– an Awareness Training Protocol
The moment you realize the cause of your suffering is a moment of liberation.
That moment of insight is an opening in awareness of an internal pattern that’s kept you stuck and in pain. Personal liberation then, is a process activated by awareness and pattern recognition, followed by a process of transcending and transforming the existing pattern by creating a new pattern with intention, self-compassion, visualization and disciplined practice.
Here are some of the steps of a repatterning process I use in my one on one coaching sessions with clients. I customize the process to meet the unique needs of each coachee.
Repatterning Process
The step by step repatterning process usually takes the coachee a few sessions to learn. Once learned, the coachee can apply their knowledge making the repatterning process their own, perfecting their practice, over time.
Step One: Noticing and Accepting What Is
Before we can change something, we have to know what is….to know what is, we must first notice what we are experiencing and accept it for what it is. It helps with this step to practice non–judgment and self-compassion.
Pattern Recognition and Impulse Control
Recognizing that the patterns of response you created over the course of your life may have been made in challenging life situations during infancy or early childhood…and were made by you, to the best of your abilities, at that time. Appreciating the automatic nature of your response patterns can help you be more self-compassionate. Those patterns, however, may no longer be serving you. In fact, the more you realize the patterns you once identified as “you” getting in your own way, the more capable you become of calling them out, and stopping them from running their course, once activated.
To change a pattern of response, you first have to recognize it as a pattern…not identify with it, simply recognize it as a pattern you once created. Once you see it as such, you have managed to see yourself, as distinct from the pattern…and are now able to pause the pattern….interrupt it…stop it…really see it…name it…know where it lives in you and what activates or triggers it.
Step Two: Reclaiming Your Power
Taking this step to recognize and isolate the pattern is often very difficult, if not impossible, to do alone. This step, when well executed, will help you remember yourself as “pattern creator” distinct from the “pattern” you create – a very important distinction!
This new awareness is very empowering. It may never have even occurred to you that your symptoms (what you are experiencing) are not you, but patterns expressing a choice you may have made some time in your forgotten past, in response to a threat or challenging circumstance.
With this insight of “I am not my pattern”, you can now interrupt, pause and engage your symptom (whatever is presenting) in a conversation…elucidating the cause of your pain, the cycle of stimulus response and the purpose or role the pattern has attempted to serve for you.
Before this can be realized, the fundamental insight that you are the pattern creator (and not the pattern) with power over the dominion of you (your experience) must first be fully experienced, accepted and tested.
Step Three: Awareness and Self Compassion helps Identify Resistance
Acknowledging that you are a complex system of systems with much of who and what you are unknowable to you, opens you up to the experience of humility and invites self-compassion.
Parts of you may, at any time, be reacting to external stimuli – toxins in your physical, emotional and or mental environment. Noticing your moment to moment reactions and their stimuli is the first step towards growing awareness. In the mindful practice of noticing what you are noticing you begin to realize that there are many old programs running in the background that no longer serve you.
Your complex system, much like a computer, has a database of programs running all the time, some conscious but most subconscious. While these unconscious programs aim to keep you safe, at times they may also overprotect you. Overprotection can be detected by becoming aware of the emotional charge or attachment you experience when you pause to think of something or someone.
Step Four: Befriending Resistance to Disentangle from the Pattern
If you experience resistance to step three in the repatterning process, notice where in your body you feel resistance, sometimes experienced as pain. Doing a bodyscan – scanning your body from head to foot or from your feet to your head can be helpful in identifying areas of tension and resistance.
Stepping back from the experience, or as I sometimes suggest, getting the 500 metre birds-eye view, can help you see clearly – and can help with shifting perspective to see clearly.
During this step, I may ask the client, “What age might you have been when you first experienced this pattern, perhaps as a defensive mechanism against some transgression or transgressor experienced by you either physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually?”
While it’s not essential to my work as a coach, but falls more into therapy, going deeper into the circumstances of that time of pattern creation, may or may not serve the needs of the client.
