Video Summary:

I want to talk about what I think is one of the most frustrating and misunderstood parts of spirituality and making change. I'm referring to making a change in the way you see myself and the world. So you’re changing your reality, or what it sometimes call, moving from one level of consciousness to another.

The proof in the pudding is holding the things you want in the new level of consciousness, the new reality. This can be challenging because we have a lifetime of conditioning and belief systems that tell us something different than the new way of being that we aspire to.

With a self-worth issue, our conditioning and self-beliefs tell us we don't deserve love, joy, abundance, and beauty. It gets into everything: our relationships, money, work, family, and the way we raise our kids. It's insidious as hell because these habits and patterns were created from a foundation of I don't deserve.

What sometimes happens is we will go to this really cool spiritual gathering, workshop, or retreat. We experience joy, love, and beauty. We get this glimpse of seeing our own beauty and might even be able to hold it for a while. And so we figure, “Now I can live in joy and allow love in my life.”

But then you go back to your life and bump into a situation where you're not allowing love in your relationship. Or perhaps you're not allowing yourself to have joy and happiness in your life.

I often hear some variation of, “During the retreat, I was just unconditionally happy. So what happened to that? Did I lose it?” While it does feel like we lost it, in actuality, you haven't. You experienced it and Spirit or the universe showed you the possibility of living your life from that place.

During the retreat, we may also see the pattern of how we’ve not allowed ourselves these things. We might do a ceremony to release away the undeserving and put out a new intention to allow love and beauty in our lives. So there's a tendency to think, “It's complete now. Now my life will be that way.”

It feels like it's the end of the journey, but in another sense, it's the beginning. It's saying, “Spirit, you and I are going to walk through this so I can allow love, joy, abundance, and beauty in my life. But it's the beginning of a journey because we have this lifelong conditioning to unwind.

The best way I know to do this is to create a practice. It's a practice of seeing yourself be in the old way of being and when you're in the new way of being. When you're not allowing love and when you're allowing love. It's seeing both because for a while you have a foot in both worlds.

As I’ve discussed in a previous blog, it’s like you have two intentions. You have the intention of the old belief system that's still lingering in your body and mind, and you have the new intention that you created when you were in ceremony or meditation.

Both of these intentions are creating things in your life, and you have to sort out which is which. And that takes a lot of noticing. It's really helpful to have some type of practice to do this.

I wonder, was that the old thing, or is that the new? And how did the old pattern sneak into my marriage again? There I was minding my own business, and all of a sudden, I was pushing love away again. How did this happen? What's wrong with me? Nothing, it just goes deep and it takes a while to sort all this out.

It requires a lot of awareness and investment in yourself to discern between the old and new ways of being. It can be beneficial to have a spiritual teacher, coach, or a really good therapist who can guide you through this. Or you can create a self-inquiry or journaling practice with yourself.

But whichever it is, it requires a serious investment in yourself. Don’t underestimate the rubber bands that pull you back into your old way of being. So I invite you to think about a practice that allows you to bit by bit walk toward allowing love, joy, abundance, and beauty into the various aspects of your life.