In a previous post, I wrote about experiential loops and what they are.
So how do you break a loop, especially one that might span hundreds and hundreds of incarnations? First off, your particular incarnation has to be advanced enough spiritually to make a conscious effort to analyze and understand WHY you are giving your power away. If you aren't there spiritually, you can't even hope to tackle this, so don't worry about it. These people wouldn't be finding this particular post anyway because this is too far above their pay grade. It's not a judgment, but merely a fact. Everyone is at different levels of spiritual advancement, so quit being butt-hurt if you're still a freshman in high school and you're trying to understand graduate school concepts. We've all been there and it's the natural progression down here.
If you're reading this and you still practice your religion in some form, even if it means just going to church a few times a year for those special events, this might be just enough to make you question WHY the fuck you're still giving your power away. If this pool of freedom is still too cold for you to dip your toes into, you can just go back to what you've always done and cross your fingers that another one of your incarnations will have the fortitude to step forward and take the plunge. It's ok. You are where you are and you make the progress in your lifetime that you will make. Some incarnations make bigger leaps and bounds than others and some don't progress very far at all. In extreme cases, some even spiritually regress, but that's ok. If your goal is to get the fuck out of this place as quickly as possible, then read on.
Being able to scrutinize what keeps you tied to a particular loop will help you recognize other loops and what keeps you tied to those as well.
In the previous post on experiential loops, I gave a list of some of them. I can't tell you exactly what needs to be done to break each one, mainly because it's not that simple and it's very rare for a person to break multiple loops in one incarnation. Experiential loops are often intertwined and/or nested within each other, further complicating matters. When you try to tackle one loop, it's common for you to be set back by other loops that will derail you. Going back to the Olympic hurdler example from the first article, instead of just jumping over the hurdle and continuing to run, you would jump the hurdle and find yourself landing in quicksand. Then as you try to pull yourself out, a swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitos decides to feast on your exposed parts alongside the leeches that have attached themselves to your skin and in the distance, you see an anaconda slithering towards you.
Below is an example that might help you get started in the right direction. Just remember that it's not a race and you should only do what you can handle in your particular incarnation. Don't push it. At the very minimum, just being aware is a very good start.
So maybe in this incarnation, you gave up on religion as an adult after you were molested by a trusted church elder as a youth. That was what it took to make you snap, but maybe as a result, you took up drinking because you suppressed those memories of molestation. That's perfectly ok, but now you have to escape the loop of alcoholism and when family drama ensues because it's tied to your addiction, now you've embroiled yourself even deeper. Do you see where I'm going with this? There isn't an easy answer. With time and the help of your other incarnations working on the same loop in different time periods and different parts of the world, those existing loops will have smaller grips on you.
Let's take the loop of drug addiction and see how your awareness of this loop can be the starting point. Let's say you have a Vicodin addiction. You hurt your back years ago and your legal drug pusher aka western Dr. gave you a scrip for your happy pills. Opiates are very addictive and after three years of popping them every day, you finally get tired of not being able to shit like a normal human being every time you sit on the pot (opiates cause constipation). You do some research and find that you can take kratom to ease your transition off of Vicodin. You buy some and after some experimentation and accidental withdrawal symptoms due to miscalculation, you settle into a nice rhythm with the kratom. Have you broken the loop? Nope. You're still needing the kratom to assist you and that's ok. You know from reading the kratom forums that a lot of users who switch to kratom to kick the pain-pill habit eventually get addicted to kratom and never come off, but you know that's not going to happen to you. You continue to taper down slowly over the next year and you get to the point where you stop taking kratom. Have you broken the loop? It depends. Two years down the line when you hurt your back again, do you reach for an old bottle of Vicodin you find in the back of the medicine cabinet? Do you order more kratom to help you deal with the with the pain? Or do you suck it up? Perhaps during this entire time, you really have given up on the pain pills and have no desire to ever fall back into that habit, BUT your work has been so stressful that you have been regularly taking Xanax to help with your anxiety. Maybe you're patting yourself on the back because you think you beat the drug addiction monster and justify the Xanax usage because it's not a pain pill and you can't even see that you haven't broken the loop at all yet. But for the sake of this example, let's remove the Xanax from the equation and go back to pain pills. Let's say you go to a party and a friend offers you some hard-to-find Darvocet that she had stockpiled. You feel repulsed by them and decline. You know that no matter how bad your life gets, you never want to go down that dead end again. You can now congratulate yourself on breaking the loop.
