16 Mar Have you begun to Thrive yet? (The Shift Requires Pattern Interruption)

Have you begun to Thrive yet? Since we spoke last time where I explained what causes us to live in survival mode, we identified that the shift from survival living to thrival living is a matter of pattern interruption. 

We have to interrupt the patterns established since early childhood which we form to enable us to navigate parents, siblings, teachers, kids at school, and – that’s a big one – surviving kids at school, this alone can have many psychological implications. 

But whatever messages we internalised about the world from that vulnerable place of childhood and adolescence; we now have the capacity to re-evaluate and to explore more empowering ways of resolving and approaching life.

The thing is, survival mode living isn’t fun. Nevertheless, it is predominantly unconscious. We just do it. It expresses itself in how we interact with people, either distrustfully, or abandoning ourselves to the care and support of others ‘unboundried’, irresponsible to our own safety and what may be necessary for our Souls thriving. Or we feel we always must take the lead, or we perpetually adopt the posture of the follower. All these different strategies and approaches to navigating our interactions when they are subconscious programs don’t give much wiggle room and provide our lives little nuance and as a result our lives feel as though they are repeating familiar patterns all the time.

And there is no other way to say it but that is exactly what is happening, we are circling the same well worn paths in our minds and literally what is happening inside gets reflected outside and the experiences which characterise our lives are subject to the parameters of our capacity to interrupt the patterns and amend the programs and choose a different pattern and install a new software programme into the hardware of our brains to realise a different existence in our day to day life. 

Thankfully to help with all this, psychologist Carl Jung taught us a great deal about The Archetypes. Since then Jungian psychologists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette have written a very helpful book for men to explain four predominant ‘Male Archetypes’ which are anthropomorphised aspects of our psychological make-up enabling us to identify and interact with these ‘parts’ of ourselves via initiating a dialogue.

So if we think of the part of ourselves which gets to choose as our Sovereignty – our sovereign right to free will, to make choices we anthropomorphise our Sovereignty into The King Archetype. And when we speak of the aspect of ourselves where all these patterns and programs are being played out as the mind, our mind we anthropomorphise as The Magician Archetype.

Therefore, it’s time to get a dialogue going between our Sovereign selves and our minds so that rather than our minds playing tricks on us, as Sovereign beings we get to use our minds to find alternative solutions to our life’s conundrums and to enable us to come up with more considered resourceful responses to life’s scenarios expanding the landscape before us and offering potentialities for thriving which until now appeared impossible within the confines of our limited paradigm.