Hey everyone,
I spent the weekend feeling sick and sorry for myself. I’ve caught one of those persistent English colds that sticks itself in your chest and refuses to go away. So, over the weekend I lay on the sofa, watched Netflix, and filled myself up with tea (builder’s, not green).
This morning, however, feeling even worse, a thought came into my mind: What if this isn’t illness, but sabotage?
And the moment I asked the question, I knew the answer.
In his book The Big Leap, which I think every ambitious person should read and memorize, Gay Hendricks says,
Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.
This is the mechanism at play when you write 5,000 words one day and suddenly find yourself unable to even open up the manuscript the next. It’s the reason you uplevel massively—double your income one year—and then suddenly find yourself in debt because of unexpected expenses. It’s the precise reason why you end up fighting with your spouse on a holiday that you were both, until that moment, enjoying very much.
Many of us are so afraid of feeling good that the moment the feeling of peace temporarily comes into our life, we unintentionally sabotage it so that we can remain fixed in our patterns of lack and fear.
It is why, this week, I got sick after making several big decisions for both my life and my career.
My lower-level self wants to stop me from taking the actions that will be required to back that decision and it’s up to me whether I allow that and stay in my comfort zone or recognize that what I’m actually experiencing is a very ingrained, insidious sort of sabotage. It is a message, a lesson, coming to me in the form of a bottleneck.
If instead of asking the question, “Why is this happening to me,” we can learn to ask the question, “What is this trying to teach me?” the message will be delivered and the bottleneck will go away.
The answer is often in the question itself.
The moment I asked myself the same question this morning, I immediately knew the answer.
I knew that my resistance was forcing me to direct energy into my illness rather than into taking positive action towards my goals. On a deeper level, this is all that sabotage is, really: A forced displacement of energy.
The good news, of course, is that when you free up this energy that’s being wasted on this distraction, you’re able to utilize it and put it towards happiness and growth-oriented activities.
So much of this last year, for me, has been about releasing trapped energy and putting it towards my creative life. The more I’ve healed trauma and learned to ignore small annoyances in my day, the more I free up my energy to be used on things I actually care about.
And every time I ask the question, “Why am I sabotaging this? What am I afraid of?” the answers become clearer, healing happens, and more energy is freed up.
Unsurprisingly, twelve hours after I started thinking of my own sabotaging patterns this morning, I feel perfectly fine.
Ultimately, when you can begin to understand that life happens by you and for you, and not to you, is when you’ll really start making headway towards the things you most desire. This isn’t about just taking responsibility, it’s about knowing that blocked creativity and blocked emotions always manifest themselves in physical and external forms.
Your body is always telling you something, when it feels good and when it feels bad.
Are you listening?
Cheers,
Natasha