Are You Unconsciously Limiting Your Ability To Enjoy? I Was

Revelations around the capacity to enjoy

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Sometimes a single word can be a gateway to cracking open our awareness to new territory.

An example of this in my own experience is the word enjoyment.

Compartmentalized Enjoyment

Spending most of my life as a consummate, high-achieving type A, I never really spent much time contemplating enjoyment. There was part of me that equated the word with leisure and even some level of complacency.

Most of the time enjoyment was compartmentalized.

Compartmentalized enjoyment means you have certain windows and activities where you really allow yourself to enjoy the moment with no agenda. But then outside these windows you view time and your actions as something to get the most out of. There is typically an inner compulsion to improve yourself and view everything as something to maximize.

So when you live with compartmentalized enjoyment maybe you let you hair down with friends on Friday night and during the game on Sunday, but outside these windows your inner experience is attuned to getting the most out of something and using life as a means to an end. Steve March talks a lot about this concept in our recent podcast using the distinction between technical atunement vs. poetic atunement.

We can see a simple example of how compartmentalized enjoyment might reveal itself in how eat.

When you eat, do you really allow yourself to fully enjoy each bite to the fullest? Do you take as long as you want to enjoy a meal without feeling any sort of way?

Or does your lunch look like shoveling the food down while listening to some podcast or watching a video you think will make your life better?

I know many people may moan and groan about how they actually enjoy multi-tasking like this, but the subtlety is to pay attention to what is actually driving the enjoyment.

For example, reflecting on my own experience when there was lots of compartmentalized enjoyment, if I took 20 minutes to eat my lunch slowly in silence while savoring each bite, there’d usually be a sense of pressure or guilt present. I’d have these compulsions to fill the space with content or get on to the next thing which prevented me from fully enjoying the experience without bounds.

The same experience would be present during many activities.

So what is driving the enjoyment of filling the space while you eat? The silencing of the inner voice or the simple essence of the experience?

Examining Beliefs Around Enjoyment

Recently the word enjoyment has been circulating in my sphere again and again. 

When this happens, I’ve learned that life is trying to communicate with me. This is a queue to excavate my subconscious and investigate what’s there. 

The etymology of the word enjoy means “to give joy.”

I found this very interesting because “to give” something implies contribution. 

When I examined the concepts in my consciousness around enjoyment using this method, they were very different than giving joy to myself and others. In fact, I could see how there was a cobweb of ideas I uncovered were placing massive limitations on my capacity for delight and ability to contribute.

Example concepts I discovered include:

• It is unsafe to fully enjoy things

• If I fully enjoy the world of form, I will get stuck here (think wheel of karma)

• If I fully enjoy the world of form, I am strengthening the ego and attachment to “the illusion”

• Full enjoyment is greedy and selfish

• Full enjoyment is not polite and proper

• When I enjoy, I am not making progress on my goals

• Enjoyment isn’t going to get “me” where I want to go. I can enjoy when I finally have what I want

• It’s unrealistic to think more enjoyment will create the life I want

• There is a limit to how much joy you can experience. It’s impossible for everything to go completely right in someone’s life

These are what I like to call shitty concepts.

They are all just relics of inherited ideas I likely picked up from my personal experience of Christianity, Eastern philosophy, childhood, and ideas in our culture.

None of them are inherently true. They are just concepts or mental formations.

The thing is that our experience conforms to the information in our consciousness. This often makes concepts appear true until we can see clearly how we are creating our own box of reality constrained by the concepts we hold knowingly or unknowingly.

In this instance, the information in the list above creates a rather limited experience for how much joy we can experience and contribute to others.

The crazy thing is I didn’t really know I was walking around with this bag of hot garbage because it was kept out of my awareness in the unconscious. This is why working on your awareness is so incredibly fundamental and valuable.

It creates the capacity to understand the information creating your experience and then re-architect it.

How Do You Know Whether You’ve Placed Limitations On Enjoyment?

Most people don’t wake up one day and have an epiphany that they’ve unconsciously been limiting their enjoyment. 

In my experience, the most definitive and reliable way we come to know the contents of our consciousness is how we respond to life. It is the gateway to understanding our inner material. 