But let's say that you've successfully broken the drug loop and you are unfortunate enough to get into a major car accident. You have broken bones and the recovery will not be fun. The doctor happily throws some pain pills in your direction. Is there any reason to suffer in pain while you're incarnated down here? If you take some pills to help you through the worst periods of pain during your healing, does that mean you haven't broken the loop? Not at all. You are AWARE. You recognize that in order to get through the day and/or sleep through the night, you need help and there's not a goddamned thing wrong with that. You know that once you get over the hump, you won't need them and you can keep the extras in the back of the medicine cabinet in case you have a serious need for them in the future.
So what's the difference between taking the pills and still being trapped in the loop versus taking the pills and having already broken the loop without fear of falling back into it? Awareness and a sense of reclaimed power. After you've broken the loop, you can succumb KNOWINGLY. Once you've truly broken the drug loop, you have reclaimed your power. There is a distinct feeling associated with this that I cannot properly convey as the English language sucks balls, but you'll know it when it happens. The feeling is similar when you break other loops. There is a knowing that whatever had a grip on you before NO LONGER HAS CONTROL OVER YOU. You now have control over IT.
If you've managed to break an experiential loop in your lifetime, take the time to congratulate yourself. Breaking a loop is extremely difficult and being fortunate enough to be the incarnation that crosses the finish line is quite a privilege.
I'll briefly cover one more example using the loop of religion. So you were dragged to church as a child and never understood why. As you grew older, you started to hate it. As an adult, you were given free rein to do whatever you pleased, so you quit going. That was a good head start, but you're not out of the woods yet. As an adult, you meet someone and decide to get married. Your future wife's family expects you to have a traditional religious ceremony in a church. This is where you can choose to take back more power or continue to give it away. Do you give in due to cultural and familial pressures for a religious ceremony? After all, you're only going to marry this person once right? Will you fold to keep the peace or risk starting off your new marriage on rocky grounds? Let's say that you cave-in and swear that after this one last time, you're done with ever going to church again. What happens when you have kids and she wants to have them participate in whatever religious ceremonies she grew up with? What about major religious holidays? Will you be going to church then and be silently pissed off every single time you walk through those church doors because you were out-of-alignment with yourself?
If you were fortunate enough to make your religious views known to anyone you dated prior to such a serious commitment, you wouldn't have been in that awkward position which would end up giving you years of future misery by allowing the religion loop to figuratively bend you over without any lube. If you had decided to celebrate religious holidays ONLY for the sake of spending time with friends and family and NOT for "the reason for the season" bullshit, then I'd venture to say that you're doing a good job of being in alignment with who you are now and who you're striving to become. I could go on about the dangers of religion for a long-ass time, but I think you get the point.
Take a moment to reflect on your existing loops and how far along you are to breaking each of them. There's no need to stress about the ones that are still left in your life right now. You might break them as the years pass or you might not and either one is perfectly ok, but if you're serious about cutting the chains that tether you to this planet, then take the steps to disentangle yourself from the horrendous sticky web of these loops. Your circle of friends will change as you make progress, but as old ones attached to old loops drift away, you'll find yourself with new ones to take their place that are more in alignment with you and your path. Having family drift away when you spiritually progress can be much more difficult, but with time, you'll find that it's only because the need for loyalty to biological family is also an experiential loop that was simultaneously being broken as you focused on other loops.
And before I close this, I wanted to clarify the family loop. There are some biological family relationships that are wonderful, but rare. If you are fortunate to have these relationships, then consider yourself blessed. More often than not, people come from fucked-up families which further fucks up their lives. This is what I refer to when examining the desire for disconnection of ties that DO NOT SERVE YOUR WELL-BEING AND SPIRITUAL JOURNEY.
Just do your best. It's all you can do anyway.
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