Having committed to the divine qualities, as a way of anchoring myself in them, what next confronts me are the reaction patterns that vasanas (core issues, early childhood trauma) give rise to.
Up till now, I’ve been mainly concerned with my vasanas, and not with the automatic reaction patterns they give rise to.
Commitment does not prevent my patterns being triggered. Right now it only determines my response.
I’m discovering that these patterns are independent of the vasanas that gave them birth. They’re children of the vasanas. They incorporate the vasana’s thinking, but they can deploy separately.
They’re as bothersome as the vasanas themselves. Someone has lain their wet coat over a shirt I was drying. Where are my pliers … again? Someone didn’t tighten the lid on the hot sauce and I got it all over me when I shook it.
I could very well be the cause of all of these instances. But my automatic filter is that someone else is. I need to look good and be right.
As I said in anther article, (1) the closer I zero in on any one issue and the more it begins to looks like I’m the culprit, the more my looking, self-servingly, peters out. They’re inversely proportional.
But the whole pattern is reactive. And so I now just drop it. I played with it for long enough, from this angle and that, and now have made my life so much easier by just letting it go, like a piece of paper I’m dropping into the wastebasket.
So I’m finding myself developing the ability to drop my vasanas and patterned responses. But it’s taking round-the-clock vigilance.
I have reaction patterns about going to sleep, getting up, cleansing, eating, drinking, and so on. This is looking a little like whack-a-mole. (2) Bop one and another arises.
Nonetheless, if I’m to lead a consortium of companies – and also write – I can’t afford to be irritable, suspicious, or hostile. Vasanas and patterns have to go.
I know that the sins of the executive suite are greatly multiplied in the retelling. What for me would be an irritable glance could become a pronouncement from on high at the water cooler.
This is a three-step operation. I’m vigilant for reaction patterns. I’m vigilant for vasanas. But I’m also a continually-renewed commitment to the divine qualities.
And I’m a source of love, drawn up from my heart and sent out to the world. Doing only the latter would make the others unnecessary, but it’d also probably have me leave this work.
Increasing my self-awareness – my vigilance – is an unintended consequence of committing to the divine qualities.
This is another instance of reparenting myself. There’s no one around to turn to for guidance any more. Either I guide myself or it doesn’t get done – and I live another lifetime of perpetual reactivity and unrealized potential.
Footnotes
(1) “Finding Blame is like Making War on a Person,”
(2) A fairground game when I was a kid, where hitting one mole that pops up from a hole causes another to pop up.