Limitation Exposes Vulnerabilities
Limitation in an area of our life can point to inner vulnerabilities, hidden blocks, that create a lack of clear focus, keeping us locked in a pattern that inhibits progress, and quite frankly don’t serve us very well.
Our Strengths Hidden Beneath Weaknesses
Hidden on the other side of limitation lies our own strengths (that we already possess) we can use to create growth – forward movement – and increase our inner freedom through the release of limiting beliefs (blocks).
Powerful but Simple
The insights and techniques that we can use are deceptively simple — and powerful because of their plainness. The best part is that we don’t even need to know how they work for them to help us. Just use them to our advantage.
Know Your Feelings
It is important to know our feelings about what seems to be the limiting forces in the situation. Maybe we feel insufficiently skilled, unworthy in some way, perceive the goal as unachievable given our situation, or even the fear of actually getting what we desire (fear of success).
Basically, we try to move forward, but progress is slow, non-existent, or at a standstill, leaving us wondering what to do and how to move forward.
Fear is Natural
As a quick reference to our last blogpost, fear can play a part. It’s natural because we are moving forward into a new project, situation, or goal without perfect pre-knowledge. If we had perfect knowledge and experience, we wouldn’t be stuck in neutral.
Let’s add one more thing about fear. Fear has been used as a social protector both in earlier societies and even from our own childhood.
No Longer Serves Us
For example, in centuries past, there truly were unknown dangers in unexplored regions where people lived. Humans were programmed from birth to not venture deep into the forest, don’t drink from the forbidden lake (it might have been poisonous), and sailors were not to go far out to sea or they would fall off the edge of the earth.
In our own childhood, we were told not to run with scissors, don’t cross the street without our parents and so on.
This earlier childhood programming is powerful and stays with us into our adult lives where it can severely restrict how we do things without our even knowing it.
F.E.A.R.
With that said, FEAR can stand for False Evidence Appearing Real. Sure, it’s cliché. But it is also true. If reality is a 10, our perception is a 9 (for us).
And our perceptions in any area of our life dictates what we choose to do (and not do), our planning (or lack thereof), how we approach new projects and goals, how we react to positive and negative events, and what we do unknowingly to block our forward progress and sabotage our own desired outcomes.
With that in mind, we can find ourselves in a situation where we feel limited, while we watch others moving forward in similar endeavors like they’re in the Indy 500 car race.
Because we do unconsciously block ourselves, this can leave us wondering what to do, how to do it, and more importantly, what exactly will this new free-flowing, unlimited desired outcome actually look like in our life?
So, what do we do?
Acknowledge to ourselves that we have a challenge, a problem that we would love to have solved. If we continue to pretend that it’s not a problem, or someone else’s problem, when we know that we aren’t moving forward very fast, or at all, then we will remain immobilized.
Self-Honest Creates Forward Movement
Without going into a lot of background, the mere conscious acknowledgement that we are having a problem, and at least part of the problem is with us, unlocks spiritual energies within our lives and unleashes psychological forces that can move us forward.
Power of Intention and Visualization
If we are already at this point and know that we are at least participating in the limiting situation, then we can use the power of intention and visualization to unleash solutions. The power of intention and visualization cannot be overstated.
Professional athletes, Olympic competitors, NASA astronauts and many others use intention and visualization to change inhibiting beliefs and behaviors to dramatically increase their performance in whatever they are doing, both physical, mental and technical activities.
The mind does not differentiate between what we think of as outer reality and what we imagine, because all inner and outer activities, real or imagined, are processed neurologically by the inner brain. To the brain, it’s all the same.
Example of Intention
Let me illustrate the power of intention using a spiritual example. I have a friend who can see auras like we see images on a television, whether in person or from a distance. Now, I happen to be VERY color blind. I do see colors but not the way everyone else does. Basically, I do not know the difference between violet, blue and purple. They are all just a range of this bluish color. They are not separate colors.
During a certain guided meditation, we were instructed to place indigo blue on the outside of our aura. As many of us know, indigo blue is a powerfully protective color that keeps negative energies and emotions out of our auric field. Since I had no idea what indigo blue was, I just set my intentions and imagined a thick layer of it surrounding the outside of my aura.
Setting Intention Made It Happen
Well, it just so happened that I called my friend later that day and I asked about the colors in my aura, which I routinely did during our phone calls. I was told that all my normal colors were there in all of the bands, but there was an abnormally large amount of indigo blue on the outside of my aura that wasn’t there the last time we had talked. Wow, that was revealing!
Over time, it became clear to me that setting and using intention not only works for aura colors, but also in every other area of our life, if we use it.
NASA and Athletes Use It
To illustrate what was mentioned before, professional athletes, NASA astronauts and Olympic competitors use intention along with active visualization to see themselves performing perfectly in any activity, physical, mental, technical or artistic. They use intention and visualization to hone their strengths and to correct unconscious patterns that block or limit their performance, as well as use them to correct conscious thought patterns and corresponding (incorrect) physical movements that cause them to fail or underperform in some activity or area.
