entire lives analyzing their behavior and associating every experience with the past. A memory comes to mind of when I was in Costa Rica with my team, and we were just having fun. We were on a boat. We were seeing dolphins. It was like the most magical day. I just think about that moment, if I was there, if I was seeing dolphins in the wild for the first time, if I was in that moment having that fun experience, I'm not in my head looking at, "Look at this joy. Look at this happiness. Look at this excitement. You know the first time I felt this excitement? You know the first time I felt this happy? This emotional pattern is related to my relationship to masculine energy that has to do with my coaches and all of the people that I have worked with as a competitive athlete..." That's not what I would do.

When we're having positive conversations, when we're experiencing positive emotions, we just process them. We just experience them. We're just present with it. I'm just like, "Wow, I'm so excited right now," and then I feel that excitement, and I experience the excitement in my body, and then it moves on, and I actually process the present moment instead of doing this introspection spiral where I actually consciously leave the present moment and go back to something that happened in the past. 

I see this introspection and this overanalyzing a lot in the human design community and in the human design world. I am guilty of perpetuating this. I am guilty of sharing this, and I am guilty of tracing down patterns and finding out where it was. We don't need to cognitively process our emotions because if you're cognitively processing the thing, you're doing it more than once. You're putting in more effort; you're doing more work than is actually necessary. 

We don't have to do that! We don't have to do this whole introspection. You can actually just feel the things that you're experiencing and move through them in the present moment. It's so, so cool. 

This goes along really well with something that I've been playing with for a while, which is at some point in my journey, I stopped trying to get in alignment and I started focusing on maintaining alignment and staying in a state of alignment. I think that the conditioned belief that I picked up on was human design says that it's going to take seven years to start deconditioning. When I first picked up on that information, I was specifically told that it's going to take seven years to decondition one specific pattern. It takes seven years to decondition each conditioned belief fully. I felt like I don't have that much time, and I'm even finding the system sooner than a lot of other people in their lifetimes. 

At some point in my journey, I got angry. I got rebellious. My Aries hotheadedness was like, "Ooh, I'm not taking seven years to decondition absolutely every belief. I want it to happen faster. I know it can happen faster. I believe that it can happen faster." If our nature is alignment, if underneath all the conditioning who we really, really are, is fully aligned, fully abundant, fully open, fully receptive, if that is our nature, then it shouldn't be learning something new. It shouldn't be like all this work. Really, it's just letting go. It's just letting go of things that are not serving you in this present moment. 

I feel like the belief of I have to do all of this deconditioning and me even going on a deep healing deconditioning journey, it's been good, but I've spent so much time looking for problems that aren't necessarily there, or something doesn't go perfectly according to plan and I assume that I have done something wrong and therefore I have to figure out what's the pattern? How did it not work? I've even had random thoughts of introspection that literally connect things that do not make sense. Things like how I'm taking care of my plants or how healthy my plants are and my sales. 

I remember having the thought forever ago. It was in the last house that we were in, so it was probably like a year and a half, maybe two years ago, and I had this thought that my plants are dying or not growing fast. There's not enough sunshine here. I know it's winter, but it's super cold, and obviously this means that the branches of my business are dying because I am in the wrong environment, and it's too cold and I have frozen everything. I'm in a barren environment was where my brain went trying to connect these patterns, and that's absolutely ridiculous. It was winter and plants just don't grow as much in winter, and that's completely fine. It was just a seasonal thing. It didn't mean that I was a bad plant parent, or that my sales were somehow related to how well I was taking care of my plants. But introspection created a pattern and created this awareness that wasn't necessarily there. 

When we're doing this, the conscious mind is trying to make sense of the emotions that you're feeling because it feels overwhelmed. You don't actually let your body naturally process the emotion. When we're staying in alignment, what we want to be doing, what is actually our nature and what is healthy for us, and what I believe we can just start acting in right now, and this is a concept that I literally played with this years ago when I was first introducing human design to the online world, and I was first like really getting started with this, I had this idea that if we just show up in alignment now and we just address any conditioning that comes up as it comes up in the moment. That's how I was moving through the world, but then somewhere along the line I was told that there's something under the surface. "You're moving fast now, but that's because you're probably ignoring something. There's probably a deeper pattern." Or, I heard that we're always going to experience the shadows and all these additional layers of conditioning.

