What Drives you: Conditioning or Awareness?

When we come into this world, we assume all is as it should be. We have absolute trust in our parents and our environment. We enter this world, into the current that is our life. As the water flows, we are carried through different sceneries, different environments and different motions as experiences. Along the way, we experience things we’d rather not experience again and others we want to seek out again. By the time we’re about seven, we’ve gathered quite a bit of data about our world and how we relate to our world. How we look at things and the decisions we make onwards, are vastly influenced through this data as our past experiences. The main components driving our decision making being what we have connected our fears and desires to, that which we want to avoid, and that which we want to seek out. We could compare these two elements as being our base binary code from which we operate from. Zeros (0) representing all we want to avoid and Ones (1) representing that which we want to achieve or experience.

Coming into this world and absorbing all that is around and coming towards us unconditionally, is great when you live in an ideal world. You’re input becomes equal to your output. Your environment standing as the example of harmonious and effective living then easily and seamlessly integrates itself into your own consciousness and you learn to navigate your life and your world in reflection of that harmony. Our world however, is far from perfect or ideal. The nature of our environment, society and the individuals that make up the world is largely reactive and unconscious. One where we are tolerating survival over thriving, one where untethered competition runs amok. We integrate and copy the reactive behaviour or learn to rebel against it (which tends to mostly still be a reactive response from our side going into the other side of the polarity, and not one of understanding).

From our zero’s and one’s we develop our code of conduct. The One indicating true north, your desires and ambitions you are striving towards and the Zero indicating your fears you wish to avoid. (It gets a little bit more complicated than that, with our fears and desires which intermingle, but I’ll address this in a future post). Often, these desires are not even true creative desires, but just the best vehicle to absolutely get away from our fears. Think of getting rich to avoid being poor, seeking popularity out of fear of being rejected -- our fear is still our starting point and what drives us to seek out the positive. Without much awareness, we develop our principles which guide us through life, our code of conduct. While we develop and establish our code of conduct during the first seven years of life, and then integrate and specify it over the next two seven year cycles, we aren’t really aware that that’s what we’re doing. As a 5, 6 7 year old, you don’t stop for a moment to think 'Hey, what principles am I living by? What principles do I want to have as my guiding compass in life? What do I accept in my life? Who do I want to be as a human being?' We don’t ask these questions, nor are we prompted to by our environment and so the answers kind of ‘happen’ to us, mostly by chance, depending on what environment we were born into and placed along the way.

Then suddenly, somewhere along the way of the current that’s your life, you become a parent. You got your own little tot that’s joining the current of your life and this presents a prime opportunity to ask yourself these questions. You’re bound to ask them, because you’re faced with rearing a tiny human being into adulthood. As much as you’re asking yourself questions about how to raise your child, you’re implicitly questioning and evaluating who you’ve grown into, and if you’re happy with where you’re at.

Parenting as such doesn’t exist. There’s only the appearance of different parenting styles and approach because our own principles be live by differ, and by extension how we treat and raise our children. When we re-align ourselves to who we want to be, a person that stands strong in their particular individuality yet always considers the whole – we naturally re-align and change our ‘parenting’.

Often in life’s goings, we ask ourselves the questions ‘Who am I? What am I doing here?’. As if who we are and what we are going to do with our life is preordained. In a way, yes it is. Not so much preordained, but conditioned, yes definitely. But we ask these questions as if we have no say in the matter. As if we don’t have any power to decide who we are and what we are going to do. While the truth is, you can be whoever you want to be. But you must decide who you want to be and what you want to live by. That’s not to say that we’re all the same and anyone can do anything. We’re all still unique and have different expressions, a different way of ‘shining’. But who we are as the principles we live by can be equal. We can all embody the principles we want to live, even if we live them through our unique expression.

When we don’t question our code of conduct as the conditioned principles we live by, we’re bound to repeat the past. The past of our parents, and the generations before them and the past of our environment. We may make some consciously aware decisions here and there about things we want to change in our life, but unless we pull the rug underneath ALL of our unconscious conditioned guiding principles, we’ll find ourselves back in the same spaces, the same experiences, over and over again – each time with greater disappointment. You’ve got the best intentions, but somehow you always end up in those awfully familiar experiences and relationship dynamics you’ve been trying to surpass.

Take a moment to identify for yourself the main fears and desires you’ve accumulated throughout your childhood. Evaluate your teenage and young adult years. How many of your decisions were based on these unconscious codes of conduct? How many of your decisions today are still being driven by those same impulses?

Now take the time to write out your new code of conduct. Declare to yourself the principles you do want to embody and live in your life (and just double check they’re not just there because you want to avoid something or seek out a fear driven desire). Really take your time to make these decisions consciously and within awareness. What do you want to create in and with your life? Sign the paper with your name to solidify and strengthen your commitment and devotion to yourself and your potential, your own personal contract with yourself.

You have the opportunity to be in the driver’s seat of your life rather than a passenger with no say as to its destination. Put those hands on the steering wheel and reset your compass!