The Question I Was Asking
For many years, I asked myself the same question over and over again: Why is this happening to me? It is a perfectly understandable question. One I suspect most of us have asked at one time or another. When relationships fail, when money becomes a struggle, when the same problems keep appearing in different forms, it feels entirely natural to wonder why life seems to be treating us so unfairly.
The difficulty isn’t that the question is unreasonable. It is that hidden inside it is an assumption we rarely notice. Which is that whatever is causing our experience lies somewhere outside ourselves. If only we could identify the person, the circumstance or the piece of bad luck responsible, then perhaps everything would make sense.
And if we ask it for long enough, we will always find an answer. Because there is always something available to blame. It might be our upbringing, our employer, our partner, the economy, or simply a run of bad luck that seems to have lasted rather longer than everyone else’s. Sometimes those things genuinely have played a significant part. But however accurate the explanation turns out to be, identifying the cause rarely changes the direction of what comes next.
Asking A Different Question
I spent the best part of twenty years finding answers to that question, and while my circumstances shifted from time to time, the patterns underneath them stayed remarkably consistent.
Things only began to change when I started asking a different question. It wasn’t a bigger or a cleverer one. It was a good deal simpler, and a good deal less comfortable.
What am I unknowingly contributing to the life I’m experiencing?
The word that matters there is unknowingly. This isn’t about blaming ourselves for every difficult thing that has ever happened to us. Life brings all of us experiences we neither chose nor deserved. It is an acknowledgement that alongside those events sit the beliefs and expectations we carry. These beliefs are quietly influencing the decisions we make, the relationships we enter, the opportunities we pursue and the risks we avoid. All this without our ever noticing that they are doing it.
That is all willingness really asks of us. It doesn’t ask us to have the answers, or to become a different person, or to know how anything is going to change. It simply asks us to consider that there may be something about ourselves we have not yet seen, and to look at it with curiosity rather than judgement.
The Dream That Tried to Warn Me
About a year before my house was repossessed, I had a very vivid dream.
I was hosting a party, and the house was full of friends and neighbours. Instead of feeling proud, I felt they were looking at me with pity. I felt I didn’t belong with them. Nor did I deserve to live somewhere so lovely or to be associated with people so lovely. I woke up feeling sad and rather flat. By the middle of the morning I had put it out of my mind completely. It was only much later, after I had actually lost the house, that I remembered it at all.
I should say that this isn’t a story about premonition, although it would be easy enough to tell it that way. The dream didn’t know anything about the future. It knew me. What it was showing me, in about the plainest terms it could manage, was what I believed about my right to be where I was. It had very little to do with the bank. It had a great deal to do with unworthiness, and with a woman who had arranged her entire outer life to argue with a belief she had never once examined.
So the information arrived a year early. What was missing wasn’t insight or evidence. Because all of that was already there. What was missing was any willingness to receive it.
Why We Don’t Want to Look
I dismissed that dream in about four seconds, and I have spent a long time since then understanding why.
In the previous article, we explored the idea that beliefs don’t stay as thoughts for very long. Over time, they become woven into the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Then they stop feeling like beliefs at all and simply become what we take to be reality. That is why looking can feel so uncomfortable. When we question a fact about ourselves, it feels as though we are questioning our very being.
So unwillingness is rarely laziness, and it is certainly not stupidity. We often assume that people avoid self-awareness because they don’t want to change. Maybe because they are unwilling to do the work. I don’t think that’s true. More often than not, they aren’t resisting change at all. They are protecting the identity they have spent a lifetime building, even when that identity is causing them pain.
I wasn’t refusing to look because I couldn’t be bothered. I was refusing because I had built an entire life on top of that belief, and I was afraid of what I would find if I unearthed it, which was that my own suffering had been shaped by my own thinking. What I was really avoiding was blaming myself, and it took me a long time to see that willingness has nothing to do with blame.
What It Cost
We didn’t have much when I was growing up. My parents worked incredibly hard, and money was a constant worry, and while we were well cared for in every practical sense, there was very little emotional warmth to go with it. They carried their own beliefs about all of it, which I absorbed without ever being taught them:
- Life is a struggle.
- Money is scarce.
- People like us never really get ahead.
- We knew our place, and our place was somewhere behind other people.
By most measures, I got past all of that. I became a workaholic, built a decent career and earned a reasonable salary, and for someone starting where I started, I had come a long way.
