and using emotional repatterning to upgrade your ability to receive
What if I told you that the way you experience shame is impacted by something that happened when you were just an infant? Or that your beliefs about pleasure are not your own? Or that the way you respond when someone crosses your boundaries could be completely shifted?
Much of our lived experience is determined by our unconscious and subconscious mind. What this means is that most of the way we are living, acting, feeling and responding is not through conscious choice but through repeating patterns that have been stored within our bodies since childhood.
For example, imagine a young girl, let’s call her Freya, has a pattern stored in her subconscious around pleasure that says ‘I don’t deserve to experience pleasure’ and because of this she unconsciously avoids receiving pleasure to its full extent. She may feel guilty when pleasure arises, she may put the needs of others before her own, she may have trouble expressing pleasure in front of others, and/or a whole myriad of behaviours that are based on this stored belief. Generally, we are not even aware that something like this is going on. Freya has gone her whole life playing out this pattern, you can’t imagine she would suddenly think to herself one day ‘I’d like to experience this differently now’. In other words, she takes the way she feels and acts as being ‘normal’ and continues over and over to play it out. You can see in this case how limiting it is to continue letting the subconscious run the show. And you can also imagine how transformational and liberating it could be to clear this pattern and allow her to receive pleasure fully and openly.
The great news is, we do have access to our subconscious mind and there are tools available to help us tap in and uncover the contents. The Spiral is one of these tools, and it provides a safe space and a simple, yet effective way to do so.
Let’s take a deeper look at how this all works.
How patterns are created in the subconscious mind
Let’s get a little scientific for a second and talk about the Human brain. There are 5 different brain wave patterns that have been identified to indicate brain wave activity, ranging from Delta (lowest) up to Gamma (highest). It has been found that during the first 2 years of a newborn’s life, the brain is operating at the lowest level of brain wave activity, known as Delta. Then from age 2, the child’s brain moves into a slightly higher brain wave pattern, known as Theta, where it primarily functions from until around 7 years old.
For reference, in an adult brain, Delta and Theta waves are shown during sleep, hypnosis and imagination. Can you imagine walking around, relating to the World, in a state of constant hypnosis? This is essentially what a young child experiences! Additionally, the child does not yet have the ability to consciously filter the information coming in from their environment (this happens in a waking adult emitting Alpha or Beta waves).
All of that scientific talk is simply to say that children are extremely impressionable. Without the mental ability to analyse, question, judge or reject the things they see and hear, they simply accept what is being presented to them and it gets stored in the subconscious mind. In a sense, they are being hypnotised, or conditioned, into a certain way of being and believing.
So how does this relate to emotional patterns?
Let’s go back to our example of little Freya. Imagine one day at 18 months old, she is playing in the backyard with her brother, innocently running around and exploring. Freya is blissing out in her dreamy Delta state with the sun shining down, her mind is free of thought and she is not aware of anything other than the grass, the flowers, and her brother. She is freely experiencing pleasure as she rolls around in the grass playing and laughing. All of the sudden, she is shocked out of her pleasurable state when her mother screams her name with intense fear
before quickly dragging her inside. Unbeknownst to Freya, her mother has a phobia of snakes and has spotted something moving in the grass. Freya is unable to consciously assess this situation – she doesn’t understand her mother’s phobia, she didn’t see a snake, and she sure couldn’t imagine what a snake bite may feel like. Instead, she learns that pleasure = fear / unsafe / run. This new understanding is stored within her subconscious and from here on in, pleasure is associated with fear, danger, and a flight response. This is her new pattern around pleasure, by the time she’s an adult she will never remember a time when pleasure felt fully safe.
Emotional repatterning
Emotional repatterning is a process of uncovering and bringing awareness to patterns stored in the subconscious, before releasing them and creating new neural pathways. This is where conscious choice comes into play – once the subconscious pattern has been released, we can choose to create a new relationship to the emotion or trigger that reflects our current level of awareness.
We get to choose to act and respond in a way that feels truthful and aligned, where we feel proud of our actions and use them to create, connect and grow.
For Freya, this may look like choosing to welcome, express and prioritise pleasure in her life. Her conscious mind has learnt that pleasure is not only okay, but is a part of relaxing her nervous system, connecting with others on an intimate level, and harnessing sexual energy for creativity. Now she gets to consciously put that into action instead of being dictated by the old pattern that had her in resistance to pleasure and therefore limited in connection, creativity and health.
It’s great to be able to shift and release patterns with awareness, but how do we even discover that they are there in the first place? Cue, The Spiral.
The spiral
The Spiral is a powerful transformational tool that can be used to identify, clear and repattern the relationships we have with our emotions in order to be free from conditioning, accelerate our growth and live our most authentic, purposeful lives.
It provides a framework and clear structure to cover all bases (because we don’t know what we don’t know, right?). Plus a facilitator-guided process so that we can move through in a safe, supported way.
The model was created by merging aspects of a number of different healing modalities and maps. These include the modern chakra system, kinesiology muscle testing, traditional chinese medicine meridian points and five-element theory, Spiral Dynamics, David Hawkins’ Scale of Consciousness, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. This unique and specific blend makes for an extremely potent process.
The Spiral is a 7-level process that looks at one chakra / theme with three corresponding emotions each week, plus intention-setting and rebalancing sessions. The order is intentional and allows us to move through the densest emotions first, so that the lighter ones can be more easily accessed. The structure looks like this:
Level One: Deserving
Base Chakra
Releasing shame and increasing self-worth
Level Two: Creativity
Sacral Chakra
Releasing fear and increasing productivity
Level Three: Power
Solar Plexus Chakra
Releasing anger and increasing self-confidence
Level Four: Openness
Heart Chakra
Releasing wounds of the heart and increasing self-love
Level Five: Expression
Throat Chakra
Releasing low self-esteem and increasing expression
Level Six: Vision
Third Eye Chakra
Releasing old views and increasing clarity
Level Seven: Purpose
Crown Chakra
Aligning to your higher purpose and divinity
Each week, ‘root clears’ are performed on three specific emotions corresponding to the theme. A root clear is where the pattern (relationship) to an emotion is identified, cleared and then reframed. It is underpinned by the understanding that there are three significant experiences of an emotion (usually early childhood) that determines our relationship to it. Each of these times results in us ‘anchoring’ a secondary emotion onto the first.
For example, at 18 months Freya anchored fear to pleasure. Now it’s unlikely she remembers this happening, so by tapping into her subconscious energy field and muscle testing, the Spiral practitioner would pick this relationship up for her. They would also test for the next two instalments of pleasure which, let’s say are guilt age 4 and impotence age 7. This pattern shows that the way Freya experiences pleasure as an adult, is now pleasure, fear, guilt and impotence. It’s kind of like all of these emotions are tangled up and tied together so Freya cannot simply experience pleasure in its pure form.
Once the pattern has been acknowledged, conscious intention is used to clear it, along with a small intuitive action. The action may involve breath, movement, sound or holding the associated meridian point on the body. Once cleared, a ‘reframe question’ is asked to encourage you to decide how you would like to experience the emotion now that you can consciously choose. This is where the repatterning happens, where a new neural pathway is created. After the session, integration tasks can be completed to ensure that the new pattern has landed on all levels, and it’s often after a little bit of time that we get to have a felt experience of the shift / repatterning.
A full system upgrade
Our lived experience is highly impacted by our subconscious patterns and it’s not until we choose to unpack and rewire them that we are able to live our most authentic lives. Imagine the upgrades and reconnection to self that could be found by repatterning the whole emotional landscape – from pleasure to shame to purpose to anger to openness and so on. This is what the Spiral is all about and why it’s so transformative.
