CwL Ep35: Are you sleepwalking through life?

Self-deception is a thing! 

Many of us are champions at it. We can fool ourselves so well.

I thought I was connected to my kids because I spent time with them…
I thought I was reflective and considered…
I thought I had an intimate relationship…
I thought I was on the path to success…

And it was only when things really began to unravel that I had to get radically honest with myself.

I was sleepwalking through my life, not willing to go deeper or scratch beneath the surface because I was so scared at what I might find.

That was until I did two things that started me on the path of my own awakening. And it’s been a remarkable journey of self-discovery.

On this week’s podcast episode I share what they were (hint – I didn’t have DO anything different – I just needed to start SEEING differently).

Prefer to Read? Here’s the Transcript:

Hey you, welcome back to the podcast. I guess this is a bit of a honesty podcast episode where I’m going to be talking to you all about the ways in which I was maybe deceiving myself. Yeah, there was a fair bit of self deception going on and what it was leading to was me sleepwalking through my life.

And I’m sharing this with you because I think so many of us have this next level, this opening up that needs to happen. This raising our consciousness really about who we are. And we often get trapped in a belief about what that is. And if you hear any of yourself in some of the examples that I’m going to share with you today, then I really encourage you to use the two tools that really helped me snap out of this and wake up and really start to actually take the reins in my own life.

I’d love you to give it a go. I’d love you to see, just give yourself the opportunity to, I guess, just tap on the door. Just tap the door of what’s possible and just walk through. For me, I had no idea. I still don’t really have any idea of exactly what’s coming. Exactly what’s possible, what’s around the corner, but I work from a completely different place now. I’m not asleep in my own life.

So let me give you a few examples of how that did play out for me. So, I quite genuinely thought I was a reflective, considered person. I thought I was a thinker. I thought this made me aware of myself. I didn’t think I had any issues because I was good at thinking about my own issues. All right?

But actually, all it was was I would just overthink things in the exact same way I always had. I was thinking about things from the place that actually created that thinking, if that makes sense. So I wasn’t bringing anything new to the table. I wasn’t going deeper. It was just like all my beliefs and stories about who I was, I was using to interpret what was going on around me. And it kept me just doing the same thing over and over and over.

And this is why I’m so passionate about people change, change their thoughts, really recognise that when we think those thoughts on a continuous loop, it’s often just taking us around in circles and it is actually possible to recognise that you’re choosing to think those thoughts, you’re the thinker of your thoughts. And so many people talk about this.

I think I first heard it from Eckhart Tolle back in the day, bloody years ago in my twenties. And I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. It didn’t fully land for me until I really, really understood that I’m going to continue going around in circles, I’m going to keep repeating things unless I just raise my level of awareness that hang on, Lisa’s not the thoughts, Lisa’s the person who’s thinking those thoughts. Right?

Anyway, we’ll move on. This is one example. I also thought I was really a connected parent, connected to my children. I mean, I had three kids in under four years, so my attention was on them. It was on that stage of life. But I actually look back now, now that I feel I’m in a completely different level of connection with them and can see that I was with them, but I was always distracted. I was distracted a lot of the time and because I was in this self deception, maybe, like I’m not being hard on myself. I do think that I did spend a lot of time in the presence of and connected to my children. But was I really sort of … How connected can you be with an 18 month old who’s just having a tantrum?

But I can see now, because I’ve really worked on this area of my life, that that connection with my children had a whole new level of depth available to it if I just stopped telling myself that I already was that. Can you see the difference there? Hopefully. Because I was telling myself, “You know, yeah, me and the kids.”, it it actually didn’t allow or open up this next level. I was just doing parenthood, not really being in parenthood.

Another way that I have felt, feel now, and I can sort see now that I was quite asleep in my life was because I thought I had a very intimate relationship with my husband, which I did, on many different levels. But it was like we have a lot of sex, so we’ve got the intimacy thing nailed down. But what I can look back on now and see is that there was not much vulnerability by the end. There was so much that was unsaid. And there was so much sort of patterned behaviour that, because I told myself that we were so close, it actually denied the truth that there was a lot of water happening, there was a lot of water under the bridge. There was a lot of stuff going on. There was a lot of words that were unsaid and at the end of the day, that’s not true intimacy.

You can know someone, you can experience intimate moments with someone, but that true level of intimacy, I think, eluded us, especially closer to the end of our marriage, because I don’t think I was opening up to it. And I think he was in the exact same place. But because we thought we had a good sex life, we had that nailed or because we talked, we were actually saying the stuff that mattered. And it just denied the realising that there were these patterned, conditioned behaviours between us that really needed work.

Another way that I think I was sleepwalking was that I thought I was on the path to success. I would tell myself I really loved and do continue to love growing a business. And while I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s all working, it’s all happening. It’s crazy. It’s really good. I’m helping people. I’m doing everything.” But, because I was able to do certain things, I was in self deception about what that actually meant.

I wasn’t digging into what my stories were around success. I was just really keeping myself very busy and that actually doesn’t equal success in terms of having a really balanced, enjoyable life. Being able to take care of myself, not burn out. There were all these things that I was telling myself, but I didn’t just give myself the opportunity to scratch under the surface.

And it was only when things sort of started to unravel that I had to pay attention in a brand-new way. And I had to wake myself up from these stories that were keeping me spinning my wheels, that I had to take sort of full responsibility for. So there’s two things that happened that really made a difference that I wanted to share with you.

And the first thing really is that I had to wake up to the fact that a lot of this stuff, it was not because I was a bad person or I was missing the point or I wasn’t trying. It was just that so much was happening at the subconscious level. So it wasn’t even something I could actually consciously get into my awareness on my own and I needed to do extra work around that.

And I realised that because I had to ask myself some pretty big questions. I had to ask myself, if my life, if this isn’t all just happening to me and I’m just like this victim of someone who’s just found herself in this crazy chaotic lifestyle and can’t keep up with anything and has no time for friends or things that matter and blah, blah, blah. Well, actually, that’s actually not anyone else’s problem to fix. That’s mine. And this life that I’ve created is a reflection of me and the choices that I’ve made.

And I need to wake up here to the fact that I need to change first in order to be able to get some certain things back on track. It’s why I started to do a lot of work on myself and that really did positively impact my marriage. And when I stopped being a surface level person who was way too afraid to look at herself and who kept herself too busy to really wake up to what was going on. And so I started to look at myself in brand-new, very compassionate ways. I wasn’t hard on myself. I was just waking up to myself and it was a beautiful thing.

And one question that really, really helped me as I was going through this process was what am I not seeing here? And just that little question helped me when I felt like I was just in that conditioned response. Well, actually, am I, or is there something that I’m not seeing here? And it really, really started to transform the way, the eyes in which I was looking at the world. It started to move things inside me.

So that’s what I want to leave you with today. If you feel at all that there’s parts of your life, where you’re just continuously going around in circles, maybe you’re in a bit of self deception about who you are or what’s happening around you, maybe you need to scratch under the surface and see if what you’re telling yourself is really true. And if there might be something for you to dig a little bit around, what are you not seeing in your life that is calling you to see?

And then just also being really aware to the fact that a lot of this is sitting in your subconscious. A lot of it has been stored away. You are a product of everything that’s happened to you. All the thoughts that you think are so conditioned, like most of what you think is just habitual thoughts. So really bring your awareness to that.

Don’t be hard on yourself for things that you’ve done time and time again, you have so much to offer the world, so much love to give and so much potential to explore. I hope that this has helped you. Scratch a little under the surface so you get to explore that. See you next time.

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