August 5, 2022. Paris.
I believed for a long time that other people had everything figured out. I had this very palpable sensation that people around me — and everywhere around the world, really — had had an instruction manual at birth. They had learned how to navigate through life, what they were supposed to do, how to have relationships, how to love and be loved, how to behave and express what they were feeling. They knew what life was about and they were gliding with ease and success.
What is fascinating about beliefs is that even when you have the proof in front of your eyes that your belief is not true, you keep believing it.
I was aware that suffering was universal, that every one suffers, I could witness suffering in other people’s lives. But I still believed that I had been left out on the big secrets of humanity, that I had to work super hard, travel super far, dig super deep, in order to integrate what everybody had been knowing for ages.
In the past few years, because of what I’ve been experiencing through yoga, from time to time my belief shifted to the exact opposite. I believed that I was the one who actually got all figured out, how life works and how to be happy, and that the world was filled with blind people.
When you go back and forth between two very opposite beliefs, it is usually the sign that they are just interpretations, the actual belief is one layer deeper. In my case, going back and forth between believing that people knew better and that I knew better was the sign of a belief of separateness. In my mind, there was a them against a me and depending on how I felt, the them was better or worse than the me.
Here’s the confusing part though. I know in the depth of my heart that we are all together, we are one. I believe we’re all made from the same essence, I believe your soul and my soul come from the same place. It’s not a faith I grew up with, it doesn’t come from my education or my religion, it’s an experience I’ve been having over and over again and I have no doubt about it.
How can I believe that we are together while believing that there is a them against a me? How can I cultivate two belief systems that are contradictory? It cannot be effective.
When I went back to therapy six months ago, it felt unsettling because of that. I knew the direction, I knew where I wanted to go. I knew how it felt to connect with myself and be present and full of love, but somehow I couldn’t sustain it. There was a pull inside me, another entity that would take me out and remind me that I was not safe and that I should hide. My therapist said that it was because I had built my spiritual practice on unstable foundations. And it made perfect sense.
What I couldn’t grasp though was why my foundations were so different from my spirituality. Yes, they were unstable. But they were also completely opposite to what felt right. Why the personality I had been creating for myself since I was born was so conflicting with my true self. Why when I know in my heart that I should go right, my head not only tells me to run left but also shows me how I would die if I went right. I had — and still have — inside me two entities that are very discordant and not getting along. It feels schizophrenic. Which one am I? Who do I listen to? How do I know?
A few months ago, during my hypnosis training, the teacher explained that people come in therapy with a problem, something they want to work on, some symptoms, a trauma, and that the most important step is to get to the root of the problem, to treat the cause and not the consequence. He then explained that we would meet two kinds of people in our practice. 1/ People who grew up in a relatively balanced environment and have healthy emotional and mental foundations. In this first case, working on the cause of the problem itself is enough. 2/ Then there are people who grew up in a toxic environment and have unhealthy foundations, meaning that the way they built their personality when they were children gets in the way of their social functioning and happiness. In this second case, working on the cause of the problem is not enough, the problem just being a symptom of something much deeper, we’ll need to untangle the web of mental and emotional patterns that ultimately led to the problem.
When I heard that the first time, it felt like my whole inner world collapsed. I freaked out, didn’t talk to anybody and went home to process. I always knew that I had a lot of insecurities and fears coming from my childhood experiences, but realising that I wasn’t functioning properly was a whole new dimension for me. My foundations were not only unstable, they were unhealthy. It felt reassuring and freeing, Thank God I’m not crazy. I was just not wired efficiently.
I was not wired efficiently. How terrifying is that? How terrifying is it to know that the programs in your brain are counterproductive to your health and happiness?
It took me a while to accept.
I blamed my parents. I felt very angry. How could they did that to me? They were supposed to protect me and love me and support my happiness. I felt betrayed. Until I realised that my parents had done the very best they could with what they had been given. I then blamed my grandparents.
Blame is a distraction. I blamed because I needed some time to process and accept. When I accepted that it was my story and that it was now in my hands to make it what I wanted it to be, my anger dissolved, I stopped blaming and started working.
I wasn’t sure know how to proceed though. How do you rewire yourself? What does it even mean? How do you change your unhealthy foundations into healthy ones?
We usually say that the soul lives in the heart. Connect with your heart and you’ll connect with your soul. The personality lives in the brain. Your personality is the sum of all the experiences you lived, it is the conception you have of yourself as a human being in this world. This conception of you is made of two different layers: what you are aware of and what you’re not aware of. What you are aware of is the “I” you use every day, it is what we called the conscious mind. What you’re not aware of is the subconscious.
