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In preparation for moving you to the next plane, we’ve been working on self-examination from several angles.
First, we learned how to create an Array to define your beliefs about something. Next, we created some Icons to visualize when our thoughts start running in a negative direction. Today, we’ll be digging a bit deeper into your personal programming, by identifying some unconscious habits that you may have.
Do habits scare you? Do you believe that they are hard to break?
Well if you believe such things, you have fallen into a Trap.
Traps are lies that you tell yourself.
They’re based on old beliefs lodged deep inside from years of social conditioning, and they provide the ego with reliable yet sneaky ways to keep you from growing.
Once you fall into a Trap—tell yourself a lie—then more negative thoughts follow close behind. This results in a sinking feeling in the stomach, accompanied by feelings of failure, depression, or hopelessness.
Here are some common Traps:
- “I can’t get it right.”
- “This is stupid.”
- “Nothing’s working.”
- “I’ve tried this before and it didn’t work.”
- “I should be more like _______”
Traps can be tricky! They sneak in when we’re faced with something we don’t want to deal with:
- “That’s scary.”
- “No way am I doing that.”
- “It’s hopeless.”
- “This is too hard.”
- “I give up.”
Traps are always a by-product of a belief.
They happen when we are not paying attention to our thoughts. For if we were paying attention to them, we would know by the bad feeling that we are misaligned with our Higher Self, and thus diverted from the creational path towards joy.
When our unexamined mind is faced with a fear, we’ll use Traps to keep us in discomfort, rather than venturing into unknown emotions.
They are just old habits, and they can be changed at any time!
So how do we change our Traps?
First, we must identify the belief behind them.
Let’s take an example:
Lucy wants to write a novel, and she has a great idea. She’s excited! All of her friends agree, and she can hardly wait to start. She buys the software, signs in…but each time she sits down to write, she starts fidgeting. She can’t get much written before she’s up and away from her desk. Laundry, or washing dishes. “I’ve been too busy to write,” she’d tell her friends. And then she spends an hour scrolling through her Instagram feed.
A year passes, and she’s only written two pages of her novel.
Why?
Somewhere in Lucy’s mind, she holds the belief that writing a novel is going to be painful. After all, one need not look far to find evidence of starving artists.
“It’s hard work to write 1000 pages.”
“You have to give up everything, live on ramen…and after all that you’ll probably get shot down by agent after agent.”
Such thoughts as these may be completely unconscious, but as a creator, that doesn’t matter. She’s creating from those thoughts whether she’s aware of them or not.
Let’s help Lucy find the traps associated with writing her novel. First, we must identify the underlying belief.
A reliable method to uncover a negative belief is to make an Array. Lucy can create one, based on the intention of “Writing My Novel.”
If she’s allowed the words to flow, there’s a good chance that she’ll have a healthy dose of negative and neutral words mixed in. In fact, there may be more negative words than positive ones in the list if her belief is a strong one.
Lucy now reads through her list, noting all of the negative and neutral words.
She’ll probably experience a sinking feeling in her stomach. She may feel like a failure, or lazy, or unworthy. If Lucy sits with these words for just a few minutes, she’ll arrive at the underlying belief about writing a novel. Here’s what she found:
“Most writers fail.”
Now that Lucy has uncovered a belief about writers, she can sit down to write. What goes through her mind? Maybe she’ll end up crying on her computer keyboard, feeling the despair of past negative associations she’s had with writing. Maybe she can’t identify any particular incident, but now she knows that somewhere, inside of her, she thought the thought, “Most writers fail” so many times, that she came to believe that it’s true.
Since all possibilities exist, Lucy can make a new choice. It doesn’t take too much research to find successful writers in all stages of their career, and also to recognize that many had to overcome that same belief to find the abundance they were looking for. Focusing on positive possibilities such as this will reveal Lucy’s original lie. She’s got lots of examples of successful writers.
When she runs into that mental block again, she now recalls this Trap.
She can now apply an Icon—a positive visual image—that initiates a new, better thought. If Lucy continues to focus on better thoughts, applying her Icons whenever necessary, she will move forward along her path of creation with ease. And she also rewires the habit along the way!
So today, identify one of your Traps:
Consider a subject that gives you that sinking feeling in your stomach when you think of it.
Where do you feel most hopeless?
Create an array
Notice the negative and neutral words listed in your array. What do they point to?
Determine the belief
Sit with your array until you arrive at a belief associated with that subject.
Feel the feelings that are associated with it.
Can you identify where your belief came from? If not, it’s OK. You don’t have to, in order to break the habit. You’ve identified it, and that is enough for right now.
Apply an Icon
This will initiate positive thoughts to get you back into creational mode. You can leave the Trap behind if you choose, just like that! If it ever comes up again, you’ll be onto your old tricks, and now you have a plan.
…and off you go, until the next transmission.
My love to you from Far Away and Very Near,
Flora