Willingness is a wonderful idea. It is a concept of inner freedom. It’s about letting go of all preconceived ideas and allowing your true essence to flow through. It’s surrender and acceptance and trust all rapped up together.
Contrast this to worry, concern, doubt, resistance and fear, you can feel the freedom of it all.
What happens, though, is that willingness is blocked by fears, judgements and negative expectations – in other words, all the restrictive thinking. This thinking arises from a number of possibilities. Some examples include abusive parenting, cruel bullying at school or an over-critical teacher .
But this is the overriding fact: If you are in a space of unwillingness you are in the grips of your inauthentic and false self. You are being subjected to your past time-track of restrictive thinking.
The wonderful part about this all is that whatever is holding you back is guaranteed to be based on a pack of lies!
If you able to examine the ‘mind talk’ going on your head, in such an instant it might sound like:
- “There is no point in doing this – it’s too hard. A whole lot of unpleasant things will happen and I will never cope. Nothing ever works out for me. If I try this I will be certain to lose and then I will be scorned and humiliated and blah blah blah.”
If you take the time to verify this chatter it becomes increasing obvious that the whole tone is one of negative expectation bolstered by catastrophe-like conclusions.
Closer examination will quickly reveal that these pronouncements are either patently false (at worst) or totally unknown (at best). In the statement above this might look like:
- The is no point . . . FALSE
- It’s too hard . . . . DON’T KNOW
- A whole lot of unpleasant things will happen . . . . DON’T KNOW
- Nothing ever works for me . . . . FALSE (catastrophe-like thinking)
- If I try this, I will be certain to lose . . . . DON’T KNOW/FALSE
- I’ll never be able to cope . . . . DON’T KNOW (catastrophe-like thinking)
- I’ll be scorned and humiliated . . . . DON’T KNOW
The truth is very different to all of this.
Is that not exciting? Is it not completely freeing to punch through all these restrictions?
The thing is that it is not so easy to do this.
And here is the especially interesting part: There is a very important pay-off that usually accompanies these thoughts. I stress the fact that they are very important because if they weren’t, you would not have them in place.
Searching for these pay-off’s is a remarkably fascinating exercise. The important thing is that you have put them in place for a very good reason – it has no judgement on you. Your own unique circumstances has necessitated that these concerns remain in place. They protect you!
Digging a little deeper, you might find that there could be a lot of fear holding them in place.
The exciting part is that, if you are able to make these subliminal fears conscious, you give yourself the opportunity to examine their validity much like I did in the example above. You might find that your fears are no longer applicable and you then have the opportunity to reassess whether they truly serve you.
What comes through powerfully in this exercise is a sense of self compassion – there is a connection with the real parts of yourself. By simply acknowledging that all the things you do are for very important reasons, you afford yourself the opportunity to connect with your own humanness. It’s a open connection to yourself as a normal functioning human being that acts completely rationally.
When you examine any resistance, you have the space to cognitively analyse your thoughts and feelings, you create the possibility of releasing the false perceptions and replace them with the truth!
This creates a freedom that runs deep and permanent.
And willingness follows closely behind!