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Check out this quote from my friend Rick Doblin:

“If your deepest dreams are something you can accomplish in your own lifetime, they’re too small.”

Take that in.

What came up for you when you read that?

Try not to read this article as just more information — that won’t help you shift anything.  

If you can, let things unfold as you read, let the questions I ask reveal what is hidden within you,  but out of sight.

This is how we change.

Like releasing the sandbags from a hot air balloon in order to rise.

We have things inside, weighing us down.

Which can’t be released because we are the ones unknowingly gripping to them — our nervous system feels safer holding on, even when that keeps us from the life we want.

We still cling to it…

With our lives.

Although I never promote going to battle with the psyche, I do encourage things that release the silent grip it has over you.

If I ask you to pause and reflect, try and actually take a moment to do it.  

Even better, write down what comes up for you.

I’m not saying we all have to change everything about ourselves, but just to become aware  if there is something in your subconscious that is limiting you from living fully.

Back to the quote, it carries a lot, and can be looked at from different levels.

On the surface, he’s saying: dream bigger.

But he’s also pointing to something deeper — that if your dreams are only about your own personal gain, they’re too small.

And if we’re really honest with ourselves…most of our dreams are just more of what we’ve already experienced.

If you once felt free on a great vacation, you might dream of owning a beach house.

If you once felt admired or seen, you might dream of having more attention.

If you once felt insecure about money, you might dream of finally having enough of it.

Our dreams are just amplifications of the past. 

We just dream about having more.

More money.

More comfort.

More recognition.

More security.

Whatever it is that makes you feel good, which is — more of what we have already known.

At face value these conversations might evoke some internal resistance, because initially it might sound like I’m asking you to not pursue what you desire, to give up what you dream of.

But actually I’m asking you to dream bigger.

So, 

How can we dream bigger?

This is what I want to explore today.

We rarely examine where our dreams come from.

We have so much hope they will deliver us from whatever knot we are bound in, that our focus gets fixated on the achieving.

But something is determining these goals of ours.

I feel it’s important to look under the hood and see the engine that is driving us.

Only when we have explored this can we choose freely if we want to dedicate our time to these pursuits or not. 

So here we go, let's lift up the hood and look under...

Think now of a goal you want to achieve.

Then become present to how you will feel when you achieve that goal.

This reveals something important.

We can only want what we don’t have.

If we already have something we wouldn’t want it, right?

If I am holding a loaf of bread, it would be ridiculous for me to be asking for bread.

Yes I could be asking for more, and that’s what I meant at the beginning, all we can do is dream of more of what we enjoyed in the past, in the hope it will bring back that same feeling we had before. 

We’re not really after the goal — we’re after the feeling it produces, because that feeling isn’t here by default.

So the engine, driving our goals, comes from what is lacking within us.

Those underlying feelings can become so intense that we begin to feel desperate to escape them.

We give that escape many names — productivity, ambition, distraction, addiction, work.

Which is why we become so determined in our pursuits.

We want them to save us.

I know this mechanism I’m pointing out might be obscured from our own view, and your mind might give you other reasons for why you want a particular goal.

But explore. 

Really examine it for yourself.

Why do you really want the goals you are after?

They come from somewhere. 

Here is an important note:

As I mentioned above I’m not for one second saying do not chase your dreams.

I can hear your mind resisting me.

Again, I’m asking, are you dreaming big enough?

Emotions are fleeting.

Their chemical life is about 90 seconds.

They have to be — or they would not serve their purpose.

Therefore, I feel it is important to ask yourself, should you give the time you have alive on this planet to attempting to replace one uncomfortable emotion with a more comfortable emotion?

It’s a never ending pursuit.

Yes it will keep you distracted, but is that the goal of life?  

To be distracted?

I’m sure you would agree that is not a good reason to be living.

Or should you dream bigger than trying to manage a neuro-biological system that is designed to fluctuate.

Besides, the particular cluster of dreams you want came from conditioning. 

You dreamt up your dreams as an antidote to your neurology that formed in resistance to the particular set of circumstances you experienced growing up.

I’m gonna say that again:

You dreamt up your dreams as an antidote to your neurology that formed in resistance to the particular set of circumstances you experienced growing up.

In other words,

You created your dreams to make up for how your past made you feel.

I remember a teacher of mine once said, "I hope your dreams don’t come true."

He was messing with me of course, but what he meant was any dreams I can think of are limited.

Limited to what my mind can think of.

And my mind can only think within what it already knows.

Therefore all it can dream of is having more of what it had.

This is why our dreams can never free us. 

They are designed to take us away from what we are unwilling to feel.

I never want you to just buy into what I’m saying, I always want you to explore it for yourself.

But I want to make a deal with you, that you will try and explore what I’m saying from a place of openness.

And after exploration, only then, do I want you to decide if you want to keep it, 

…and if not,

You always have the autonomy to return to your previous beliefs.

With my work you can always go as far as you want and get off at whichever point you like.

I work in the aspects of transformation.

However, you might just want to be a little less anxious, and if that is your goal, fantastic, you have every right to only go as far as you like.

As I’ve written about before, no one has any right to take anyone's suffering away from them.

But if you want to give it up, work like this is here to help you remove it.

Ok, back to the task at hand.

Now might be a good time to explore how we get ourselves into these states that we so desperately want to get out of.

