Do you ever think or feel like you are sabotaging your own efforts and not taking the right turn? Your own conscious desires to go in a certain direction, do an activity or create something for yourself in your life?
By definition, sabotage is an act of destroying or damaging something deliberately so that it does not work correctly.
Why on earth would you do that? Why would anyone do it deliberately?. When people talk about sabotaging themselves, what it really means is that there are some deeper unconscious objections to what they may be wanting on a conscious level. When we feel we are sabotaging ourselves, it may mean there are fears, doubts, self-criticism, perfectionism or self-judgement getting in the way or other issues that are asking us to look at them BEFORE we may proceed with our conscious wishes, plans or in a desired direction.
It is much easier to be aware of what we want consciously for ourselves than being aware of what is blocking us. This is mainly due to the way our mind and ego works, as one of its main characteristics is a self-preservation mechanism. So, in order to protect you, your mind will not look into the ugly stuff, because it knows this is threatening to you on some level.
Another problem is the mind’s tendency to identify with whatever it is thinking. So, if your mind is telling you that you can’t do it, that you’re not good enough or that it is something to be feared, you blatantly believe it without questioning.
You can’t trick your own mind and even if you do for a while, sooner or later, those blocks pop up again and again. It’s actually a friendly reminder for you to look deep within and tackle something that requires your attention, but not by believing it, but by looking attentively and with care and curiosity, by shedding light to it and understanding why it is there in the first place.
So, if it is so simple, why is not everyone doing it already? The way our mind works has began when we were small children and it may well be 20, 30 or 40 years during which this pattern has become imprinted, solidified and fixed. It’s the path of least resistance, the way you’re wired to automatically respond. All of these objections your subconscious mind is storing is put there for a reason – to protect you and to preserve the integrity of your psyche. There is no way you could have dealt with it as a child. And so, it is waiting there until you become ready and willing to deal with it consciously, patiently and compassionately.
One of the ways to start doing this is simply to step back and observe what goes in your mind, becoming vigilant and very attentive. That alone takes practice, but is actually a very simple one. Once you’re able to do it, you can start detaching from the content from your mind by recognising that you are not your thoughts, that there is a deeper awareness behind your thoughts and this that is the place to identify with and return to over and over again. You may call it your heart, your Observer mind, your awareness, your essence, your soul or anything else you like, but it’s a deep place in which you see you are whole and complete and that ripples on the surface can’t affect it.