Reflect
The Universal Story
We come into this world as a pristine consciousness, akin to an untouched canvas — pure, open, receptive, and curious.
We come into this world as a pristine consciousness, akin to an untouched canvas — pure, open, receptive, and curious. It’s a short window of time where we don’t have labels, judgements, opinions, or any preconceived notions about who we are or how the world is. Our consciousness at this stage is at “full aperture”, attuned to the broadest possible spectrum of consciousness. In fact, when we’re born we can’t even articulate shapes visually, all we see are fuzzy blobs of light and darkness. Everything we come to know in our lives is programmed into our mind, like a blank hard-drive. Except for one program that we all come pre-installed with, one ubiquitous need that keeps us alive when we are at our most vulnerable:
Our fundamental programming to seek out love and safety.
So while we are born without any pre-programmed ideas, assumptions, or labels for the world around us, we are inherently wired for love. From the moment we’re born we can immediately sense the presence of love and safety, or the lack thereof. And therein lies the gift and the curse of our adaptive nature; our young psyches quickly learn that our survival depends on those around us, compelling us to develop energetic resonance with our environment.
We sense we’re reliant on others and we learn to attune with whoever is there to care for us and adapt to the environment we’re in. Our first impressions of the world shape our first behaviours. We learn to optimize and adapt our behaviour to maximize our potential for care, attention, and sustenance. All of this happens without any conscious awareness.
This adaptive process sets into motion the creation of our foundational subconscious map: a fast-growing constellation of beliefs, assumptions, and rules about who we are, our world, and how to navigate successfully within it.
This is how we begin to establish our conditioning, or our Inner Orientation. Our Inner Orientation creates the lens through which we interpret our world. It includes our personality, beliefs, perceptions, values, and fundamentally informs how we see things. This creates a set of patterns that become deeply entrenched habits for how we think and move through our lives. These patterns can be positive and supportive, or they can be maladaptive and limiting.
Put simply, we naturally narrow our aperture and begin seeing the world through a fixed perspective. Think of our mind as a blank hard drive when we are born. Our Inner Orientation forms the software of our operating system, and our personality is the interface for that operating system. Like any software, the code is largely invisible to us.
Our primary driver for this adaptation is the seeking of love and safety. We learn early on that certain behaviour is rewarded and other behaviour is punished. We discover that when we behave in certain ways, we are either more or less likely to receive the love and safety we critically need as infants and children. Similarly we learn patterns around what keeps us safe and what puts us at risk. As babies and young children we are entirely reliant on the older humans around us. We’re willing to do whatever it takes to get the love, attention, and safety we need. When we don’t receive that love and care, it feels to the young child like an existential threat to the mind-body system.
The most pronounced phase of our conditioning happens by the time we’re seven years old, well before we have the prefrontal cortex development to rationalize or contextualize our experiences. These rules become entrenched, fairly quickly, and shape the lens through which we see the world. We continue to have experiences that shape us throughout our later childhood, adolescence and adult life, but the most impactful and enduring conditioning happens at a young age.
Beyond our adaptive patterns, beliefs, and behaviours, much of what we absorb are the patterns and beliefs of our parents. This happens unconsciously, we mirror and embed the energetic frequency of our parents’ nervous system. Their fear becomes our fear. Their pain becomes our pain. Their way of interfacing with the world becomes implicitly imposed upon us.
As we move through our teens and early adulthood, we unconsciously test the assumptions we’ve formed about ourselves and the world, often reinforcing them by creating situations that mirror our past experiences. We unconsciously attract people and circumstances that recreate familiar family dynamics, further solidifying these ingrained patterns.
While we continue to learn and grow throughout our lives, these foundational beliefs and patterns often remain deeply embedded until we actively engage in inner work to awaken to these unconscious areas of our psyche and transform them. This work is about gaining the knowledge, tools, and support necessary to access the subconscious and unconscious mind, the nervous system, and the body—where these deep-seated patterns are stored. By unlocking and releasing the energy trapped within these patterns, we create lasting transformation.
