When I was a teenager, I wanted to live differently from my parents. Bigger, bolder, more free. I envisioned myself doing interesting things, making a difference and succeeding. My plan was to get out of my small hometown as soon as possible.
I moved abroad to work and study, first as an exchange student in high school and then to London. The multicultural atmosphere and seemingly unlimited possibilities of the city expanded my personal horizon. I felt like I was finally on my own, got involved in the excitement of the dotcom and media industries and really enjoyed my life.
After a few years I started to feel more and more often that my stretch for freedom and independence, a counteraction to my small town youth, was beginning to lose its shine. Something within was calling for a closer look.
Returning to Finland turned my gaze more strongly inward. I felt my daily environment shrink considerably in the move. This turned out be an excellent catalyst for facing the limiting patterns and templates that I had externalized to other people and my surroundings in my youth.
I started to notice that the limitations I had observed in my parents were not just outside of me. I became more aware of having inherited some of the same ancestral thought, emotional and behavioral patterns that had affected those in my bloodline, as well as the culture in general. It was obvious that I carried within me exactly what I had tried to escape some years earlier.
One of the core patterns was the reclaiming of the right for existence through sacrificing self at work, based on shame and the belief of innate inadequacy. I pushed this pattern to the extreme during my first years back in Finland. It might have looked like dedication and competence to some and a compulsive need to be valid to others. I was starting to think, feel and behave in ways that I really didn’t like. The time came to explore the pattern and start dissembling it.
The way we look at ourselves and our lives is equal to what kind of selves and lives we create. Whatever it is that we observe, we always do it from our unique points of view. We give names and meanings to our internal movements as well as people, things and events, making them into what we see them to be.
The more aware we are of this, the more we can impact what and how we observe. A famous quote says: ”A miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love”. Things, people, events and ourselves can be experienced in unique and different ways.
If we observe ourselves and the world primarily through our inherited templates and patterns without presence, we repeat them over and over again as our versions in everyday life. As many of these patterns are rooted in our fear of survival, they hinder us from being what we could be without its constant control.
Beliefs of inadequacy as professionals, parents, spouses, friends and humans in general are gnawing away at us. They surface as attempts to fulfill external expectations and an addiction to validation and approval from others. They manifest as constant consumption, a compulsion to achieve and as systematic, subtle or unscrupulous abuse of self and others.
Each one of us can become aware of the power and responsibility we have for our observations, if we so choose. We can loosen the grip of the ancestral patterns by taking a step back and looking at ourselves with honesty. What are my main models for relating to events and people? Am I afraid of something? Do I have a need to control situations? Do I attempt to control what other people think and how they behave by taking on certain roles? What are those roles and from where do they originate?
As our observations of ourselves and the surrounding world begin to be liberated from fear, our experiences shift. We might be involved in a familiar event. However this time, we experience it differently in thought and emotion, and also act in a new way. We don’t automatically get attached to the suppressing energy of fear, but see the bigger picture with more clarity. What has been waiting behind the inherited and adopted patterns can take up more space and filter through our experiences. On the line of fear and love, we move more strongly into love.
As the hold of old patterns recedes, there is room for something else. Like exploring what are the most authentic aspects of me, free from limitations, at this stage in my life? What and how would I like to experience life, to be, think, feel and do on daily basis? In the space, vacated from fear, we might experience relief, surrender and peace. Also anger, sadness and grief for having kept ourselves prisoner for so long. Necessary and constructive states all of them, at least based on my experience.
So when I was a teenager I wanted a life of freedom, greatness, courage and success. And why not. At that time I didn’t realize though that I would have to fine tune the ways in which I saw freedom, greatness, courage and success to actually truly feel like I was living them.
It would require continuous awareness of inherited and cultural templates in the process of creating daily life. Also explorations of what those attributes actually mean to me in different areas of my personal evolution, as the illusion of fear grows weaker. I would experience that heartfelt success springs from a place that transcends fear. Observed from that place, every day is an essential particle in the human experience and that experience in itself is the biggest success I can have, exactly as it is, if I choose to see it so.
Marika Vepsäläinen
Coach, Consultant