The Chains That Bind.

Tamara Harhai

I was going through some of my highlights from The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest. The book’s fundamental premise is that the biggest obstacles in our lives are us, not the external world. We unconsciously block our own progress by acts of self-sabotage. Self-sabotage is a “comfort blanket” that protects us from fear, change, or discomfort.

The themes are self-sabotage, emotional patterns, and how to transform ourselves from within.

I thought today’s post would be sharing some of the quotes I liked.

Your new life is going to cost you your old one.
It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense of
direction.
It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.
It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.
It doesn’t matter.
The people who are meant for you are going to meet you
on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort
zone around the things that actually move you forward.
Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of
Being understood, you’re going to be seen.
All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you
no longer are.

We are meant to go through these periods of what some refer to as positive disintegration. It is when we must adapt our self-concept to become someone who can handle, if not thrive, in the situation that we are in.
This is healthy. This is normal. This is how we are supposed to respond. But we cower because it will be uncomfortable. It will not immediately give us the virtues of what we are taught is a worthwhile life: comfort and ease, and the illusion that everything is perfect on the surface.
Healing is not merely what makes us feel better the fastest. It is building the right life, slowly and over time. It is greeting ourselves at the reckoning, admitting where we’ve faltered. It is going back and resolving our mistakes and going back within ourselves and resolving the anger and fear and small-mindedness that got us there in the first place. Healing is refusing to tolerate the discomfort of change because you refuse to tolerate mediocrity for one second longer.
The truth is that there is no way to escape discomfort; it finds us wherever we are. But we are either going to feel uneasy pushing past our self-imposed limits, breaking boundaries, and becoming who we dream of being, or we’re going to feel it as we sit and mull over fears we fabricated to justify why we refuse to stand up and begin.

It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.

Happiness is not something you can chase. It is something you have to allow. This likely will come as a surprise to many people, as the world is so adamant about everything from positive psychology to motivational Pinterest boards.
But happiness is not something you can coach yourself into.
Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not be resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure

What happens when we start to chase what we really want? We resist doing the work that it takes to actually get it because we are so afraid of not having it. Any brush with failure makes us rescind our effort and tense up.
When we go so long without having what we really want, we create subconscious associations between having it and “being bad,” because we have judged others for having it.
When we get it, we fear losing it so badly that we push it away from ourselves so as to not have to withstand the pain. We are so deeply enmeshed in the mental state of “wanting” that we cannot shift to a state of “having.

Closing this out with this quote by poet Tomas Transtromer: “Don’t be ashamed to be a human being—be proud! Inside you, one vault after another opens endlessly. You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.”

Keep going,

Ije