We are always on this journey of deconditioning. We're always on this journey of discernment and figuring out what we do want to hold onto and what we don't want to hold onto. This is just a constant process and your physical body is constantly doing the same thing as well. It's constantly nourishing you. It's taking in nutrition, and deciding to keep it or not. Every time you breathe, you are taking in oxygen, and you are breathing out cellular waste and carbon dioxide from your body that you don't need. We are doing this constantly. 

With belief systems and perspectives and awareness, it gets to be the same. I don't know why we have this conception that somehow we're going to get to a space of healed, and then never have to heal anything ever again, and if anything does pop up, it means that you didn't do it right the first time. Absolutely not. We are here to be in a state of alignment. 

It feels so good to be reconnecting with this method of staying in alignment. In this present moment, you're aligned. There is nothing that you are doing wrong. You are taking in something inspirational by reading this blog. Maybe you're learning something. You responded. You had an invitation. There's a message here for you. 

In this moment, your intuition got you here, and you are getting exactly what you need; 100% exactly what you need right now. Congratulations, first of all. That is amazing. You're here. You're doing exactly what you need to do, and when you’re done here, you're going to move on to the next aligned thing, and you're going to be guided. If some sort of conditioning pops up around some sort of uncomfortability or you find yourself interspecting by overanalyzing your thoughts, overanalyzing your behavior, what you get to do is you get to recognize that sign of stuckness, and you get to see that that's not supporting you. You get to let it go. 

There are many different ways you can do this. Obviously, I'm getting trained in RRT right now so that I have more techniques to work with my unconscious mind to really let go of this stuckness. But my big message for you today is that you don't have to get to alignment. It's not some destination that is super far away. It's not on the other side of loving yourself or forgiving yourself or feeling worthy or anything like that. It's not on the other side of becoming someone new, changing who you are. It's not on the other side of anything. Your alignment is here. Your alignment is now. Your alignment is just who you are in the present moment. 

So, you have to just relax. I want you to take a really deep breath right now. I want you to breathe in as much oxygen as you can, and remind yourself that you are taking in intentionally only what is valuable to you, and as you exhale, you are breathing out everything that is not serving you, any stuckness, any resistance, any resentment that you have, because you're doing perfectly right now. Right here, right now, you are doing absolutely perfectly.

Maintaining alignment, what you get to do is you get to continue moving throughout your day. You get to continue following your strategy and authority. You get to continue getting out of your head, getting into your body, just enjoying the moments that are in your experience. You don't have to do much else. You just get to live your life. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to analyze it. You don't have to do too much in your head. You just get to be present with what you're actually experiencing in the present moment. 

Spend less time traveling to the past, because it's taking you away from the only moment that you can actually do something. We can't change the past, and just because there was a pattern in the past doesn't mean that it's going to always be there, doesn't mean that it's relevant, doesn't mean that it's connected to something that's going on right now, doesn't mean that things have to play out the same way in the future. There is no connection. Things don't have to mean anything. We create meaning, so give things less meaning and make them less heavy. 

The only moment that you have power over and that you can actually be processing, and the only thing that you are actually responding to is exactly what's in front of you right now. When you're in your head, you're not in the present moment. You're not responding to what's exactly in front of you. Of course your actions are going to feel weird, because if you're taking an action right now, but it's based on a response to an emotion that happened in the past, you are out of alignment. That is the emotional center creating an emotionally charged decision. That is your nervous system giving you additional motivation for something that will actually overload your system. 

That is not the way that we are operating from now on. You are showing up in alignment. If something pops up and it makes you feel really, really good, then you can keep that belief. If it's a meaning that you are creating, then you can keep it. If it's something that doesn't feel supportive, you can let it go. 

