Understanding Behavior

Dating should be fun. There’s all the excitement of wondering if we will be attracted to each other, will we have much in common, are we going to see each other again. There’s the curiosity of meeting new people and sharing new experiences. Just the possibility of romance can put a spring in our step, so it's only natural that we would all like to meet someone special and see it develop into something meaningful.

Often, however, after talking with or meeting a potential partner, we find ourself criticizing them. Perhaps we think they are too serious or quite judgmental or always complaining or something else. Whatever it is that we find ourself thinking, we need to recognize that we are only able to see ourselves in others and therefore the behavior we have found uncomfortable is in fact our own! This truth can be quite a shock as it may reveal an aspect of ourself which we had never noticed or perhaps had hidden, however the recognition is a real blessing and if we are serious about love then we need these situations to help us know ourself better.

There are a myriad of books about our less attractive traits, our ‘dark side’ and how we need to own them, but taking responsibility, whilst very noble, doesn’t always bring any real peace or understanding. The body’s nervous system is a bit like a computer. As we grow, we see our parents and teachers behaving in a certain way and telling us what they believe to be right and wrong, and as a result the system literally gets programmed to behave the same way. The whole process is completely unconscious and the patterns that the nervous system adopts continue to play out until such time as something or someone makes us aware of them. Just like computers, we can only do what we have been programmed to do .. until the programming becomes conscious.

Ultimately, whatever we were exposed to simply got wired into our system and became our reality .. and we had no clue it was happening. We are all just products of our environment. In fact, a recent study concluded that approximately 99.8% of our behavior is unconsciously driven. Whilst this may be hard to digest, one thing is clear - if we are to discover our true self, we need to recognize and integrate these behavioral patterns because they have nothing to do with the real us .. they have just been adopted.

Nobody is to blame. Our parents and teachers didn’t do anything wrong - they were also programmed by their own growing environments and couldn’t have behaved any differently or better – it literally would have been an impossibility. And no matter what characteristics they displayed, these automatically became our own unconscious template for life. They didn’t ask for them any more than we did. The patterns simply got wired into all of us at a cellular level and they have played out without our realizing it.

Up until this point, we could not have done anything any differently or better! There is no judgment to be attached to anything we have done because our level of awareness at that time simply did not allow us to do otherwise. We also need to understand that any behavior which we disliked in our parents and promised never to repeat ourself will actually have been made stronger by suppressing it. Moreover, if we are still suppressing rather than accepting it, not only will there be an inner conflict but we will probably have intense reactions when we spot that behavior in others, and project blame onto them rather than see the behavior present in ourselves.

Please take some time to let this knowledge sink deep inside. Sit with it a while. There is no need to forgive anyone because nobody has actually done anything wrong, yet this understanding does bring real compassion.

So why is this important? Well, the more self-aware we become, the better equipped we are to have honest relationships. When we recognize that nearly all of our past behavior has been unconscious, we realize that everyone else is the same. Nobody is to blame or be judged. We are all simply living our lives and growing in awareness as we go. There is no right or wrong way, we just have patterns that got wired into our systems and became absolutes .. they became ‘beliefs’. So how can we now say that one person’s belief is more right than another’s? 

When we become aware of these 'beliefs' as just unconscious responses, and we allow them space instead of fighting them, their hold on us begins to fall away and they become integrated. In so doing we reveal something beautiful beneath all the old conditioned traits. The real 'us' emerges ... our true self. With less ‘beliefs’ governing us, we start to take our hands off the steering wheel of life and let life lead us instead of us leading it. Where once we reacted robotically, we start to experience everything from a place of present reality rather than past perception. One is true, the other simply an illusion.

Two things are automatically revealed in this freedom ... our own beauty and the beauty of life. 


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