Living your life by default is not living your life. You’re repeating your life, over and over.
Each of us has a Default Mechanism, a subconscious pattern of returning to memories of previous experiences in your mind to find a response to a current experience. You may find yourself blocked from your true emotions by your Default. Your Default is your “energy of choice” which produces a thought. Your Default is your “Go To” energy. It powers your very first, almost automatic, reaction in response to the events of your life.
Two Energies To Choose From
There are two energies from which we all choose: Contraction or Expansion. The energy of Contraction produces thoughts that generate feelings of concern, caution, worry, anxiety, apprehension, nervousness, tension, etc. The energy of Expansion produces thoughts that generate feelings of confidence, excitement, joy, eager anticipation, exuberance, etc.
Most of us move primarily into Contraction as our Default response to moments arising. We do this because we are being cautious, as we naturally want to protect ourselves from pain. So we usually are on guard around unexpected events.
There are also those for whom a first response to incoming events is Expansion. This is their Default. But these people are definitely in the minority.
Neither of these Defaults is “good” or “bad,” they simply are what they are, and both provide instances when one would serve us better than the other. Unexpected events are seen by the mind as “emergencies” of a sort, and so our Default is the First Responder.
Feeling Without Thinking
What has created your Default is the accumulated energy produced by your prior experience. It’s how you feel without thinking when something occurs in your life. You don’t have to do any fresh thinking now because you’ve already done your thinking about what’s in the moment confronting you, based on your past.
Your old thoughts are triggered by a familiar energy pattern that magnetizes you to them, and this powerfully diverts you from any new ideas you may have been tempted to entertain about the current moment. It takes strength to pull away from that magnetic attraction. It takes Soul Courage.
The Default Vault
You may not think that you have a Default, and that you come to each new moment in your life with original energy, but observation has shown that this is true among only a rare few. Most of us have a Default, and it is not our intellect. It’s not emotion, not wisdom, pain, or joy.
It’s a pinch of all of those things at the same time, melded together like layers of paint on the walls in our mind. Each layer represents different times in our life where we had experiences that produced an end result that was then imprinted as an intellectual concept, an emotion, our life’s wisdom, our life’s pain, and our life’s joy.
It might help to think of your Default in just this way—as a container (you could call it your “Default Vault”). Imagine it as a space in your mind where you hold all your valuables—the thoughts, understandings, and deepest feelings you’ve gathered from your past—and where you go especially when you’re threatened or fearful about feeling and expressing an emotion in any particular moment.
Each of the thoughts produced by our Default is unique, because the energy that produces them is created from the feelings that our personal experiences have generated. Those experiences have left us feeling different levels of one thing or another: joy, pain, bliss, peace, shame, fear, excitement, and so on. The feelings that are in the majority (the “paint” that is the thickest) color our Default container.
What's In Your Default Vault?
Below are small examples to help you identify your Default. Read each question and pull insight from the answer with which you most naturally relate:
The phone rings at an odd hour and you look down to see that it’s your boss.
Your first thought is:
1. Oh, no, what have I done wrong?
2. Oh, goodness, is she okay?
3. Wow, maybe I’ll be commended for all my hard work!
4. Geez, what does she want now!
Your first feeling is:
1. Apprehension, concern, inner tightening
2. Excitement, warmth, curiosity
3. Mellowness, easy joy, peace
4. Mild annoyance, numbness, indifference
To demonstrate that it’s not entirely about self-esteem, let’s take this same example and substitute your boss with your Aunt Millie. So, as you notice her name on the phone . . .
Your first thought is:
1. Oh, no, who died?
2. Wow, it’s Aunt Millie! How wonderful it will be to catch up!
3. Hmmm . . . I wonder who’s getting married.
4. Now what does she want?
Your first feeling is:
1. Apprehension, concern, inner tightening
2. Excitement, warmth, curiosity
3. Mellowness, easy joy, peace
4. Mild annoyance, numbness, indifference
What's the "Essence" of Your Default?
Try to not take this little exercise too seriously. And definitely resist any temptation to criticize it, saying that your own answer was not listed, or the situation was not realistic, etc. It’s just a mental game to see which response you most relate to, so that you can better identify how often your thoughts and feelings are running on automatic, versus being organically experienced and expressed.
This might seem a little bizarre at first, but the exploration of it all can really be quite fascinating. Close your eyes and think past the rest of your mind, trying to feel into the thoughts and feelings that live in your Default.
