What Your Triggers Are Trying to Show You
There's an interesting idea that has been rolling around in my head: your relationship to everything—people, circumstances, yourself—is what determines your experience of life. Sometimes we feel that this is something passive. We kind of learn, as children, from our environments how to move about life, how to treat others, and the meaning behind life. As we get older, we start to see that what we were taught isn't really adequate, and we start to forge our own understanding of those same relationships that raised us from fetus into young adults. It's natural to question the nature of how we relate and start to make small—and sometimes big—changes in how we want to relate moving forward.
We either want to emulate what we learned about being in romantic partnerships from our parents, or we don't. We want to connect deeper to nature, or we descend deeper into materialism and electronic utopianism. We want to teach our children values and tools that we weren't taught, or we want to replicate the life we grew up with.
I think the relationship we don't talk about enough is the relationship to self and that of the one with god, universe, creative energy, whatever you want to call it. We learn this from a very young age from our parents. Some of us even come with a connection that transcends space, time, and upbringing. Ultimately, this connection belongs to us, and it's our responsibility as humans to cultivate it in a way that feels deeply meaningful and personal—because it ripples out to all of the other relationships we hold in our lives. From the most direct to the most subtle. We are constantly relating to everything: the world around us, our thoughts, our subconscious, the things we can consciously sense and the ones we cannot.
I say all of this because I firmly believe we are all conduits of pure creative energy, and the level of connection and sensitivity we have to that truth will define how we move about the cabin of life. To actively seek to have a relationship with the unseen, the energy that guides and connects us to everything on a subtle level, and to know that this is an option—to open ourselves to be a conductor of creative energy and use it to create—is the difference between moving through life believing you need to push and shove to make everything happen for you (it's you against the world) or knowing you are being led, and guided, and ultimately a vessel for creation. When we listen to the subtle calling of creative energy to lead us, it takes us to places and to create things we never knew possible.
Sometimes I forget. I get into human doer mode and feel like I need to push to make it all happen. Then I remember: I am not here to force my life to happen and bend it to my will. I am here to allow it to unfold and enjoy the process as I co-create each moment with an intelligence that flows just underneath the surface of my conscious understanding. I have learned to trust this process over time. When I do, things happen for me so easily and so much faster and more gracefully than I could have designed myself. It is a remembering, a constant remembering of who I am and what I am really meant to do here on earth: experience all of life and create and recreate. Forget and remember and be in the beautiful process of knowing myself, which is always done in relation to everything.
Which is why triggers are so important. They are almost always pointing to places that we need to work on. I believe life is a mirror, and we are constantly being shown what is in a state of ease and balance and where we need to be taking a good look in the mirror and healing or shifting perspective.
If you are seeing something come up again and again, the chance is it's probably you. It's not a bad thing—it's a beautiful opportunity to reassess your relationship to yourself, to your people, to the world at large. The work isn't out there. The work is always here, in how we choose to relate. And when we shift that relationship from forcing to flowing, from resisting to receiving, everything changes.
