Resilience. What does it mean ‘to overcome’ someone or some object? How do we ‘overcome’ an experience that happened to us and is now a part of who we are? People will say, “Get out of your own way; you’re sabotaging yourself.” Yet, how can we if part of our identity or personality constitutes self-blocking?
A lot of research on resilience is about overcoming externally-imposed obstacles. While this is interesting and important, many of us–myself included–have struggled to overcome self-limiting beliefs and behaviors. We needed resilience to overcome the negativity and harshness that we generated in our own consciousness. It took me years of internalizing positive and encouraging ideas, and practicing uplifting feelings even when I felt demoralized, to liberate my consciousness of horrendous self-doubt and low self-worth. Bob Proctor, Mel Robbins, Dr. Ramani on YouTube, all of their messages and ideas on the subconscious mind empowered me to work through and navigate that part of myself that was self-blocking.
For some people, self-blocking (or self-sabotaging) is a way to stay ‘small’ in a world that would let them have a big life, but that they think and feel in their subconscious mind would never allow them to truly live the greatness they desire. For example, when I arrived in New York, a series of crises threw me into unemployment, homelessness, and perpetual lack of food, or what sociologists call food insecurity. I always had ‘just enough’ to survive but never enough to thrive. I was on economic life-support. Fast forward after years of therapy and other forms of exploring my subconscious mind, and I am thriving. Nothing outside me changed: the buildings were the same. The trees in Central Park were the same. The traffic was still the same! Yet, my experience of this same city radically improved because the subconscious mind reorganized itself through exploring, processing, and yes, eventually overcoming self-limiting beliefs and behaviors. The outcome changed because the input changed. I bloomed anyway.
This painting is a representation of that journey. The singular flower blooms as the old mental paradigms–represented by the dripping–gently fall away. My hope is that each time you slip into your soft new t-shirt, you feel the inner determination to overcome self-limiting beliefs and behaviors. A quote from the psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung says it best, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” Bloom anyway.