What I hadn’t noticed was that my financial decisions were still being made by a frightened child who believed security could disappear overnight. Outwardly I was living the pretence of success. Inwardly I was living the same old story, and it showed up in all the places you might expect it to: credit card debt, waiting anxiously for payday, and spending beyond my means in a way that never quite made sense to me at the time. Eventually my outer world caught up with my inner beliefs.
Painful Lessons
Losing my home was one of the most difficult experiences of my life, and it was made harder by the fact that I was raising three young children on my own. For a long time, I experienced it in the way most of us would. I believed life had done something to me, and it honestly never occurred to me that I had played any part in it.
I want to tread carefully here, because this idea is so often misunderstood. There is a world of difference between recognising the influence of our beliefs and blaming ourselves for everything that has happened to us. The financial struggles of my childhood were real. I didn’t create them, and neither does any child create the environment they are born into, and the conclusions I reached at the time were entirely understandable ones for a little girl trying to make sense of the world around her.
Living From Our Conclusions
What we do go on choosing, without ever realising it, is to keep living from those conclusions. They become the lens through which we interpret everything, influencing what feels safe, what feels possible, what we expect from other people and, perhaps most importantly, what we believe we deserve.
That is where the hope in all of this sits. If a belief can shape our experience, then it can also be questioned, changed and eventually replaced. We cannot rewrite the past, but we can question the meaning we gave it, and our future stops being tied to conclusions we reached before we were old enough to understand what we were concluding.
Willingness Is Not Readiness
I think it helps to be clear about what willingness doesn’t require, because most of us set the bar a great deal higher than it actually is. We don’t have to understand our beliefs before we begin, or know where they came from, or who gave them to us. Neither do we have to feel strong, or calm, or ready. We don’t need a plan, a practitioner or a free weekend, and we don’t even have to believe that anything will come of it. We only have to be willing to look at all.
I did this badly for years. I looked at the wrong things, reached conclusions that had to be dismantled later, and went round the same circle more times than I would care to admit. It worked anyway. The reason it worked is that willingness is the one ingredient nothing else can stand in for. I have known people who could describe their own patterns with real fluency and had never once looked at them, because the describing had quietly become another way of not looking.
It also isn’t a single decision, made once, on a good day. It is a decision we make again each time something uncomfortable surfaces, which in the beginning tends to be rather often.
Life Isn’t Punishing You
There is a question sitting underneath all of this, and I think it deserves an answer before any of us is asked to look at anything. Who exactly is going to be doing the looking, and are they going to be kind about it?
If the voice that examines us is the same voice that has been finding us wanting for the last thirty years, then it is no wonder we won’t open the file. That isn’t really looking at all. It is a good deal closer to a hearing, and we already know what the verdict is going to be. Nobody volunteers for that. What took me a long time to realise is that the examining voice doesn’t have to be the critical one.
A Loving Presence
For all the emotional absence of the house I grew up in, I always knew there was something else available to me. Something steadier, that didn’t join in. It wasn’t a belief, and it wasn’t anything that anyone had taught me. It was simply there, and I could reach for it when I needed to. I have come to think of it as the Higher Self, and I know that language doesn’t suit everyone, so please call it whatever you like.
What matters is its disposition rather than its name. It isn’t remotely interested in whether we should have known better, and it doesn’t keep a record. It looks at what we did alongside what we believed while we were doing it, and it wants, quite straightforwardly, for us to be free of it.
So life isn’t punishing us. It is asking us, sometimes very insistently, to become aware of what is running underneath. My dream wasn’t a threat of any kind. It was information, offered a year in advance, by something in me that already knew, and willingness becomes a great deal easier once we know who is doing the looking.
Try This
Think of a piece of information about yourself that has arrived more than once. It might have come from a friend or a partner, from a pattern that keeps recurring, from a dream, or from a feeling that turns up in the same kinds of situations and that you have become rather good at moving past.
- What is it?
- What would it cost you if it turned out to be true?
- Are you willing to look at it?
You don’t have to act on it, and you certainly don’t have to fix it. Looking is quite enough for now.
Willingness has to come first, and it is the only part of this that nobody can do on our behalf. Everything else in this series rests on it.
In the next article, I will explain what looking actually consists of, and why so much of it has to be done indirectly.
Articles in Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness: The Gateway to Your Higher Self
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- Why You React the Way You Do
- How Beliefs Shape Your Experience
- The Only Thing You Have to Do Is Be Willing
- Turning From Experience To Observation
- From Observing to Choosing