The client’s system has all the answers…and when asked in the right way, the system will provide information in the form of image, feeling or symbol.
As coach, my focus is in helping clients reclaim their power. We go only as far and as deep as is required to achieve that, working attentively with my clients to help them distinguish themselves, as pattern creator distinct from the pattern, which is separate from them and can, if they choose, be abandoned or reprogrammed.
Step Five: Centering the Self and the Power of Intentionality
Once the client recognizes that she, whether conscious or not, is the pattern creator and not the pattern, we’ve reached a place where she can reclaim her power and connect with a sense of her authentic self. This is a joyous and empowering time.
To re-centre, I ask the client to take a few deep and mindful breaths, letting go of what she no longer needs or wants, and begin to simply notice the breath as it moves through the body, like a river flowing through the landscape. Once this simple, rhythmic flow is established and experienced, I ask the client to find that place within that is a place of peace; enter into that place of stillness and say to herself, “I am at Peace…I am in my place of Power.”
From this deeply centered place, I invite the client to create a life-affirming statement that includes the former symptoms she had been experiencing yet transcends and resolves them…for instance, if the initial symptom was…”When I think of my relationship, I get brain fog and feel stuck.: The intention may be states, “When I think of my relationship I see clearly and respond authentically.”
Overcoming the Inner Critic
Step five is an exercise of self-determination which may, initially, be challenged by the inner critic….that fearful, self-judging aspect of the self that can rise up in response to the client’s efforts to reclaim her power. Transforming the inner-critic and self-saboteur requires re-education and is its own process.
Step Six: Visualizing, Validating and Anchoring
I like to use the client’s intention created in step 5 “When I think of my relationship I see clearly and respond authentically” as an inspiration for her to create an ideal vision of what she really wants, the ideal as if already realized, and then breathe into it and make it real….in full, living colour.
Once the ideal is so envisioned, the client begins to believe in the possibility of realizing her goals which gives rise to new hope and a burst of new energy. This creative healing process enables the client to claim her power, own it, ground it in the here and now. More deep mindful breaths, while visualizing the ideal as if already realized, help the client to anchor this new sense of empowered self in her body. Restating her intention to herself out loud, helps to anchor it in her consciousness, making it real, achievable.
Mindful breathing is a fabulous practice. I often teach my clients this core skill in our first coaching session. Taking time out to breathe mindfully, enables you to re-centre at will, letting go of things you no longer need or want and reset your focus. Mindful breathing can also help you reset your awareness – creating inner space to allow you the space and time to choose what patterns to let go of, which to hold on to or keep and know why. Or perhaps instead of letting them go, choosing to reset or reprogram them so they can inform rather than enslave you.
Creating the internal conditions that enable growth in awareness – moving that which is unconscious towards conscious awareness – is empowering and transformative. The patterns of thought and feeling that you’ve been living may have been unchallenged by you for decades and lie hidden and buried deep inside yet drive your everyday experience..
Step Seven: Designing Action and Committing to Practice.
Every session ends with reflection identifying what’s been learned and can be applied through action or practice in the coming week. Journaling both pre and post coaching session is a reflective practice that trains client awareness and attention noticing what’s working and why.
Step Eight: Taking Charge, Accepting Responsibility
You are perfect as you are.It’s your practice that you can improve and perfect. By applying your insights and knowledge clients internalize the mindfulness practices, techniques and repatterning protocols they’ve learned reducing their dependency on others and enhancing their own self-management abilities.
The repatterning process offers a road map. It may take a few months or it could take years to complete….Time and again, clients return for another coaching journey – with the desire to go deeper, to open and become more whole. Each case is unique.
What is important is to remember that it’s in your power to transcend and transform your situation of living.
The information I’m sharing with you in this post is just that – information – a process that can be learned. There are numerous practices and techniques I teach in each step of the Repatterning Process. Clients experience improvements often after the very first coaching session. The benefits are cumulative and grow exponentially over time and with practice.
Awareness training is work and this inner work yields remarkable results.
About Julia von Flotow
