What Is Beneath All of Our Struggle?
Updated: Sep 17, 2020
We all have our dreams. We all have our businesses that we would like to start, people that we want to ask out, jobs that we want to quit, or just dreams of living a life without struggling to get out of bed. So why are we not doing something about them? Why do we keep getting stuck and irritated by the same things and no matter what, there just doesn’t seem to be an improvement? Why are we not living our life to the full potential, like all the inspiring quotes on Facebook and Instagram invite us to do? You know, the ones that tell you to make your life a masterpiece, be the best version of yourself or live your passion, and you go „Yeaaah!“ – either in honesty or with sarcasm – and go back to whatever you were doing before, or force yourself despite the internal resistance that you feel.
But what if all these things were actually simple to understand? What if they all had a common denominator, something you could use to make sense of any and all of them? The good news is, they do, and it might not be what you expect. The key to understanding everything lies within emotions.
Emotions are largely misunderstood in the context of everyday life. According to popular opinion, it’s something that women have and men don’t, something that is present in certain activities like dating and romantic life and arts, and absent in other areas, such as making business decision or banking. These stagnant views are fortunately accepted less and less, but we are still to some extent influences by them, because we can’t just suddenly undo all of society’s bias in ourselves.
I maintain that emotions are actually felt by everybody all the time. Beliefs, our „rational“ decisions and habits all surface from emotions, and not the other way around. Why do I think that? We live as physical bodies and the main responsibility of the body is to keep us alive. When something bad happens to the body, it is going to remember exactly how it went, so it can help us survive in the future. The way the body saves this information is by creating a link between the need that we had at the time (for example need for comfort or safety) and the emotions that we felt in that situation (for example feeling attacked or powerless). The problem is that because of how disconnected we have been from our bodies and emotions for generations, we don’t remember how to release this link naturally and we continue to have this association. Let’s say it becomes the engine on which the subconscious and conscious mind run, it becomes imprinted in us as a way to handle fulfilling this need.
The reticular activating system (RAS) in your brain, responsible tor responding to survival threats, will then keep stirring you in the direction of these associations. Let’s say that your need for freedom has in the past been met by the feeling of being attacked. So in the circumstances when you now have a need for freedom, your subconsciousness and consciousness will present ideas, actions and thoughts that will make you feel attacked, because that’s what the body associated with this need. It thinks that this is how it gets the need fulfilled. And maybe that’s why after some time, you will completely give up on the idea of feeling free, because you just don’t think it’s possible and when you try to go for it, it doesn’t feel good. This is how we start to feel afraid of things that on some level we feel can actually be good for us. There is always some deeper emotion under these fears. Another question in this particular case would of course be „What/who do you need to be free from?“
We are trying to think that we make decisions based on logic or things that make sense, but it’s really these emotions underneath that are making things run. If we cling onto rationality and not feeling, we do it for the sake of safety. We might be afraid of facing how we actually feel and it can also be genuinely scary to open oneself to the fact that one’s own decisions, thoughts and preferences are in fact just a small part of a large picture.
Our minds even go as far as creating unreachable circumstances on our happiness, in order to protect the association that they believe is the key to having our needs met. Sometimes, they are not so obvious, for example „I would quit my job that makes me feel unworthy if I had more money, but I don’t“. Sometimes though, they are quite obvious, for example „I would do something about this if I was younger / If I grew up in a different society / …“. These thoughts are created on top of those negative associations, created to allow us to keep feeling the emotion that the body perceives as a sign of getting what it wants.
So how does this all relate to our problems? I’m here to invite you to see that what you think is a problem would not be a problem if you didn’t feel bad or weird about it. And guess what – when you change how you feel about it, when you release the connection that was made in your brain, your thoughts change and the engine makes it easy to get your need fulfilled. By letting your body know that the threat is no longer real, it stops looking for the emotions that turn it into a problem.
If you want to change anything in your life, really truly change it, my recommendation would be to start following what are your emotions telling you. I don’t believe in anything like changing your thoughts or reprogramming the brain – you might change some beliefs, but the core stays the same and will eventually produce other beliefs that correspond to the association. You can however use emotions to map out your patterns in life.
I used to think that there was no work without suffering. As soon as something became a task, I started feeling a lot of resistance to doing anything about it – even if it was something that I originally wanted to do! As soon as something became a task, I felt like I need to do it no matter what and it was no longer about what I want, but about the task getting done. I couldn’t see anymore how it relates to any bigger goals that I had. When I dug deeper, I discovered overwhelming feelings of powerlessness and out of control, and being taken advantage of, which were linked to my need of being supported. In a deep relaxation state I also discovered that I am connected to trauma of my ancestors, who were working in terrible conditions and whose experiences I inherited as a part of my genetic and energetic make-up.
The best way that I have encountered for releasing these associations and the pain the emotions are pointing to is called Metaphysical Anatomy Technique (MAT). I genuinely believe that if everybody learned how to do this or how this works, we as humanity would be unstoppable – in the good way this time. I believe in a happy and struggle-free life. Can you imagine what would the world look like if people didn’t feel blocked, scared or depraved? Can you imagine what would the world look like if everybody had a real chance at happiness?
There are more and more tools already out there, all you need to do is decide how much longer you can afford to not live the life that you have always wanted. If MAT speaks to you, you can join me for one of the courses to learn the MAT tools yourself or book a free 25 minute MAT consultation today.
Much love, Eva
Eva Zeťková is a level 3 MAT practitioner and certified Metaphysical Anatomy Level 1 Teacher, teaching since 2019. She uses MAT daily to work on herself and with her clients and students.