Science shows that your brain is shaped and changed by your choices about your experiences every day. This is referred to as neural plasticity. Understanding what lives in your systems, beginning with your family system, can help you to change patterns, increase happiness, health and success.
Now, the theory piece. How does my ability to choose play out in theory?
What are multi-generational patterns in systems?
Patterns aren’t created by events in your life but by your decisions and actions about them. Events trigger reactions, thoughts and emotions that lead to decisions and actions. You create words, phrases and actions to support those decisions and they become mindsets or patterns. You think this is the truth when in fact it is just your truth.
Take it a step further. Your primary pattern maker is your family and your pattern may actually be a multi-generational one. (Remember you inherit your emotional DNA). Over time details of events fade but patterns get stronger until someone sees them and decides to change the Emotional DNA.
Example: You get divorced. Your siblings are all happily married. You tell yourself you are bad at relationships. That thought becomes your reality and it now governs your relationships. Let’s look a little deeper. In your family there are three generations of women who have all divorced at about the same age. This may be a multi-generational pattern and you might ask, who called themselves bad at relationships first?
How do they shape my life?
The bad news is that when a significant event frightens or stresses you, you tend to default to an old, maybe even multi-generational pattern, in times of stress. You may experience heightened states of anxiety and failure that seem inescapable. We call this a systemic trance.
Can I use them to create the life I want?
The good news is that you are able to change your Emotional DNA.
The extraordinary news is that once you understand what lives in your systems, you can shift limiting patterns and enhance successful ones transforming your life and creating success on a continual basis. Constellations and systemic work facilitate these shifts.
Often when you say you are stuck we call that the pattern that is trying to rest. Your heart’s desire and deepest wish often contains the pattern that is trying to emerge. The two patterns frequently sit alongside each other.
In our workshops, we show you how to access and process these patterns consciously to set down long held struggles and create success, happiness, peace and joy.
Exercise: Putting Patterns Into Practice
Now for the constellations piece. Again, we are going to use a simple exercise to dimensionalize what you are feeling and thinking. We are making the invisible, visible and the unconscious, conscious.
On a piece of paper, write down the one thing you would like to stop doing or experiencing in your life. Place it on the floor. Notice what you tell yourself and how you feel about it. You might even have a facial expression, a saying or an action that happens for you around that. Good. This is the pattern you are trying to stop.
Ask yourself are you the only one in your family who has had this experience? Or is it just like your father, mother, or perhaps someone else in the family?
Now write down your heart’s deepest desire or highest wish on another piece of paper. Place that on the floor in relationship to the first piece of paper. What does that feel like? What do you tell yourself or feel about that? Where do you feel it in your body?
Now take your place in relationship to these two pieces of paper. Notice: How close/distant you are to or from each one. Ask yourself how much do I want this? Do I really want this or do I just want to want this? Or am I even allowed to want this?
In my next blog, you will see there are things you can do to shift from the pattern that want to rest to the pattern that’s trying to emerge. One contains your fate, the other holds your destiny.
In our workshops, we take a much deeper dive with you but this allows you to start getting a sense of your head, heart and gut working together. Good luck.
Write to me with questions or insights or attend a workshop to learn more.