In the first few years of life, we’re like sponges, soaking up experiences and learning how to perceive the world and move around in it. We experience mostly in the physical, then emotional bodies.
Before we shift to the mental body around school age, there is a massive pruning of synaptic connections in the brain. We prioritize connections we use regularly, then insulate them for faster processing. Under-used connections are purged.
As the brain is an interface with the mind, most of us lose access to memories prior to the pruning. Few of us remember much before age 4. Yet those earlier days are when we build our basic self-concept and relationships with food and security.
This means we’re often unconscious of our relationship with these basics. We can get secondary hints, like noticing how we’re reacting or the stories we tell about ourselves.
The basics are also many layered. We copy the energy patterns of our mother in utero and prepare ourselves for the threat level she experiences. We then absorb conditioning and learning from our family as above.
More recently, it’s become clear that we take on some unresolved ancestral baggage in exchange for a birth. We may not make much progress resolving that stuff, but sharing the load seems helpful.
And then there’s the karmic suitcase of our soul’s history that we bring into this life.
These can get very complex where they overlap.
If we try to lose weight or overcome fear, for example, we sometimes have to contend with far more than just bad habits. For some, there can be a cornucopia of old dynamics behind these basics. We may have carried them for a very long time.
I’m not promoting a longer list of excuses for not making progress. The effort to live a healthy life and resolve our history is very worthwhile. These issues will pull at us until they’re resolved.
Be patient with yourself if some seemly simple things are more challenging than they “should” be. There can be a lot of inertia in the structure that wants things to stay as they are. Attention softens this. With sustained energy towards our goals, we can break down the walls of our history.
Davidya