We can also feel discomfort when we experience something pleasurable that pushes us outside our window of tolerance for staying present with our experience.
It has been very important for me to examine my tolerance level when comparing my capacity to sit with pain versus pleasure. My pain tolerance has been historically much greater than my capacity for pleasure.
In observing my own process, I’ve noticed that when I go through periods of time where I feel scared, uncertain, or disconnected, I reach towards what feels familiar and might provide a close match for the resonance of a person or dynamic that I have historically been used to relating with.
We seek towards often what has informed the development of our innermost self, personality, and identity.
When we get scared, it makes sense that we would reach towards the last person, place, or thing that gave us a more defined sense of who we were, especially when it feels like the ground is shifting beneath us.
In my own experience of this, when I begin expanding beyond my perception of what I believe is possible and the rooted definition of who I’ve held myself to be for so long, individuals that have mirrored old parts of myself and identity usually appear.
Whether it’s a person that has played an important role in my past history or someone in present time whose vibration is similar and evocative of my personal history, I will often have avatars that show up as illuminators of where I have come from and where and what I am letting go of.
An avatar is an archetype for a person or group of individuals with a similar template that might show up throughout our lifetime that we appear to experience a repetitive narrative or dynamic with.
For instance, you might keep selecting relationships with individuals who share similar qualities that stimulate a habitual response and relational outcome until that dynamic and pattern is fully illuminated and integrated.
These relationships act as growth catalysts on our journey towards integrated wholeness and greater self-realization.
It can be challenging when we are confronted with old aspects of ourselves, especially when we meet a person that reminds us of someone we once knew, and it was a formative or even painful experience that was part of the fundamental construction of our core organizing self and identity.
When we connect with familiar tethers to our former self, the greatest impulse that we might have is to cling on and grasp for what once felt like our ground, identity, or truth.
The practice here is to become wakeful and attuned to when these avatars from our previous self’s history arise in our present moment reality and watch the ways in which our patterns and earlier imprinting get activated.
As we become an active witness, we can more fully understand our origins, how we are organized and came to be formed.
At the edge of our becoming and actualization of deeper, more integrated layers of being, we can ask ourselves, what is the reality we choose to create for ourselves now?
Without negating any aspect of our history or past and that which has played a fundamental part in the formulation and development of ourselves, we invite ourselves to connect with the integrated truth of all that we are now.