The subconscious is like a very old computer, something very archaic and slow changing, full of information and made of programs. These programs are your foundations. You build the programs of your subconscious from birth — even maybe in utero — to the age of 7. You arrive into this world as a beautiful and pure human baby, you observe what is happening around you, how it feels, how to keep yourself safe and loved, and you create a whole system of programs, beliefs, and rules to live by. In other terms, experiences you lived in your early childhood have been analysed and generalised as rules, and you then live your whole life according to those rules.
That’s why in some ways free will is an illusion. You’re not consciously deciding in your everyday life, your subconscious does that for you, and it does it based on your past experiences. If your programs are not healthy, your subconscious will decide against what’s good for you. This is self-sabotage and it is very common. Free will becomes real when you get to know your subconscious and change what doesn’t serve you anymore.
The primary — and probably only — goal of your subconscious is to keep you alive, to keep you safe. Your subconscious loves you and it exists exclusively for you. It’s just that it learned how to love from your childhood environment. If you grew up in a safe environment, if it was safe for you to be yourself, if you integrated the belief “who I am is good”, then your subconscious programs are healthy. If you grew up in an unsafe environment, if it was unsafe for you to be yourself, to express your feelings, to be seen and heard, then you integrated that being who you are was not aligned with staying alive, your subconscious programs are not healthy.
I don’t know in which situation you see yourself, whether you have healthy foundations or not, know that no matter where you are, you’re not privileged nor doomed. People growing up in healthy environments also have insecurities and wounds, while people growing up in toxic environments can heal and be balanced and happy. It is not black or white, nothing ever is, I see it more as a scale. It is a scale that goes from unhealthy foundations to healthy foundations, from unsafe to be your true self to safe to be your true self. And we’re all somewhere along this scale.
There is this image that I like. If you imagine that your soul — your true self, your essence, who you were made to be, whatever expression resonates with you — is this beautiful beam of light being projected into a lens. If the lens is super clean and clear, the light goes out of the lens with the same colour, the same pureness, the same brightness. If on the contrary, the lens is dirty and blurry, the light can’t get through and doesn’t shine anymore. It gets stuck in the lens.
The lens is your humanity, it is your personality, your foundations. The lens is like this safety checkpoint that answers a very simple yet fundamental question: Is it safe for your light to shine? Is it safe for you to be you?
Until very recently, I believed that if you were willing to be your true self, you just had to be brave, to explore your heart and to free yourself. In other words, you just had to make your light super bright and strong. But if your lens is dirty and blurry, even if you work super hard on making your light brighter and brighter, it may become stronger and get through here and there, but it still won’t be able to shine continuously. This is what my therapist meant when she said I had built my spiritual practice on unstable foundations. Making your light bright is not enough, you’ll need to clean your lens too.
So you may ask. How do you clean your lens? And yep, that’s a valid question.
First is to become aware that it’s there. Most people identify with their lens and forget they’re actually the light being projected into it.
Second is to assess your lens. How dirty is it? How healthy are your foundations? I may be wrong but I feel like it’s quite intuitive. You already know deep down how safe you feel to be your true self and if your foundations are healthy, you’ve been experiencing them your whole life. You may have resistances though, because it is an unsettling question to ask. It may take some time for you to be very honest with yourself. And that’s ok too. You can just leave the question open somewhere, and it’ll get answered when you’re ready to face it.
And then, the work begins. It starts by observing. It always does. Observe your inner conflicts, observe the both sides with so much compassion and love and dig deep. Ask yourself what feels right and trust that voice. You need to know that you’ll fail. You’ll fail. Again and again and again. You’ll fall back into some old patterns you know are not good for you. And that’s ok. Please remember that that’s ok. This is what the work is about. Falling and learning. Again and again and again. Get some help if you need. I got a lot of help. I got help from my therapist, from my hypnosis teacher, from my hypnosis training friends, from my friends and my family. I journaled a lot, practiced yoga and meditation a lot, and I kept trusting that I was going to make it. And I believe this is the most important part. Self-work is so very enduring and lonely. You need to believe that you’ll make it, that it makes sense, that it’s worth it, that you have the power and the knowledge to get through.
If you believe that as souls we choose our human lives, we choose our parents, our experiences, what we want to work on and get through. If you believe that as a soul you chose exactly the life you’re living right now, including the suffering and the traumas. Then facing it, healing yourself, cleaning your lens, letting your light get through, this is your gift to this world, the only thing you really have to do on this earth. Don’t get fooled by the society we live in, money and power and achievements. The only thing worth achieving is to let your light shine as bright, as pure and as magical as it is.
Love always,
Camille