This is why I am writing an entire book on using your response to life as a primary practice for consciousness expansion and transformation.

If you’re not familiar with this idea, just start noticing when you get disturbed or taken out of peace. Take this as a queue that perhaps there is some underlying energy-information in the bedrock of your consciousness, that is creating your inner response that manifests as your thoughts, emotions, and impulses.

The more we pay attention, the more refined our ability to notice the subtleties of our response becomes. Eventually we start to see that all of life is unfolding in a manner that aids our awareness of the imprints that are obscuring the realization of the Divine beings we are and have always been (Self Realization).

In the context of enjoyment, here are some basic examples of responding to life that might indicate you have unsupportive information driving your capacity for enjoyment.

Example 1:

You're ordering coffee and the barista starts chatting you up. They seem kind, warm smile, and like they’d be fun to talk to. Instead of opening to the experience of engaging in a conversation, your inner impulses are hustling you along to extract yourself so you can go focus on some goal oriented activity or next thing to do. In this example, there may be a concept around enjoying the moment with this person is at odds with achieving your goals.

This doesn’t mean that you need to sit and chat with every human who wants to talk to you to enjoy life. The thing you need to see clearly is the inner response before consciously deciding what to do.

Example 2:

You hear about someone who is traveling the world and doing what they love. When you hear about this, you wonder what part of their life isn’t going well?

You assume that if someone’s career and ability to experience adventure are going amazing, then some other part of their life has to be going less well because that’s the way the world works.

I mean one person can’t really have it all right?

In this case, there is a concept that there is a limited amount of positivity that someone can experience. This is why you are reacting with this thought in your awareness. 

To understand the information and concepts creating your experience, you need to become a student of your own response to reality. This is the primary way to understand the invisible forces that determine how you experience the world and in my experience, it’s actual unfolding.

Updating The Information 

One of my aims in this life is to expand to the highest potentials of love, joy, and contribution. What you come to realize is that all of these work together.

When you love yourself, you experience more joy and love for others.

When you expand your capacity for joy, it is easier to love yourself and others.

When your life is full of joy, you want to contribute and share it with everyone around you.

Everything builds upon another. 

So when you open yourself to FULL enjoyment, you increase your capacity to love and contribute. 

I don’t think there is an enlightened teaching out there that would contend with this interplay.

Once you recognize the outdated information in your consciousness around enjoyment, you have the opportunity to transform the underlying energy-information. Again, you can any of this these techniques or this meditation I recorded.

Here’s some example updated information that is more supportive for a healthy, loving, and expansive experience:

• The more I enjoy, the more I contribute

• The more I enjoy, the more I love

• The more time I spend in enjoyment, the more easily goals are achieved

• The deepest part of Self desires maximum enjoyment which supports maximum love and contribution

• The more open I am to enjoyment, the more I rest in the present moment

In my opinion, there is nothing about any of these concepts that contends with your consciousness expansion or Self-Realization. If you really feel like it does, perhaps this is a good time to investigate whether that’s really true?

If you believe the highest Divinity is loving, why would that oppose enjoyment?

With this recognition, you see that the only thing that’s been limiting you is your own concepts. 

This can be a humbling experience. It may even cause some anger or frustration because most of the formative programming was not something you chose.

For example, my parents brought me to a church that disseminated perspectives and interpretations that hampered my ability to enjoy parts of life. One place that manifested is my capacity to enjoy money.

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:24 

If you experience disturbance as you recognize the source of your programming and your prerogative is freedom, the call is always to meet whatever is arising. This is the only way we can un-encumber ourselves from our pasts whether we chose the circumstances or not.

Closing Thoughts

As we humans spend our lifetimes running around trying to architect the world around us to enjoy life, it seems like a prudent thing to spend some time investigating our relationship to enjoyment.

What beliefs do we hold? 

What information is lying beyond our immediate awareness that we can courageously investigate to discover more about ourselves?

Understanding and working with this information may ultimately lead to a much more enduring sense of enjoyment than making sure all the plates are spinning the right way. 

I am grateful the forces of life have beckoned me to explore this part of myself. 

I wish you a healthy and supportive relationship with enjoyment in your own life!

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If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