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Have you ever learned a bad habit and despite remorse, you still repeat that same bad habit? Think about a simple thing that you repetitively do even though you know rationally it is not the best habit. For example: Have you ever delayed in paying a bill only to get a late fee, and even though you paid a significant surcharge for being late on a bill next month, you pay the bill late again? In other words, you can be conscious of a behavior, claim that you're going to make behavioral changes, then do absolutely nothing different.

It's true. We are all conditioned to be in a certain way. We live a life of routine habits and compulsions controlled by our psychological patterns and internal conditioning. All of us are prisoners of our unconscious drives, impulses, and needs to reach a state of serenity and peace, you have to enhance the reality that we are generally unconscious, completely asleep and switched off to our own lives.

In this blog, we’ll cover what it means to be asleep in your own life, and how to overcome this so you can break free from negative things in your past that are holding you back from a sense of holistic wellness.

Asleep in your own life

I use the metaphor sleepwalking on a tightrope to explain to folks how we are unaware at times of our own behaviors. This is the not so blissful ignorance that we all exist in and how we're conditioned in trance, to not be as conscious as we need to be. Your mind is inflexible and limited and can attach to any thought or any emotion. Buddhists call this unconscious pattern of being asleep; “samsara”.

While most people believe that they are in control of their daily happenings, this sleepwalking that we know is going on, contradicts that belief. Moving from one unconscious trance to another is nothing more than past programming, shaping our current interpretation of reality, which means that we are all running on templates from our childhood or events in our past.  If you are watching something good on TV  and someone is talking to you, do you listen? Probably not. You have to turn your head away from the screen, refocus on what they are saying and really listen in order to hear the message. Communication happens on these two levels: the conscious and the unconscious. We get huge amounts of information from everywhere all day, so we sort it as best we can; moving and engaging draws our attention the most.
Much has been written about the common everyday trance that occurs naturally in people. It is not bad for you unless it keeps you sleepwalking through life. In the Eastern tradition, they talk about being trapped in Maya, a transient world of the mind or the world of thoughts, feelings and emotions. Your identification and attachment to these thoughts, feelings, or emotions can dictate your emotional state. Rather, you should be able to experience a multitude of natural trance states, which can actually lead you to a transcendental experience of yourself yet instead, we often remain sleepwalkers woken only by either pleasure or emotional pain as we move through life in a haze.

You are more than thoughts or problems

But there's good news: You are not just your  thoughts or problems.

Here's a shocking revelation. You are not just merely what you're thinking or the challenges you're having in life right now. You have never been the things that pass through your conscious mind. You are not simply your thoughts, emotions, fears, memories, or ideas. These are all valid emotional experiences, but they do not define you!

Instead, think of your emotional experiences like this: Imagine that you are in a puddle of mud and experiencing trouble getting out of it. The very second that you identify with that difficulty, your mental thinking pattern limits your freedom to transcend or get beyond it. The fact is, you are not, yet can create as much distance as you need from the mud puddle to figure out the problem? You have simply been conditioned not to have this ability to transcend your thoughts.

Research shows that trauma impacts our memory. Researchers ran an experiment and found people, “reporting a greater history of trauma exhibited more suppression-induced forgetting of both negative and neutral memories, than did those in a matched group who had reported experiencing little to no trauma”, Those who reported more trauma “demonstrated greater generalized forgetting of suppressed material” (Hulbert, Anderson, 2018).  For many, these emotional experiences and negative thoughts that are holding them back are caused by traumatic events that they cannot even remember or remember fully. This makes it extremely hard to move forward in life.

Unresourceful Mental States

Unresourceful mental states like these cause narrowing, fixations of attention and shrinking of your perspective. You experience things as happening to you. Each of these mental states, whether they're pleasant or unpleasant (like going on a nice long vacation or getting into a minor car accident) are composed of unconscious conditioned responses. It is these automated condition responses that have the potential to create adult problems that begin with the childhood experience. Younger responses might have worked back then, but do not work now later in your life. Natural absorption will need to be solved with a shift in your internal perspective and attention.

How to Stop Being a Prisoner to Your Past

We can’t change the past, but we can take action to not let it tarnish our present and future. You must take an active role in your own healing.

You will have to make a conscious effort to not sleepwalk through these feelings, nor become totally consumed by them.

Instead of being fixated on a rigid emotional trigger response, start noticing the patterns in your emotional behavior. Witness. Observe how things play out and set yourself free from the continuous cycles that are no longer working. To help you with each mental image, sound, physical sensation, or sensory stimulus, you must begin to notice what sets your emotional state. The world is full of triggers that nurture pleasant or unpleasant feelings, and may set off your nervous system’s fight-flight-freeze response.

Remember:
you are not what your emotions might be dictating to you
you can clear away old emotional baggage on your own.

You simply need to notice your trigger and your pattern of behavior, then be intentional to not let it consume you. You have to allow space for your feelings. Take deep breaths to calm your nervous system. Think through a positive solution to the problem. Use a journal to reflect on your feelings after the moment to process.

Each time this happens, employ your new coping strategy. This likely will take repeated efforts. But over time, it becomes more natural to do, meaning you’re better equipped to handle these negative experiences as they occur in life.

For example, if someone is triggered by loss, they may sleepwalk through emotions of loss and try to totally avoid those feelings. Or, they may become totally consumed by grief such that it disrupts their whole day. To stop being a prisoner to this feeling might look like getting to a place where she can acknowledge feelings of loss and grief when they come up in conversation, perhaps getting a little emotional and honoring those feelings, but then being able to resume other activities in her day.

Conclusion

When you use these new and hopefully more flexible strategies, you'll no longer be a prisoner to your past. In our childhood, we would have emotional experiences. We would get locked into negative feelings for long periods of time – pouting and perhaps ruining the whole day. If you're honest with yourself, there are still moments in your adult life that you pout, and if you look underneath the pout, you'll find that there are certain experiences from your younger years that are being re-triggered. Awareness is everything. Wake up from your sleepwalk and become aware of the fact that now you can transcend any limited emotional pattern once you recognize that it exists and can employ healthy coping mechanisms!