You Released the Relationship but Did You Release the Pattern?

It’s officially Spring, Aries season and we had our first new moon of Aries season yesterday.

The major energetic shift that so many of us have been looking for is here at last.

I’ve been talking about this transition for quite some time now as I know so many of us have been IN IT and we are *finally* crossing a really important threshold seasonally, astrologically, collectively and individually.

The thing about transitions and crossing thresholds though is that they don’t happen in a day, as much as I know we want them to.

Yes, we have milestones that mark our entry points into new cycles but I’ve started to think of those more as important markers and lines in the sand of shifting from what “was” to “what is coming.”

We must remember that both things can exist at once- we can still be in a process of release, reflection and integration AND we can also move forward.

As always, we can move at our pace and give ourselves grace.

For me right now this is embodied in the deep process of moving out of + selling my childhood home of 30 years.

I have the unique opportunity to be going through……well, my entire life.

As this massive chapter is closing, it’s like time is suspended and I’m able to see my life and my identity up until this point from a bird’s eye view.

I am sifting through old pictures, old documents, awards, school papers, journals  - so much of what has made me up until this point.

I am able to very clearly see my path as well as my patterns from a 360 holistic perspective and it’s had me thinking about something I am currently focusing on in my acting class: relationships.

When I say “relationships” many of us immediately jump to romantic relationships or friendships…..and it’s true, the quality of the relationships we have with the people in our life massively impact us.

But the reality is that we have a relationship to every single thing in our life beyond just people: money, our bodies, sex, beliefs, jobs, habits, homes, dreams, traumas, food, government, nature, our past, our present, our future, etc.

We hold thoughts, feelings and energy to everything we are in relationship with.

That means that even when/if we complete or physically move on from something or someone we have been in relationship with, there’s a chance we could still be holding the energy of that relationship within our bodies and our energy fields.

This can look like leaving a toxic job and finding yourself in the same exact position at a new company.

This can even look like the thrill of leaving corporate life for entrepreneurship and end up bringing the same corporate energy into your new venture (thus re-creating the thing you meant to leave).

This can look like ending a misaligned relationship (friendship, familial or romantic) and find yourself involved in the same dynamics just with different people i.e new play with the same ol’ characters.

This can even look like stopping a bad habit and find yourself creating a new bad habit that fills the same role.

All that to say, just because we end, complete or release relationships doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve actually released the patterns that had the relationships leave our life in the first place.

From an energetic standpoint, Maryam Hasnaa refers to this as “the paper doll syndrome” - where you keep being attracted to the exact same energy but in a different person.

I would expand this definition because again, relationships go beyond people.

For example, one of the hardest lessons I had to learn was when I left my advertising agency job after 5.5 years to venture into creative entrepreneurship and ended up creating a paper doll situation of exactly what I had been trying to leave for the first 3 years.

I was over-booked, over-stretched, over-committed, over-doing and stressed out.

Why?

Because I hadn’t yet released the pattern(s) that had me unconsciously choosing stressful, hard, energetically misaligned situations (and people) in my life because I still held a deep belief that life was only rewarding when things were hard and my value was connected to how much I could accomplish (hello, capitalism!).

The reality is that a lot of times in the moment, we don’t have the full picture. It might take some time to see or understand what pattern we are working with. We can only work with what we know in the moment.

…….but we can certainly help ourselves to not have paper doll syndrome by at the very least being more aware of - and start releasing - what those patterns might be and the ways in which they keep us energetically (and sometimes physically) corded to things that no longer work for us.

This could look like:

1.) Taking a *sacred pause* before jumping to our next “thing”
2.) Clarifying what worked, didn’t work, what we learned and what we’re grateful for from the relationship
3.) Being honest about what role we played (excluding any forms of abuse) and/or beliefs we hold about ourself
4.) Reflecting if we’ve seen similar patterns from the past
5.) Practicing radical compassion for ourselves and the thing we were in relationship with
6) Engaging in energy practices such as my Cord Cutting and Calling Your Energy Back meditations to clear old energy
7.) Visioning what energy we would like to experience in our next cycle
8.) Embodying the energy (daily) you’d like to see in relationship with the new __________

We don’t have to have this all figured out to continue moving forward in life but the more we can hold space for release and integration as well as action and planting seeds, the more we’ll have the capacity to create our futures based off of what’s in true alignment for us (and not keep dragging forward our past).