Create the Life You Imagine ~ February 2019
Understanding Your Self System
We have been working with the notion that we are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, rather, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. The picture above is the illustration I work with when helping people make sense of this truth, and over the course of the next several months we will move through all the parts of your spiritual Self system to help you understand how the system operates and how you can use this new awareness to live every day at your highest possible level of creativity, consciousness and connection.
As you can see from the illustration, we all have a physical self which I refer to as your “Personality,” and a spiritual self, which I refer to as your “Soul.” I like to call these two parts your “Lower Triangle” and your “Upper Triangle.” Your Lower Triangle is your physical being and you can think of it as your vehicle while you are having this human experience. Your human vehicle in life includes all of your human parts which we can break into three levels:
Your Physical Body, which includes the complex system of cells, tissues, blood and organs that keep you alive and functioning;
Your Emotional Body, which includes your desires, feelings and emotions, and;
Your Mental Body, which includes your thoughts, beliefs and mental awareness.
Our Lower Triangle is where we store up and record every experience we have in life. Our small self is the voice of our Lower Triangle and it creates its views about life and about the world based on the history records and reports stored in the lower triangle. If we have had fairly gentle and agreeable experiences and conditions in our lifetime, our Lower Triangle probably functions pretty well, and our small self may be able to direct our lives from day-to-day without too much difficulty or trouble. Our small self may struggle, though, if it encounters something new that is difficult or challenging, because it has not had any experience or practice with the harder roads of life, and the small self only operates on what it knows.
If we have encountered a lot of stress, difficulty, pain or trauma in our life, however, our Lower Triangle can get banged up by all that difficult history and our small self will likely start directing our lives in very reactive ways in order to avoid further episodes of difficulty and trauma. Our small self might experience a little bit of panic every time it encounters any of life’s potholes, detours or traffic jams, and will kick into overdrive or shut itself down to protect itself or to avoid further injury or damage. If we go back to our analogy that our Lower Triangle is our vehicle, we might say that our Lower Triangle has had a series of accidents, and despite the repairs we make on the surface or cosmetic level, our vehicle definitely shows the signs of that difficult history. Our Lower Triangle may run a little rough at times or may have unpredictable system failures because of the injuries it has experienced in the past. Because we have worked hard to get the dents in our vehicle banged out, buffed up and shined after each difficult event, however, others may not notice that we have this history of accidents, and they may be confused and bewildered by the reactive ways we operate our vehicle at times.
Our Lower Triangle, our physical being, is home to our small self. The small self has carefully reviewed all the experiences of our life and our complete history of accidents, struggles, traumas, and challenges, and works diligently to create a daily action plan that takes all of this information into account. Its primary job is to keep scan the environment for threats, to keep us safe and to prevent future accidents and injuries. The problem with the small self, however, is that it is completely unaware of our Soul Self and it only knows what it knows. It has no idea that we have access to the higher operating system of our spiritual self, so it does the very best it can to manage life in our Lower Triangle as effectively as possible, given the danger and damage reports it reviews each day.
Our Upper Triangle is home to our Soul Self, our higher operating system. Our Soul Self can use our intuition and higher consciousness to access a storehouse of timeless wisdom that our small self doesn’t possess. Our Soul Self is like a self-driving, self-correcting operating system that can fully repair and restore our vehicle in every moment to allow it to operate effortlessly in any conditions, and without regard to our history of difficulty, injury, pain, trauma or abuse. Our Soul Self doesn’t check the accident reports or the road history, because it holds the program that is buried deep within our operating system that makes us uniquely suited to bring our spiritual gifts and talents into the world regardless of the conditions of our life. Our Soul Self knows that despite our life history, we have a gift to offer the world that no one else can bring, and nothing about our life experience can block that gift from coming through if we activate our life from the level of our Soul. Our Soul Self may send us some hints and clues about who we really are at times, but it waits for us to activate the switch to fully engage this deeper operating system, and to let our Upper Triangle take control of our Lower Triangle vehicle.
If we want to activate the deeper possibilities of our life that lie ready and waiting for us in this operating system, we have to learn to open the channel to our Soul Self, put our small self in the passenger seat, and let our Upper Triangle operate as the driver of our Lower Triangle vehicle.
Wishing you the blessings and light of the Soul, as you create the life you imagine.
Tracy
Stepping Stones:
Draw a large triangle on a piece of paper to represent your Lower Triangle, and inside that triangle write down as many of your difficult life experiences as you can think of, from your earliest memory to your most recent life events. Now if this was all the information your small self has about how life goes, imagine the ways your small self might learn to operate within that history.
Around the outside of the triangle write down all the ways the small self might make sense of these life experiences. On the left side of the page, write down all the feelings that your small self would have when it looks at your triangle (e.g., angry, anxious, ashamed, betrayed, bitter, defiant, disappointed, depressed, embarrassed, exhausted, fearful, frustrated, hurt, humiliated, irritated, insecure, jealous, mad, misunderstood, neglected, numb, overwhelmed, panicked, powerless, pressured, rebellious, rejected, sad, scared, sorrowful, unsure, vulnerable, worried, weak, etc.)?
On the right side of the page, write down all the thoughts and beliefs your small self might hold (e.g. Life isn’t fair, I’m no good, People can’t be trusted, Life doesn’t work out for me, I am not smart enough, or strong enough, or thin enough, or pretty enough or important enough, etc.)?
As you look at these feelings and thoughts, can you be aware of how the small self gets triggered in your life or shows up in ways that creates reactions, obstacles or limitations in how you operate? On the bottom of the page, write down all the ways your small self acts when it is operating inside the pattern of experiences, feelings and thoughts of the Lower Triangle. Now watch yourself this week and notice when the small self shows up, and pay attention to its strategies to keep you safe and protected.
