COMFORT ZONE Vs FREEDOM

Staying in your comfort zone is staying with what is familiar. You activate the same neurology and chemistry, the same thoughts and feelings that keep you in that state of being. It is a cycle that perpetuates the same familiar behaviours, actions, decisions and therefore thoughts and feeling over and over. It is your conditioning.

Life, however, is dynamic and change is the constant. If change is that which challenges your comfort zone as it so often is and you resist, the result is internal chaos as well as external disorder.

“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”    Lao Tzu – Philosopher

To evolve you will go through and must go through, challenges to your comfort zone; you will go through and must go through what can be perceived as periods of building \ construction \ birth \ growth \ syntropy \ order as well as perceived periods of destruction \ stagnation \ death \ entropy disorder.

Learning occurs by association as information is processed synaptically – linear, neuronal pathways and ephaptically – non-linear, electro-magnetic exchanges. Associative memories, when reinforced over a period of time, result in positive or negative perceptions that recycle whenever triggered and will run your life through emotional reactions; your high’s and low’s. You become conditioned.

Your conditioning becomes what you know, is automatic and often outside of your awareness – your comfort zone. You may not like being there (or you might and you just want to stay there and resist anything that challenges you) but it is familiar and predictable; in a nano-second and before you know it, you revert to familiar behaviour, actions etc.

“There are risks and costs to action…But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.” John F. Kennedy – President, USA

Emotions distort perceptions, distort thoughts and you feel the discomfort throughout your body. Such distortions affect your cognitive ability to make clear, wise and effective decisions as blood flows away from the decision-making centre of your brain. This negatively affects your output, your personal performance and the quality of your interactions.

The stronger your conditioned thinking, feeling, decisions, behaviours, actions are the less conscious control you have. Your automatic sub-conscious programming is running. This is what you live daily.

Ask yourself these quality questions:  How do I want to live? How do I want my life to be - right now?

Suggestions:

·        Observe your High’s & Low’s – make a note of when they occur; under what circumstances?

·        Observe your behaviour – make a note of whether you perceive it to be grandiose or passive\submissive and under what conditions.

·        Observe your actions – note whether you are reacting, or perhaps avoiding and not taking any action or whether you are taking conscious action.

·        Listen to your language and the words you use consistently – they define your experiences and give you an insight into the meanings you have assigned to those experiences.

A pattern will emerge that gives information about your comfort zone.

Commit to taking time every day to sit in quiet reflection and appreciation. Persist. Silence the ego, the analytical Mind.

“At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.”    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1749-1832 - Writer and Statesman

This will nudge you towards making active changes towards a new way of thinking and being. It is the first step.

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”               Dolly Parton - Singer, Songwriter, and Entrepreneur

“It takes effort to contemplate new possibilities beyond known choices. But that effort is the ‘pattern interrupt’…”                  Joe Dispenza

Lilly Fitzgerald

THRIVE OR SURVIVE - WHAT IS IT FOR YOU?

In light of recent Global events and the consequent fall out from them, never has there been a more important time than NOW to speak about developing COLLABORATIVE societies that have as their goal, to:

further expand their communities for the benefit of each individual as much as for the benefit of the community. 

The sentence above may be long and a bit convoluted in its wording but I am sure you get what I mean. 

For some time now there have been people who have been constantly researching, writing about and delivering presentations about how destructive human beings have been and continue to be, it seems, at an individual level, at a local level, at a global level etc; that destructive tendency appears to be transferring across all aspects of life. We seem bent on destroying things whether it be through the way we think, the way we act, what we say, what we eat............etc.

What is heartening to know, however, is that to the degree that we have suffering, we also have the opposite happening - it just does not get reported on and often the rejoicing & celebration, the respect and collaborative nature of human-ness is dismissed. It doesn't sell, does it!!!

Recently I heard an interview with Dr Srini Pillay during which he explained that according to studies by Freud and many subsequent Psychologists:

the human brain is wired to master disappointment but not necessarily to thrive out of it.

This has been processing in my brain for some time now and this is why:

Those who perpetrate harm onto others use the powerful tool of FEAR to maximize that harm. 

Such people are not only 'terrorists' as we have seen recently, they include those who are violent in communities in all sorts of ways.

Maybe they know that the people they target will not only suffer the psychological harm & physical hurt, they will also have ongoing consequent
FEAR that will put a halt to any thriving.


If this is so, then such perpetrators have been successful not only in the harm and ongoing fear they set out to inflict; they have succeeded in stopping the Global Community in its tracks from THRIVING for the GOOD of all and for the good of the planet in a COLLABORATIVE way.

So my questions are:

Do you as an individual want to just manage disappointment or do you want to thrive out of it?

Do we as a diverse Global Community want to just manage disappointment, manage the harm and hurt or do we really desire to THRIVE out of it on a Global scale?

What is the answer to be?

What does 'to THRIVE out of disappointment' as opposed to 'managing harm & disappointment' mean:           for you?
                                               for your community?
                                               for the Planet?

I agree with Gregg Braden and others when they say we are at a turning point rather than a tipping point. 

Warmly
Lilly