Lightening Your Load – Saying Goodbye to Limiting Patterns

Article Highlights

• This is your brain on survival
• Survival r us
• An Epic negative human tendency

Dear ,

I got to meet my survival self head-on, literally, one morning in New Zealand, 1996 or so.  I rushed in to the bathroom in my hotel room, slipping on the wet floor.  I launched through the air and fiercely smashed the side of my head against a brass doorknob.  It knocked me out.

As a neuro-specialist later told me, my neocortex, or thinking brain, was stunned and non-functioning so my physical operation was taken over by the so-called “reptilian” brain” and limbic system.  I was now in pure survival brain mode.

When I came to I had no consciousness as myself – this operates through the neocortex or thinking brain.  I only had awareness of being endangered, cold, shaking and I felt terrified of a bad noise in the sky.  There was no “self” awareness, just an urgent instinct to seek warmth and safety.

I dragged myself (the right side of my body wasn’t working) onto a carpeted corner of the hallway outside the bathroom where I felt warmer and more protected.  I was not aware of a carpet, a hallway, a corner or a bathroom.  I had no verbal thought process whatsoever.  

Information seemed to come to me in pictures of things that felt familiar (from stored memories) or through instinctive impulses to act.  It was even some time before the awareness dawned that the scary sound “in the sky” was actually “me” – my own wounded moans.

This state persisted for an hour or more and is a long, ultimately funny and fascinating story for another time.  As my brain recovered from the stunning blow, I eventually regained my other faculties, individual self-awareness, and remembered my name and personal story.

For a time however, I was in intimate touch with my inner animal. My only awareness was at that “animal” level and it was an illuminating experience.   I gained first-hand experience of the limitations and impulses of my survival mode.  I also clearly experienced the benefits and necessities of this aspect of self.

There’s much that’s vital there.  There’s also much that could use updating. We’re plagued by deeply stored memories, emotions and decisions that became biochemically imprinted on our physical, emotional and mental systems in a way that gives fear an advantage and flight or fright impulses tremendous gravitational pull.

I’m not recommending ridding ourselves somehow of our survival “self;” let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, please. It’s still good to store information that fire can burn us, for instance, and to have the automatic impulse to jump out of the way of a speeding car.  But the system is more hyper than need be and modulation and update would be very good.

Certainly the world would benefit from an upgrade of the human survival/coping brain with its compelling preference for attack or flee, aggression, fear, revenge, territorial behaviors and dark sub-conscious impulses.  How do we retrain our inner animal?

Previously I’ve discussed what I call Bardo patterns – self-limiting thought, emotion and behavior patterns so deeply ingrained that they successfully resist our best attempts at clearing or resolving them.  They are rooted in our survival aspect, the “coping” brain.   In some ways, it’s not entirely wrong to say that as humans our group T-shirt probably says “Survival R Us.”  How to start moving out of survival mode when it’s so wired into the current operating system?

I’ve been thinking and meditating about this because I’ve come across personal patterns and fears so firmly embedded that they keep playing out from a sub-conscious level despite my active determination to resolve them.  In addition, I see physical and emotional patterns and tendencies that run through families, and ones that seem to go beyond the time and space dimension as well.  How do we clear patterns at the subterranean and more esoteric levels of our being?

We each have our methods for this and I’ll share my thinking, feeling, solutions and experiential information for you to ponder re: relevance or interest in your life.  You are the boss of your life though and it’s important to keep that awareness foremost.

My own quest for solutions to these persistent patterns has lead me to the area of sound healing which is both an esoteric arena and a burgeoning science.  There are many in science and medicine who now feel that sound and frequency healing is a frontier that holds some of the greatest promise in the future.  Sonic and ultra-sound solutions now garner respectable interest and funding.

As a person interested in what I call Conscious Sound, I first began working with sound for my own benefit.  Eventually I started offering sessions to others using words, sound and song to energetically “flush” the brain and connect the limbic and survival systems to more expanded aspects of our make-up… what I’ve been calling the esoteric or spiritual DNA. 

This seems to be a time when the Bardo layer is more exposed, partly caused by the global pause that has deepened and opened more in each of us, and partly caused by the great influx of solar light currently coming into our system.  I have a special session called the Bardo Session for clearing troublesome old patterns.  You can learn more on my website, mahulili@mahulili.com if you feel you need personal help with this. 

BUT I’ve been thinking to do a group session for this that’s very affordable, probably $15, and which I believe will be just as individually effective and impactful.  I’ll let you know when I set a date for that.

For now though, I wanted to let you know that if you feel you’re a gerbil running around and around the wheel of some old fears or wounds, you’re not alone. It’s not easy but it is purposeful because so much is clearing, lifting, shedding.  We’re all going to be very happy we saw it through!

~ X♥️Ma HuLiLi