You see life is happening out there.

For no particular reason and in no particular order.

But we have determined how we would like it to unfold and if it unfolds in the sequence we like, we are happy, and if it unfolds in a pattern we don’t want, we are unhappy.

And we live in constant fear it might not go the way we want it to…before it has even happened.  

So, bigger dreams to me, means. 

Dreams that take you outside of these limited systems.

Dreams that are beyond.

Dreams that are bigger than all this

I don’t want your life to be an oscillation between momentary happiness and rebounding fear.

I want for you, lasting fulfillment. 

That is a much bigger game to play.

I think that is achievable for everyone.

When something we don’t like enters, we feel it immediately, the body tightens — frustration, anger, sadness, fear.

But how do outside events get in? 

When I say come in, I mean a vibrational energy of that thing comes in, the actual thing can’t come in.

If I have a fear of spiders and I see one, the spider doesn’t get inside me.

But the energy of what I feel towards it does.

I tense up, I contract, I resist.

I resist because I don’t want to feel those feelings.

We are doing that all the time.

We live in suppression, repression, and denial.

Suppressing means you don’t want to feel it so much that you push it so deep inside that you try not to feel it.

We think it’s good to resist? You’re proud that you resisted. 

You say things like I stood up for myself.

But what it really means is that you defended the boundaries of what you are willing to feel.

It’s the range your identity is comfortable living within.

Those feelings mark the edge — and you push life away at that point.

You call it strength — 

but often it is just the refusal to feel.

And instead of not feeling them, it’s what makes them stay.

For a myriad of reasons, at a young age my nervous system experienced some overwhelm and of course as a little boy I didn’t particularly like that…Obviously.

My body felt it was too much for my developing nervous system to feel.

So I resisted.

I blocked it in an attempt not to feel it.

And what does blocking it do?

Yup, it keeps it.

It hangs onto it.

What happens to a net that is blocked, you've seen nets that have trash trapped in them, right.

More trash piles up behind it.

A similar thing happened to me.

I became a boy piled up with anxiety.

It’s what happens to all of us when we try not to let the vibration of life pass through us.

Everything we are trying not to feel piles up.

It gets heavy.

It weighs us down.

And then — it begins to inform our behavior.

We become reactive.

Our reactions come from what we never allowed to pass through.

We become people that carry blocked feelings doing the things to try not to feel the feelings we blocked.

This is how personality is formed.

You become the person that doesn't like these things — and the person that likes those things. 

You say I’m a person that likes this, I’m a person that doesn’t like that. 

I’m a person that’s afraid of this. 

You’re not. 

Those likes and dislikes are a concept.

Not something you are.

You learned to perform a certain kind of person — a well-rehearsed character that lets in what feels good and keeps out what hurts.

It’s you holding onto past memories of what felt good and what didn’t.

It’s all the past.

You are a historical character —

Not new,

Not meeting every new moment of life freshly.

We keep these behavioural patterns in the foreground, rehearsing them again and again.

Until they become embedded.

And then they feel natural.

Like this is just who we are.

Stop a sec, get in touch with what I just said.

It’s not who you are.

It’s what you think you are, because the biases are familiar, you think it’s you.

Resistance is instinctual. If someone attacks you, you resist instinctually.

So it takes mindfulness to not resist life through your default behavior

But we need to do this.

We need to become aware of our automatic reactions to life. 

We need to feel life fully.

Because we can’t be so sensitive that we are resisting everything.

You can’t avoid driving a car because you are resistant to what feelings you might have if something doesn't go according to plan. 

What’s incredible is that we also do the same with what matters most — our relationships.

You shouldn’t choose someone on the basis they don’t create any disturbance.

And don’t choose them because you think they are the antidote to the feeling you want to get rid of. 

Like loneliness.

In relationships there is a grasping toward the ones who fit a pattern from the past — hoping to feel something familiar again — and no movement toward the rest of them.

When someone matches those patterns, you call it love.

So there is no possibility for a fresh and new relationship.

Anything you have ever felt with someone was generated within you.

They didn’t put it there — they activated what was already yours.

No one is pouring feelings into you. You have them all within you.

But intimacy is actually one of the things that can liberate us, but that's for a different discussion.

Look, 99% of experience passes through you.

The only thing that stays around are the things you resist.

If you can handle it, by ‘it’ I mean life, it means you let it come in and go through you. 

You’ve heard of ‘Be here now’, well it means, you let it all pass through and you remain.

Not escaping to fantasy or pursuits, you’re allowing life to come in.

You stay.

Right here.

Right now.

With life, as it is.

And you relax.

Not resisting.

And it passes through.

Life is meant to come in, you’re meant to experience life.

Have a think, what percentage of time in your entire life was non-resistant?

That means life came in fully, it penetrated your core.

Probably very few have actually experienced it.

When a sunset comes in and it is so beautiful it overwhelms you so much you can’t take it.

That is life, entering, without resistance.

This might sound strange at first — but what we call personality is largely built from what we have resisted.

That’s why there are those that want to find out what they really are.

Because what you really are is outside of this looping chaos of suffering.

Right now, feel your body, sitting here, reading this.

Nothing is missing.

Dream bigger than repeating the past. 

And life, 

Becomes something entirely new.

— Paul 

—Paul

P.S. If this subject raised some questions, you can submit them here, and I will answer them for you.