The Viable Alternative

I was watching this documentary recently called, “The Living Matrix” which in a nutshell was about alternative forms of healing. On it, there was a particular segment about a woman who had divorced her husband because while she wanted kids, he didn’t want any. After her divorce, she made plans on eventually getting remarried and having two kids, but in the middle of her plans, she found out she had ovarian cancer, and one of the consequences of ovarian cancer was infertility, i.e. she couldn’t have kids.

As she began to do her research about the disease to find a way to avoid the traditional routes of surgery or radiation to treat cancer, she wound up taking a course in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), which is a practical form of psychology that starts from where you are now and looks at where you want to be and uncovers what’s in the way. She discovered that although she thought she wanted children with every bone and cell in her body, when she looked back into her childhood and the “hostile” environment she was raised in, she remembered thinking to herself as a child that the last thing part of her wanted was to have kids.

In other words, though on a conscious level, she fully desired to have kids, on a deeper, unconscious level, she didn’t want any kids, so there was an underlying conflict of intentions which was sabotaging her “success.”

It’s funny how we may think we want one thing on one level, and never realize the reason why we never get that thing or always seem to have it “frustratingly” slip through our fingers is because on a deeper level, we really don’t want it.

Since 2005, when the movie “The Secret,” came out, there’s been all this fanfare about the Law of Attraction and how we can use it to create the lives we want. Furthermore, we hear all these wonderful stories about how this person was able to use it to attract his ideal job, how that person was able to attract her ideal mate, and how other people were able to use it to attract more money, their dream house, an exciting opportunity, etc, etc.

What is so annoying for some of us is that while we hear all these great stories, we look at our lives and realize that we haven’t been able to attract something of true significance to us. Yeah, we may think of a friend and then suddenly he or she calls, or we may think of a song and all of a sudden we hear it on the radio or playing in a store, but what about the BIG things, like more money, or a better job or our big break in acting that will make us famous? How come we can never attract things like that?

The answer is the conflicting intentions we put out there.

For years, I’ve sought success, but frankly, I was always THAT hardworking guy with all this great potential, intelligence, and wisdom who couldn’t seem to get a “break” and was almost always struggling financially. People would look at me and wonder, “Why isnt’t this guy successful when his has this, that and the third?” What’s more, whenever I would seem to be on the verge of an imminent breakthrough that would’ve actually served to set me up and allow me to start really building a foundation of success where I can start to achieve my dreams, something would happen that would mess everything up.

It was very frustrating, confusing, and depressing. All I wanted was to be successful and somehow it always seemed to elude me. To get to the root of this, I finally swallowed my pride and admitted to myself this past spring that maybe I needed to start seeing a therapist to help me determine how I may be sabotaging myself.

Shortly after my decision, I started going once a week to this out-of-the-box type of therapy called body oriented therapy, and after of five months of personal work, I started to notice that each time I would experience yet another disappointment where an opportunity would fall through, that beneath all the feelings of disappointment, I noticed a deeper sense of satisfaction, as if I was happy to be going through all this. It seemed like on a deeper level, I was happy about my continued failure.

My mind went back to when I first graduated from college back in 1998 and I was at my first job. At that time, I was making the most money I had ever made in my life, I was living at home so I was able to stack tons of money, and I finally reached a confidence with women that I could only dream about when I was 19. Yet, I was still depressed about a breakup I had with a girl a year earlier, and I was in generally totally bored with life. Nothing at all excited me and I was totally devoid of any desire for just about anything.

I had all this “success” and yet I wasn’t happy.

Looking for answers, I began to wonder if maybe there was fulfillment in “struggle.” I thought maybe I had gotten to where I was too easily and maybe I needed to struggle and that was what would make life more exciting. I began to romanticize about being this wise, intriguing wandering soul with few possessions, no women in his life, and little money who would wander seeking enlightenment and the answers to the mysteries of life.

Lo and behold, a few years later, all of this would come into fruition. Within a few short years, I had no job and little desire to find another one, I couldn’t buy a date because I had actually “forgotten” how to attract women, and all my access to money dried up and from then on having enough money became a continuous struggle. When I finally discovered the book, “Think and Grow Rich” which reignited my desire to be successful, EVERYTHING became a lot harder and hence my “struggle” to be successful started. It seemed like some hidden force within me was stifling me and holding me back and every time I seemed to be on the cusp of success, something would always come to pull me right back like a rubber band.

I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why nothing was working out and why I couldn’t be successful. The issue was that I had completely forgotten about the decision that I made back in ’98 that I didn’t deserve any success because I didn’t work hard enough for it and it came too easily for me. That was what was REALLY running the show deep inside my unconscious, and that was what was sabotaging my success. The roots of this decision go further back into childhood which is another story for another blog.

When I felt myself smiling years later over yet another failure, it was because on a deeper level, I was living EXACTLY how I wanted to live, I just wasn’t aware of it.

Now that I’m aware of this, I have to now do some work around learning to feel worthy of success and letting go of my incorrect programming that life always has to be a struggle. By getting everything into alignment, I can finally stop sabotaging myself and start attracting the success I desire and deserve.

So, if there are one or more areas in your life where you can’t seem to achieve success or you wind up sabotaging yourself when you’re on the brink of a breakthrough whether it is finances, or relationships, or a particular position at your job or closing a certain type of business deal IN SPITE of your earnest efforts and insistence that you want what you say you want, maybe it’s time you look a bit deeper. It may be on a deeper level that you have conflicting intentions, and it is those conflicting intentions that are blocking you from having success.

Through therapy, journaling, or meditation you can identify this conflicting intentions and resolve them so you can move forward and claim the life you really want.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love