What is a Pattern?
SPIRIT gave BEAR a beautiful fur coat for comfort on cold nights. BEAR fell asleep and dreamt cozily all winter long, and by spring had quite forgotten that the coat could be removed.
On a sweltering summer day BEAR watched with envy as friend SNAKE’s old skin shed to reveal beautiful and gleaming new scales. “Ahh, poor me”, BEAR said, “if only I could shed this fur of mine – it kept me toasty warm in winter but now I’m suffering terribly. How could SPIRIT be so cruel?”
~ SPIRITOS QUEST: Collected Modern Myths
In SPIRITOS Awareness Training you’ll hear a lot about ‘Patterns’, so it’s critical that we define the word.
Patterns are the default ways of being in the world that are created by the human psyche as a response to a crisis. They are a brilliant ‘hard-wired’ survival response and are a part of the design of being human. They were created and put in place by a younger you to help you survive a crisis. Now children grow up in everything from nurturing environments to nightmarish scenarios - the point is that there is no avoiding the creation of these patterns.
A Pattern can be created in the moment of you as a three-year-old turning left expecting to see your loving mother and she’s disappeared – THAT is the crisis for your three-year-old psyche. The giver of all goodness in the universe has forsaken me! Something is WRONG! The three-year-old you perhaps concludes: “I am not enough”, or “I am unlovable”. It makes no difference that momma was two feet away the other direction. A Pattern is created in a moment and then is forgotten in the next moment. There is no conscious distinction between YOU and Pattern – it’s all you. And then you simply ARE the Smart One, or the Cute One, or the Bad One, or the Stubborn One, and on and on.
Most of your life these Patterns control you. Filtering your every perception of the world; who you date, where you work, guiding the course of your life to the smallest detail to conform with the Pattern.
As we mature, we lovingly polish and add embellishment to these original Patterns until they look very sophisticated and adultish. Remember - these Patterns mostly work pretty well for you. If I ask your friends what they think is cool about you – they will likely name your Patterns. Patterns are not bad things – they have gotten you as far as you have gotten in your life.
The point of SPIRITOS Awareness Training is not to destroy, or fix or improve your Patterns. We want and need your Patterns for you created life. Awareness Training seeks to jog your memory when you forget like BEAR. You forget that YOU are not your Patterns - that YOU have choice.
Fortunately buried in all the forgetting there is a voice quietly yearning for something deeper. A voice continually whispering for you to listen for something deeper. Something more connected to your heart’s wisdom.
We seek to nurture that connected voice within and grow it to manifest in the world as you rediscover your unique Mission of Love.
Love, David