#002 – All of us have mechanisms designed to protect us and keep us safe at all costs — even when there is no threat. Our experiences, past hurts, and ideology often times form walls that create a deep need for certainty without ever stopping to ask if they are truly serving us. We’ll explore in this podcast how some of those things got there in the first place and look at the deeper treasures that might be waiting for us on the other side.

Show Summary

How Does Scarcity Create the Box?

We unpacked last week what is a scarcity complex. This week we are looking at how this illusion of separation creates the barriers we all live with every day.

A box is basically anything that you have in our life that helps you feel like you are safe and that you are protected at all costs. It is composed of four walls, and those walls often times are composed of bricks. Each brick could, metaphorically speaking, be representative of past experiences, your ideology, or things that give you a sense of status or significance.

Your political point of view is one brick on the wall. So is your religious or spiritual outlook on life and how you view God or why you’re here on this planet. Other bricks could be made up of experiences and ways that you’ve been hurt in the past by other people. There are also physical things that we want to fill our lives up with to distract us and help us feel like we are okay.

If you’ve had a painful experience in your life, your brain will often associate that person or situation with something that you never want to open yourself up to again because it will always mean getting hurt. So anytime you see something that reminds you of that thing, you retreat behind the four walls of your box.

Questioning the Bricks

Sometimes by choice, you might decide to examine a particular brick. This is one way to begin to examine some of the bricks on the wall. It is the voluntary way, that usually doesn’t involve too much pain, because you are choosing to approach a person or a situation from a place of exploration.

There’s also another way. Sometimes those bricks get knocked out. It isn’t our choice. A break-up, a health issue, a financial crisis are all events that often times will dislodge a brick or sometimes crumble an entire wall. Anything that jars something that you once thought was true leaves a hole in the wall. This often times feels scary, and it is almost always filled with uncertainty.

Boxes Create Judgment

All of us to some degree live in our own box. We make judgments about people, and today we make judgments about others over the smallest of things. To top it off, we often times don’t even acknowledge that we judge.  We are in denial of our judgmentalism. Most of us think we are compassionate, merciful human beings, and it’s everyone else that is the problem. But if we’re really honest, we are all judges. We are also extremely hard on ourselves as well.

Judgment produces the certainty that our mind often craves. So living from that place of fear is part of the human experience because we want to know that everything is going to be okay. We fortify the walls of our box without ever stopping to question why we are doing it in the first place. What might be behind it?

Transcending the Box

Having the awareness that the bricks are there is often times the first step in beginning to cultivate the space to breathe. It requires being willing to live with uncertainty and not always having “the answer”.  But letting go of that need for certainty begins to open us up, where we no longer see ourselves or those around us filtered through our past experiences or most tightly held beliefs.

We return return to this place of curiosity and exploration, seeing ordinary things we look at every day as if they are new again. None of us do this perfectly as we all get triggered, but trying to stay open is what allows us to truly connect to the heart.

So what might it look like to leave the four corners of the box? It means taking even the tiniest of steps, throwing certainty to the wind, as you trust that there might just be a deeper adventure waiting for you.  And the great news is that we weren’t created to do it alone. This is what we will unpack more in Episode 3.