So of course just like everyone else, I have spent the past several days thinking about the new year and what I would like to create for myself this year. However, I noticed something peculiar- every time I began to sit down and really focus on setting some big intentions for myself, something happened… I suddenly remembered I needed to change the wash to the dryer, my dirty dishes (that have been sitting there in the sink for hours) began urgently calling me to be washed; I even had an unexpected strong compulsion to clean out my refrigerator top to bottom…
And to be clear- I don’t like doing chores!!
Fortunately, I’ve done enough introspective work on myself at this point in life that I was able to catch myself and recognize that I was behaving out of the ordinary and that there must be a reason for my sudden preoccupation to clean behind my stove!
I allowed myself to shift into curiosity and ask- what exactly am I up to? The answer dropped in hard and heavy, like a huge stone slamming down to the bottom of a pond- my subconscious was actively avoiding intention setting! Why would I do that, you might be wondering, isn’t it fun to dream about the future and imagine what exciting things may lie ahead for this coming year?
Well it certainly can be, but it can be scary too. When we allow ourselves to dream big, there is an underbelly shadow side to the dream- the fear of disappointment. For me the shadow side sounds like the voice of my parents saying, “don’t get your hopes up”. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that phrase as a kid, I wouldn’t need to save for retirement right now. And were my parents being malicious and purposefully trying to squash my dreams? No, they weren’t, they were simply repeating what had been told to them growing up, combined with a bit of lived experiences (their own lessons in disappointment) and they didn’t want us kids to feel the pain that comes with those experiences. So while they were well intended, there was the unfortunate consequence of this being pounded into my head. I came to believe it was bad to get my hopes up, to dream too big, to reach too far… And I believed it at a very deep subconscious level.
Now, I have actually been aware of this insight for several years. With the help of tapping, I have actively worked to clear out this unconscious program. I have reprogramed my mind to believe that, yes, life is going to disappoint me sometimes, that just how life is and so I feel more accepting of disappointment. After all, if life was all good all the time, it would actually be pretty damn boring. The bad times are what make the good times all that much sweeter.
Yet, here I was, doing every unappealing chore I could think of rather than still down and set some intentions for the new year, intentions I might be disappointed to find do not come true a year from now… Consciously, I KNOW that we have to set clear intentions to manifest our desires in life. If we don’t set clear intentions, we are like that little red line moving across the map in the Indiana Jones movies, except our redline would be wandering all over the map without knowing where it was trying to end up!
We are the co-creators of our own reality and the universe will conspire with us to get us what we want but it can’t help us along when we do not know where we are trying to get to. And the most powerful way to get that to happen is by taking some quiet time to yourself and getting very clear in your mind’s eye about what you want. Writing it down and/or telling a friend about it are powerful tools to super charge your intention into reality. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But it’s easy to avoid doing all of that and just let time pass by when we are afraid of being disappointed… and/or what might be worse is if we tell others our wishes and our dreams don’t come true, then we are embarrassed AND disappointed. So it becomes very appealing to carry on with life, not take the time to set new year intentions with anything more than just a surface thought. Heck, within a few weeks everyone has moved on from thinking about new years resolutions anyway…
Last year, I wrote a book. It was something I always wanted to do my whole life but I could never seem to fully set my intention and focus on it because I had so much fear getting in the way. Fear that I didn’t even consciously know was there until I tapped on it and that log jam of trepidation cleared and the book flowed out of me in less than 6 months!
This year, maybe the reason chores suddenly became so appealing to me is that I am afraid of sitting down and setting intentions that may be ‘too big’. Things that may expose me more than the book did, or that may change my life in ways that I can’t imagine but that I dread anyway because change is scary…
And maybe I know exactly what big desires I have that I wish to manifest into my life but it feels safer to not think about them. Maybe to part of me, it feels easier instead allow them to linger in the dark recesses of my mind rather than move front and center in the spotlight because I am too afraid to name them and risk being disappointed if my big dreams don’t come true…
Hummmm…
I think it’s time now for me to let the chores go, sit down, tap away the fear of disappointment and bring out my journal. It’s time for me to set some BIG audacious intentions for 2023. I only have this one life after all, a little bit of disappointment is a small price to pay for living my best life.