Recently I’ve seen through a shitload of habits and automatic emotional responses and reactions, and it never ceases to amaze me how these insights can shift stuff.

Worlds, even.

Ever since I fully recognized my brilliant covert victim behavior and realized that I didn’t need it anymore (this happened around two weeks ago), many of my restrictive habits have completely fallen away.

Today I became aware of another tricky one, and I’d like to share it with you.

For a long time, I’ve been envious of people who I deemed more successful than me (which is obviously a subjective assessment).

That, by itself, was fucked up and challenging enough, and it caused quite some frantic and confusing activity behind my scenes.

But there’s more, or, there WAS more.

Today I suddenly saw that much of my resistance towards other coaches or authors or people who talk and write about happiness and spirituality and self-help or ‘self-improvement’, was because it freaked me out.

Let me present you with a little analogy.

Imagine standing in front of a dozen different roads that all look the same, and then see yourself picking the one that’s on the far left.

You’re not sure about it, at all, but you HAVE to choose, so you get going.

After a while you start building a solid story about your initial choice, and you constantly look for arguments that back up your inclination.

You have to do it because there’s still doubt.

Did you REALLY pick the right road?

What if you didn’t?

And so you walk on, hesitantly, desperately trying to believe in where you are and where you go and why you did that, but not completely sure.

One day you hear a story about someone who took the road in the middle, and they are doing really amazing in life, and now you feel like shit.

So what do you do?

Run back and follow the other road?

Nope.

You keep trying to feel good about your choice, and you start mocking the other ones.

You keep looking for proof that whatever you picked was right, driven by the secret assumption that finding out the opposite would kill you.

You build a whole fucking library with reasons why your road is the only one, the best one, the ULTIMATE one.

And you still freak out every time you encounter news or stories about other people on alternative roads, how they’re doing extremely well, how life is incredibly cool for them, and how they have hordes of fans that agree and follow them like Namaste zombies with endlessly deep pockets.

Every time that happens you feel more uncomfortable, and now you want to convince yourself you did the right thing even more, by forcing yourself to see every other road as bad or wrong or a waste of time.

And all along it’s still there, The Question, whispering in the back of your mind…

What if you chose wrong?

So…

That’s how it felt for me, I guess, kinda, sort of.

Like my safety was on the line, or my sanity.

I simply couldn’t stand seeing other people on one of the other roads, being happy and thriving and growing and blossoming.

I just learned to work around it, deny it, and bury it.

And then my insight happened, my lightning bolt moment, my monumental AHA!

And this weird, tight, suffocating tendency to stick to my road and defend it with my life while denying other ones, fell away.

It was just one of the things that I no longer needed.

And now?

Different roads don’t threaten me anymore.

Different ideas are just different ideas, and one day I might embrace them, who knows?

Losing this weird and deeply emotional habit is one of the things that was almost instantly replaced by a feeling of deep safety.

The safety I’d been trying to find all my life doing so many crazy things, or running away from stuff.

Or needing to find the perfect road.

Believe me: this is not simply something you hear about that makes sense.

Things that make sense just make sense, but they hardly ever move mountains.

This was a trillion times deeper, and a gazillion times more explosive.

BOOM!

And my world just got so much bigger, and brighter.

And safer.

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(Photo by @susan_wilkinson, for Unsplash)