Say “aaaahhhh”!

I’m at the Texas Med Clinic to determine if I have strep throat.  I haven’t had strep since I was a kid, but my memory of the pain from the throat swab is as fresh in my mind as if it had happened yesterday.

I know it’s going to suck, but I’m grown woman, so I can’t exactly be a baby about it.

The nurse comes in.  I mentally prepare.

She says open wide and say “ahhhh”.

I shut my eyes, focus on my “aaaahhhh” and just as she’s about to strike the swab against my throat, I instinctively jerk back.  Crap, my mental prep didn’t work!

I pull it together, really focus on my “aaaahhhh” and the second time around she’s able to make contact.  Phew.

Guess what?  The throat swab didn’t hurt like I remembered it hurting in my childhood memory.  Now, I’m not sure if it’s because I tested negative for strep so my throat wasn’t near as sensitive as it would have been had I had strep or if the throat swab I had as a kid was unusually rough.

Let’s say it was a one-off incident, where the throat swab from my childhood was abnormally painful.  Because of that one incident, I’ve carried around the fear of having to go through a similar experience.

Childhood conditioning tends to play a huge role in the remainder of our life, so it’s important to ask ourselves where and how this conditioning is currently at play to determine if it is unnecessarily hindering us in any way.

Now I understand that avoiding a throat swab probably didn’t hinder me from following my dreams, but I shared the example to illustrate how we internalize past experiences and allow them to drive our current behavior, no matter how much time has lapsed from the initial incident.

I reacted to the nurse’s attempt to swab my throat because of something I’d experienced 20 or so years prior!  It’s important to ask if and how early childhood experiences are playing a role in your life today.  For instance, is there a particular experience that has shaped or limited what is possible for you today?

It’s during our childhood and formative years that we begin to internalize the limitations of what is possible for us.  Without investigating these limiting beliefs, we set ourselves up to be controlled by them throughout the remainder of our life.

To further illustrate this, let’s take the example of how an adult elephant is trained not to wonder off.  Adult elephants weigh an average of 10,000 pounds, so you’d think it would take some sort of heavy duty contraption to keep them from wondering off, right?

It actually only takes the sensation of a rope tied around one leg and that rope doesn’t even have to be tied to a stake!  This is because they were tied to a staked rope when they were too small to overcome its resistance.  They’d hit the end of their staked rope and learn the extent to which they could travel.

They, then, associated the sensation of having a rope tied around their leg to the barrier that it created when they were younger.  Because of this early conditioning, they never challenged the validity of these conditions when they got older.

We’re just like the adult elephant…full of so much power and potential, but hindered by the psychological limitations imposed on us through past conditioning.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much to internalize a limiting belief…

Maybe you answered something wrong in class and your classmates laughed at you, so you concluded that you weren’t smart…

Maybe you had a parent that you couldn’t please, so you thought you weren’t good enough…

Maybe you vulnerably shared your dreams with a friend or parent and out of their own fearful conditioning they said your dreams weren’t possible, so you agreed with them…

When we allow childhood experiences to limit what is possible for us, we set ourselves up to be ruled by these limiting beliefs in the same way that the rope around the adult elephant’s leg kept it from doing what it was fully capable of achieving.

Like the baby elephant, we are easily conditioned.  Like the adult elephant, once we’ve been conditioned, we never stop to examine whether or not the conditions still hold.  We just continue on, adhering to each limitation that we have accepted as truth.

This is no way to live.  Your soul can’t thrive in an environment of fear-based conditioning.  It needs to be free to soar, to expand, and to explore!

You’ve got to bend down, grab the rope tied around your ankle, shake it, and see that it’s not attached to anything!

This is how you unleash the power and potential that is housed within your soul!

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Each moment that we’re able to live from our soul, we leave a lasting impression of love in the wake of our presence.  Together, we can help heal the world by simply being loving.

Peace, Love, & Joy,

Shanna