
Planning to live in your passion
Creating a life you love, begins with knowing exactly what you want that life to look like.
BELIEFS
Dr Isabelle Cunningham
11/30/20246 min read

Creating a life you love, begins with knowing exactly what you want that life to look like. Once you have a clear image and a strong idea of how you want your life to be, you can start moving towards it.
Many people never get to live the life they dream of simply because they are never truly focused on what it is they actually want. Their ideas keep changing and so they are unable to move in one consistent direction. Many people also fall victim to self sabotage. That is when they seem to continually change direction just before they start to get where they really want to be, or continually come up with excuses or diversions that keep them just behind the life they really want to be living.
Self sabotage is not a conscious or intentional thing. No matter how focused, together or wise we are, we have all participated in acts of self sabotage at different times in our lives. The main reason for self sabotage is that the subconscious mind, with all its past programming, cannot believe the ideas the conscious, intelligent mind is proposing. For example you might decide that you really want to work for yourself as a Holistic Life Coach, with your own successful practice, making a great income. Your conscious (or sophisticated) mind might see this and want it and even make plans to get it. You might do a course to get some appropriate qualifications. You might even start looking for venues or premises to work from. You might start putting little bits of money away to cover the set up costs of what your sophisticated mind is now seeing as the thing you really want to do; the path you are really supposed to be on.
The subconscious (or primitive mind – which is working exclusively off old programming, in a knee jerk reaction sort of way) can deal with the planning because its only planning. But, what if you have grown up in a family that did not have any faith in holistic healing (perhaps you heard words like ‘mad tree huggers.’) Or perhaps you come from a working class family that viewed people who work for themselves as capitalist crooks! Maybe you have been programmed (unintentionally of course) by parents or other people throughout your formative years that simply believed setting up your own business and working for yourself is just too hard. So then when you get to a point where it is just starting to look like you are actually going to achieve your goal, your primitive mind will jump in and save you. It will react from its programming and stop you from doing something that it has been programmed to perceive as unsafe or too difficult or even impossible.
We don’t always know what our deep subconscious programs are and often they have caused many problems in our lives over and over again before we start to realise that something in our primitive mental programming is actually interfering with us achieving the good things we want in our lives. Visualisation is a powerful tool when it comes to reprogramming the subconscious mind. If, through our conscious (intelligent) mind we keep showing our subconscious (primitive) mind pictures or telling it words (stories) about what we want to happen, the program in the primitive mind starts to change. Then, when we start to achieve these things we are wanting, that do not fit in with our original programming, the subconscious mind has been re-programmed to accept these things as possible and it does not throw up objections and create mindsets that cause self sabotage. So for example if you have grown up believing that money is hard to come by (or the root of all evil) and this mindset has kept you in a poverty consciousness and you start re-programming your primitive mind to see having money as a positive and safe experience, you will stop self sabotaging your plans to develop a prosperity consciousness and have a healthier financial situation in your life. It is a difficult and time consuming exercise to go back and search through all the programs our primitive mind has misinterpreted throughout our naive infancy and gullible childhood while it was collecting the rules of living on earth for us.
What we can do is recognise the programs that pop up and affect us negatively, as they arrive. Then we can take action to replace those unhelpful programs with other more beneficial programs that have been developed in our sophisticated, conscious mind from the experience and intelligence we have gained since the original programs were installed. It doesn’t matter where the old programs actually came from or what happened to you during childhood that caused those programs to be adopted. It only matters that you create new positive and productive programs for yourself now. If you are a visual learner and can picture things in your mind quite easily then you probably received the old programming through what you saw as a child. The best way for you to change your programming is through creative visualisation. If you are not a visual learner and have trouble ‘seeing’ images clearly in your mind then you probably received the old programming through what you heard as a child. The best way for you to change your programming is through the use of positive affirmations. There is an exercise for doing this below.
Once you start to install new positive programming in your primitive mind, that you have personally chosen, which is based on what you want and know in your intelligent mind is completely possible for you, you will start to see the things you want to attract in your life coming toward you at an amazing speed. You will start to notice opportunities and you will develop more self confidence and motivation to help you take advantage of those opportunities.
Try out these exercise below and then come back soon for more information on how to create a life filled with passion!
Visual Exercise: Do this exercise every chance you get!
Simply sit and close your eyes in a relaxed position.
Then picture (or imagine) yourself living the life you want to achieve... see yourself doing the things you want to be doing.
See what you look like when you are living your perfect life.
What are you wearing?
What does your hair look like?
What does your home and your car look like?
Explore how it feels to be this person you are imagining.
Imagine what it feels like to be free of money worries...experience the relief and the joy!
Imagine what it feels like to feel perfectly healthy, looking and feeling wonderful, prosperous doing the work you love and having plenty of time for leisure.
Try to really see yourself living the life you want in maximum detail.
Really get into it and try to really experience how it makes you feel.
This exercise in so much fun, like a little excursion into your perfect life! More importantly this is a very powerful way to reprogram your old self sabotaging patterns and open your subconscious mind up to accepting the possibility of a new reality for yourself.
Audio Exercise:
Write down some positive statements (affirmations) about what you want to make true in your life.
These might include statements like:
• I am happy, healthy and strong
• My life is prosperous and abundant.
• I make a minimum profit of (insert your ideal amount) income every week.
• I work in my passion.
• I love the work I do and feel motivated and inspired every day.
You get the general idea. The most important thing is to keep the statements positive (refrain from using words like don’t or not.)
Make sure the statements are simple and direct (it is your primitive ‘ugh” mind you are communicating with here so nothing too complex!
Also, make sure the statement say exactly what you want to have happen as if it already has.
Put the statements up all over the place, on the fridge, in the toilet, everywhere and say them over and over as often as you can.
Out loud in front of the mirror, directly to yourself, is very powerful as this is probably how you originally received the information you are now wanting to override (being told it to your face.)
As you say these statements try to actually experience how you will feel when these statements are actually true in your life!
This is not so much faking it until you make it, as it is giving the subconscious new information and convincing it that these things are actually possible and even probable in your life, so it stops trying to protect you from the very things you want.
Have fun!
Namaste
Isabelle
Copyright © 2024 Catharsis NZ. All rights reserved.

