Ask Dr. Julianne

Aloha Dear Ones,

It’s good to be with you again. I’ve been doing a lot of reflection this past week. There are many challenges in my life right now. I’m determined to see those challenges in the light of the evolutionary perspective I’ve been studying.

Sometimes challenges seem to come all at once. Our tendency is to view these challenges the ways we always have, or the ways in which we have been taught. We round up the usual stories, tell them first to ourselves, and then repeat our stories to anyone who has the patience or kindness to listen. We remember all the details of how these challenges showed up in our lives in the past, and pour over these unpleasant details, one by one.

We develop amazingly creative ways to reinforce our previous experience of the challenge at hand. Some of us, with a highly developed visual skill, even learn how to project a movie of our past traumas and dramas onto our conscious minds,  and watch it play, over and over again. In our mind’s eye, we watch the challenge take shape, we see our ineffective response, and we safely and surely predict the unhappy result. I say, “safely,” because no matter how awful the result, there is a certain false comfort in the familiar.

If we cling to the false safety of the familiar, we are doomed to experience our current challenge as leading to the same negative result, or, to a situation even more heartbreaking. How can we break out of the familiar cycle of repeating our mistakes? How can we break free of our past conditioning?

We can start by being willing to examine our beliefs about our situation. If the choices we have been making have been consistently leading to unhappy results, then there is something wrong with the story we have been telling ourselves. We are not seeing clearly.

So, we allow ourselves to be curious about the challenge we are facing. Instead of falling back on an old story, we admit that we don’t understand the truth of our situation. We cultivate an attitude of not knowing, but wanting to know. As both the integralists and the evolutionaries might say, we enter into a process of inquiry. We hold even our most cherished beliefs around the issue lightly, leaving room for new information. We open ourselves to feedback from life. We begin to make choices based on this new information, not based on our conditioned patterns.

It takes courage to be open to the truth of life. But the good news is that the evolutionary impulse, the innate creative power unfolding all of life, is very much on our side, once we start on the path of the good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. The evolutionary impulse, which to me is the Holy Spirit, is actually calling us to that sacred path.

In being willing to see our challenges with beginner’s mind, to become curious about them, to admit that we don’t understand everything and to desire to learn more, we open the door to a deeper wisdom. By making different choices based on the new truth life shows us, we come into closer alignment with the holy impulse moving all life forward. From that place, all goods things are possible.

Love and blessings,

Dr. Julianne