Yesterday’s post was about Awareness of beliefs, habits, and values.
Things that take control of your actions, reactions, and choices.
Many of your beliefs and habits are at best semi-conscious. You learned them at a time when you had little ability to be critical and discerning of the programming you received.
You’ve grown up being conditioned.
Programs
Not to say that everything you believe is somehow “bad” or nefarious. Or was taught to you out of ill intent.
Humans often react to uncertainty and discomfort with attempts to control, to make someone else change or act differently. And so even when trying to teach a value like “respect,” people often rely on control mechanisms like shame to deliver the lesson.
That ends up becoming a program that runs in your head. And it can make it harder to treat people with respect, because you resent feeling shame in the past when you didn’t show respect fast enough or well enough to satisfy someone else.
Another program could be that in an effort to help you achieve, you were only rewarded for perfection. Anything less than 100% brought negativity. Now you’ve got a program in your head that thinks that if you can’t be perfect at something, you shouldn’t try.
Not very helpful for you, either of them.
Your programs resist being unmasked and challenged. You’re conditioned to think you weren’t conditioned, because the programs are things your brain thinks it needs to survive.
Process Lists
Becoming aware of these programs gives you a chance to change them or end them. And Awareness is the key.
If you’re a unix/linux user, building awareness is like learning to use the ‘ps’ command. You can look at:
- your own active programs and processes (your conscious Intentions)
- your background processes (hidden and counter-Intentions)
- all the programs and processes active in your brain (including beliefs, assumptions, values, expectations, and more).
(As a Windows or Mac user, a similar tool might be the Task Manager or Activity Monitor.)
Once you start to see your programs, your relationship to them begins to change. Choose if and when they run. Don’t let them run you.
Certainly, not every program you have is “bad.” Many do a job that you may want done. Some of them might do more for you if they did it in a different way, or were consciously chosen versus reactively deployed.
The first step is being aware of the programs and conditioning. And to do that, you have to acknowledge they exist.
You can do this. I can help.