One Day Turnaround
I once took a course years ago offered by the inspirational speaker and business leader, Anthony (Tony) Robbins. The course was called Power Talk. He illustrated the power of intention and visualization when he once helped a failing basketball player turn his performance around in ONE day by using the powerful technique of setting his ideal intention and active visualization of the ideal outcome, i.e., hitting 3-point shots every time. It worked for him and it can work for us! We just have to use it.
There are a few simple steps that you can use to get things moving forward to achieve your goals.
Steps to overcome limitation:
- Set your intentions.
Imagine the situation, project, relationship, etc., flowing perfectly. See, visualize the details, FEEL the emotions of satisfaction, joy and success that comes with your goal being achieved and continuing to flow smoothly. Feeling the emotions of success, fulfillment and satisfaction makes it real for your inner self.
When it is real for your mind and inner self, together they will use your inner abilities and higher spiritual connections to “magically” move things forward. Things will become unstuck, sometimes seemingly by themselves.
- Break the goal, project or process into manageable pieces.
Another thing that happens is called “Seeing the Elephant” in process improvement. When we see the enormity of what lies before us in some goal, project or activity, it can be immobilizing!
When we look at the elephantness of our project, goal, or process, we can feel overwhelmed and wonder what to do? We can feel stuck, frozen in fear.
The answer to this comes in the form of a question: How do you eat a (proverbial) elephant? One bite at a time, of course.
Both in process improvement and in organizational leadership, the first question one asks is, “What is the best use of my time right now?” What activity, what little step can I do right now to move this project forward.
When you think of things in that way, you can break the elephantness of the project into smaller pieces and start working on one of them right away.
Pick one thing that you can do right now with the resources you have at hand. It doesn’t matter if it is the real first step or not – you just need to jump in and do it.
Even if you aren’t entirely sure how to do the smaller project piece, as you start working on it, the next step will often reveal itself.
At the same time, it is important to ignore the upcoming unfinished pieces until later. Believe it or not, they will naturally sort themselves out.
You can also do an internet search as you proceed with each step or piece, or even look back to something else you did that was similar. Sometimes, similar can be the “Same thing, only different.”
Just know that by doing the one (first) piece you are moving forward toward success! After finishing a few pieces of the elephant, you can see and measurably feel the progress you desire. Things are beginning to happen!
With those first two steps in place, let’s move on to an incredibly powerful unseen ally.
- Trust and Know, as best as you can, that your higher guidance will make use of your active intentions and visualizations to move things forward.
Another spiritual principal that was brought out by Neale Donald Walsh in the book, Conversations with God, is that God, the Universe and our higher guidance are always conspiring for our highest good. He said it a little differently, but that was the gist of what he said. This is an important spiritual principal that so many people, even spiritually focused people, sometimes forget to use or ignore by allowing their minds to try to run the show.
If you can accept, or even wishfully believe, that higher guidance is there to help you, just know that what you did in steps 1 and 2 will be used by the Divine (God), the Universe and higher guidance (your guides, angels) to manifest success and move you past the inner blocks that have kept things in a holding pattern for you.
Higher guidance will help you unconsciously choose tasks that will move you to your goal.
Those who operate using intentions and visualization, which sometimes looks like faith, will tell you that the Universe will bring other people and forces to intersect and support your goals.
They live it and their lives reflect success! They trust their higher guidance and use the Universe to manifest their goals.
When you trust higher guidance, out of the blue, fortuitous events, people and money will appear when they were nowhere to be found before. Good things happen without your having to do anything directly to make them happen. That’s the beauty of employing step 3 after doing steps 1 and 2.
- Meditate each day using a chosen technique to help you release limiting factors from your life and help you align to your true self.
If you don’t already have your own meditative technique, Vipassana is a method that will allow you to release limiting emotions and thoughts without having to do anything but breathe. It is a powerful and wonderful way to let things go.
There are many organizations that teach it and several ways to learn it.
The book Mindfulness in Plain English by Henepola Gunaratana teaches Vipassana meditation. The main thrust of the technique is for us to learn to silence our minds by focusing on our breathing.
As we do, our mind begins to settle down. As it settles, our emotions, and sometimes mini-visualizations, will subtly and quietly come up from our subconscious. As they do, we are not to explore them, only to be aware of them and let them go.
This allows emotional baggage, limiting beliefs and behavioral programming to be released from our being without our mind engaging with whatever that is being let go. You will also be quietly moving closer to your true self, and connecting and living from it.
This step helps you do without effort what Franklin Covey calls, “Sharpening the Saw,” which is the seventh step in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
By using these simple steps, you can transform limitation in your life into breakthroughs.
In summary –
Use active intention and visualization.
Break the Elephantness of the project, activity or personal goal into smaller pieces and work on them.
Trust the Divine and higher guidance, together they open you up to unseen spiritual and energetic processes of that higher guidance. They will “magically” use the invisible mechanisms of the Universe and move you forward past limitation.
Use moments of reflection on a daily basis through meditation, such as Vipassana, to increasingly clear the logjams of limitation in your life while simultaneously bringing you closer to your true self, your High Self.
As you do all of these, your unique inner strengths will reveal themselves allowing you to hone them as you move forward toward success in all activities of your life.
Remember, Lao Tzu said, “The journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step.”
Perhaps you can use these techniques as your first step. What do you have to lose?