What does it feel like in there? Is the energy one of Contraction or Expansion—or a combination of both? After you identify the essence of your Default, assess whether it’s working for or against your highest good most of the time.
A Default is by no means a fail-safe reliable indicator of a person’s response to any given situation, but it is the first place that a person will go to more often than not.
Reprogramming Your Default
Thinking about the energy behind your thoughts this deeply, on a day-to-day basis, may seem tiresome. But it’s important to do initially in order to bring awareness to how you may have been inadvertently allowing this energy to navigate you through your days and ultimately affect the course of your life.
The good news is that your Default can be adjusted so that it can work for and with you more often. The first step in reprogramming your Default is to not be ashamed or afraid of it. Go ahead and get to know it a bit, like you did in the exercise above, and become more familiar with the energy it holds.
We can do this by allowing ourselves to really feel into a moment when we remember that our Default is on. As noted earlier, most Default responses are contracting, not expanding. So fear, doubt, and worry are very often the emotions that we frequently find ourselves covering up during the course of our days.
Unlocking Ourselves from Our "Safe Space"
Yet even a consistently expansive Default is not always in our best interest. Ideally, a combination of both our expanding and contracting energies will open our vault. We need this balance of concern and caution with joy and confidence to release us from being so stuck in our old ways that we find it near impossible to experience a new moment in pure form. Fortunately, most of us know that combination and we can unlock ourselves from what we thought was going to be our safe space.
You know this pattern well, and recognize it, I’m sure, now that it’s being spoken of. You’ll be trucking along great during the day, and then something happens out of the blue that wakes up worry or a sense of eager anticipation. Either way, it can keep you up all night. Then you step away from your usual first response so that you can get back to living your life.
So the key to identifying, feeling, and expressing your true feelings in the moment is to be ultra aware of your Default, especially if you notice that your Default thought doesn’t support you in that moment. This awareness alone will assist in stopping the old patterns from repeating themselves, and present you with an opportunity to respond to life through organic feeling. This is the place of pure creativity—when automatic responses are shelved, the blackboard is erased, and a new story about this moment can be written.
Getting to “New”
Getting out of your Default requires you to look at your Default very closely so that you know immediately when your mind has taken you there. Initially you may not be comfortable looking at your Default, but here’s the thing; the more aware of it you are, the more you can recognize it—and then decide if it serves or does not serve your best interest in any given moment.
As soon as you sense that you’ve gone to your Default energetic response, pause for a few seconds and ask yourself silently: “Is this really how I feel or am I carrying emotions from past experiences into this moment?”
You will immediately know the answer.
If you are sufficiently aware and honest with yourself to see that you are running on a Default response, take control right then and there. Pause and consciously breathe into what is happening in that particular moment, making sure that you give yourself the freedom to Soulrender to feeling and expressing whatever is coming up for you.
Catching Your Default in "Pre-Reaction" Mode
Do you see what you’re doing? You’re catching your Default in the act of trying to pre-form your reaction to a new experience in life so that it doesn’t use recycled feelings and thoughts from an old experience. Immediately following this “bust,” you’re re-focusing and re-directing yourself inside to connect with how you really feel when your Default is defeated. You’re being creative instead of reactive.
And you are being creative from the most authentic part of you, not the least. You are responding from the deepest part of you, not from your automated surface reaction. You are living from the inside out, making life happen from a place that is truly in alignment with your Soul.
This will change your life. It certainly changed mine.
Your Soul Mission – Should You Choose to Accept It
As you become familiar with some of your Defaults, start begin to make a conscious effort to catch your Defaults “in the act.” Witness your old automated reaction, then consciously replace it with a new response that carries energy, which supports your highest good.
The more you do this, the faster your mind will learn to replace the old reaction with what is true for you now. Using your current response to replace your Default is a key factor in Soulrendering to your authentic feelings.
©2015 by Tara-jenelle Walsch. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher: Rainbow Ridge Books.
Article Source
Soul Courage -- Watch What Happens
by Tara-jenelle Walsch.
Click here for more info and/or to order this book.
About the Author
Tara-jenelle Walsch is the founder and spirit behind the Soulebrate greeting card company and the Soulcialize personal development program. She speaks publicly about building emotional awareness and the wonders of living soul-first through the Soulcialize concept, which she believes creates soul connection and has the ability to enrich the world at large. Find out more at soulcourage.com.