So, recap: you are perfectly aligned exactly where you are right now. If something pops up that you want to rewire, that you want to change your perspective on, you can do so, and you can do so easily and simply, and it doesn't have to take a whole lot of energy. It can be as simple as, "Oh wow, that belief doesn't feel good. I would like to believe something else. What would I like to believe instead?" You don't have to spend all of your time analyzing your behavior patterns, thinking about your shadows, thinking about the things you're doing wrong. You can just show up and exist and process the things that are happening in the present moment. 

If you are an extremely intelligent person, if you've been in the human design world or have been in the personal development world for a while, you count as a highly intelligent person in my opinion, because if you're doing this work, if you have this level of self-awareness, introspection is absolutely possible because it's probably something that you have been trained to do. I trained myself to contemplate. I trained myself to introspect, and I didn't realize that this was actually a pattern, this introspection was a sign that I was still stuck in some of the conditioning, so congratulations to me. I understand, I see, and I recognize the trauma. I understand my patterns, but it's still holding me back in certain areas because all I do is I recognize it, and I go into the reason why it happens and this mental journey of reliving the trauma, reliving the experience, and I'm just reaffirming a pattern instead of experiencing an emotion, and then letting it go.

I have an example of moving away from this. I overexplain things. A lot of times my overexplaining will come as justification. Specifically to my husband, I will justify a lot of my actions, even if there's absolutely no reason to justify my actions. There have been times where I've justified getting a snack, or I will literally justify being hungry. My husband has done an incredible job telling me that I do not have to justify anything to him.

For a while, that was the pattern. I would start to overexplain, and he would help me stop. But then I started to notice when I was about to overexplain or when I wanted to overexplain, and then I would say out loud that I was going to overexplain and I don’t have to justify it. But then I got to this point where I would recognize the behavior, and I wanted to just say the thing and not overexplain. But that conditioned belief was you've had this problem in the past, and this introspective part of me was latching onto and was attached to telling my husband I am not overexplaining in this moment. 

It was the same thing with saying sorry. Sometimes I'll apologize when it's not necessary. So, instead of that, there have been moments where instead of apologizing, I'll say, "I want to say sorry, but I'm not saying sorry," and somehow that softens the blow for me. But what's actually healed and what's actually aligned is not even acknowledging that past, because that memory, every time I want to say sorry for something and then don't, but then explain why I don't want to say sorry and why I'm not saying sorry, that is still acknowledging and holding onto the belief that I am somebody who has problems with apologizing too much. It's still a part of my identity. It's still a part of my reality. It's still impacting my behavior. I may not be saying sorry, but I am essentially apologizing for not apologizing by still bringing up the issue, still bringing up that train of thought.

The next step, the actual healed step, is acknowledging that I don't even have to say that I want to say sorry for something. I don't have to acknowledge it at all. There are certain things that I do not owe anyone an apology on, and the actual aligned action, something that is available to me is just doing the thing with no explanation. Just doing the thing without assuming that I have to let people know that at one point I would've apologized for it. Instead of adding all these extra steps and conditioning, I can just do the thing, and not worry about apologizing. That's the next step.

I feel like introspection is really easy to get stuck in because you are acknowledging the behavior pattern. You see the behavior pattern, but then we don't know how to move from I know that I have this, I know that this happened to me, I know that I've experienced this in the past to, I don't have to experience this anymore, and it's not a part of my experience anymore. That is where we're moving. 

If you are somebody who notices your conditioning and your behavior patterns, and you're just a really introspective person in general, I encourage you to stop looking at yourself. I encourage you to get out of your head. I've done this twice where instead of getting stuck in that introspection, I have been shaking out my hands. I'll just shake my hands a little bit, and that's been really good to just shake it off almost. It's like clearing my head. I am literally closing that entire tab. I don't even need to think about it, because I'm not going to get anywhere productive by interspecting. I'm just confirming that the pattern is still there. So, less introspection, more maintaining alignment, more just addressing things as they come up, if they come up, but not assuming that things have to come up. 

If you are interested in a beginners guide to interpreting the details of your human design chart, check out DECODED! This guide is composed of the outlines Eden has created for the Energetic Resumes, SSCC, and a few of her most saved Instagram posts. These are notes that Eden regularly references that provide a clear breakdown of the details of your human design chart. Learn more here: DECODED