NOEMAYA

Most people try to change their lives by adjusting behavior. They refine habits, replace routines, and reach for better tools. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is often the necessary starting point. Changing behavior can create momentum and give you a sense that something is moving. But if you stop there, you will eventually circle back to the same place. The same patterns return, just wearing different clothes. The reason is not a lack of discipline or effort. It is that all of these changes are still happening within a yet untouched environment that led to the birth and survival of those old patterns; these patterns are the necessary tools to survive that environment, and insofar as we still live in that same environment, the same patterns will naturally rise again; they are intrinsically tied to the nature of the environment.

This environment is not physical. It is not your room, your job, or your schedule; it is not an intellectual or spiritual take on the world, not a worldview maintained by belief or theory. It is a background sense of the world, a way reality feels before you even begin to think about it. It is a general atmosphere that shapes how you interpret everything. You could call it a worldview, or a default narrative, or simply the tone of your inner life. Most of the time it goes unnoticed because we are always already immersed in it, like fish in water. It feels like reality itself.

Within that environment, certain patterns naturally arise. Obsession, fear, control, lack, overthinking, perfectionism, distrust. These are not isolated problems. They are expressions of something deeper, a single underlying story that gives them all coherence. Somewhere beneath the surface there is a quiet assumption, often something like not being enough, or not being able to trust life, or needing to secure and control outcomes. This is the core narrative. The behaviors you are trying to fix are only its branches.

This is why working on everything at once rarely works. That urgency to fix all aspects of yourself, that all or nothing approach, is itself part of the same environment, the idea of not being ok with imperfections. It carries the same tension and pressure as the patterns it is trying to eliminate. So even your attempt to escape becomes another way of staying inside.

The shift begins with recognition. You start to notice not just what you do, but the background in which it happens. You sense the texture of that environment, the tension, the lack, the constant pull to react and manage. Once it is seen for what it is, as an environment that is maintained at a personal level, we can move forward with a better understanding, seeing the core stories that drive our old patterns. What matters is that it is no longer invisible. You get to the see the environment for the first time; you realize you are in it, and that there’s no essential nature to it; it’s simply a construct maintained by our patterns because we are in one way or another invested in staying in that old environment. Your sense of self is tied to that environment; you cannot be a new self in an old environment; the whole framework needs to change.

From there, the work becomes more precise. Not everything needs to be addressed. Some behaviors are surface level and can be left alone for now. Others are direct links back into that core narrative. These are the ones that matter, they are the pillars of your old world. The habits and thought patterns that most strongly reinforce the old story should be addressed first, not out of perfectionism, but out of clarity. You deal with what is actually harming you, in the order that it is harming you.

The way you deal with them is not by fighting. Resistance keeps you engaged in the same structure. You energize that which you fight. Instead, you suspend participation. When the familiar impulse arises, your old ways of interpreting, and just the impulse of constantly interpreting everything, you recognize it and you do your best do not follow it. You might say something like “I am going to sit this one out.” There is no need for force or inner conflict. You simply do not continue the movement. You see it, and you say no. Gently, but clearly and with Grace. This is less about changing the content of your life and more about stepping out of the automatic involvement with it.

Here’s the trap of perfectionism, another pattern of the old environment: one can become obsessed with this practice. Remember, old habits die hard. The goal is simply to implement this saying no to your impulse to read into the moment in more cases than you did a week ago. If you do it 3 out of 10 times, that’s progress. That also builds confidence and trust because you’ve fucked around and found out for yourself that you can still be safe and ok if you don’t have a theory and interpretation of every moment of life, that you can still survive without a story about every little happening. It’s an aha moment! You don’t have to exhaust yourself to shove into form the essentially formless stream of life. Can you have no theory at all? Fun game to try!

This is where structure becomes necessary. Without some form of system, you will drift back into old patterns. The old environment is efficient and familiar, and it is often maintained by patterns that operate on autopilot, draining us without our permission. So you create simple constraints. Clear lines you do not cross, “I am not buying this story that my mind is trying to sell me; just this one time; I wonder what it’d be like if I don’t; let’s find out,” and then you move on. You develop default responses when certain triggers appear. Not a complicated framework, but something solid enough that in weaker moments you are not left negotiating with yourself. The system may feel unfamiliar or even meaningless at first, but it gives you somewhere to stand while the old ground dissolves. One of the default and always available platforms to return to everything we are triggered to buy into our old narratives is the practice of embodiment. I am not going into it here but you can read my earlier post on this topic.

What follows is not dramatic. As you stop feeding the old narrative, it begins to weaken. It loses its intensity, its urgency, its sense of necessity. After all, it became what it is as a result of our regular maintenance of it. Fantasy exists and flows in light of our attention. Remember this simple rule if you want to discriminate between the real and the unreal: if you can be distracted from it, it is not real. Distraction is an abrupt shift in attention; if you lose a mental narrative as a result of even the slightest distraction, a joke or loud noise or an accident, it means you kept it in existence by the force of your attention. You were its creator and sustainer.

When we refuse to be naively captivated by our own story-telling, the problematic environment itself starts to shrink. And as it does, the patterns that depended on it begin to fall away on their own. You are no longer constantly managing yourself because the conditions that required that management are no longer dominant.

At some point, a different sense of life begins to appear. It is not something you construct directly. It naturally and spontaneously emerges as the old one recedes. There is less noise, less pressure, less need to control. Things feel more open, even if at first that openness is unfamiliar. It becomes clear then that the new life was not something you had to build from scratch; you just had to leave behind the old.

The new version of you cannot come into existence if you are busy using the old version of you, and your old version cannot envision the new version; that version only senses and understands the possibilities of development in the old, limited environment: don’t try to build more constructs in the old environment, however lofty and noble they might be; don’t decorate the hole you are about to leave. You cannot use your phone while it’s being updated; it’s as simple as that.

Changes of this sort, change of the internal landscape and sense-environment, often require transcendence; they require a leap instead of a continuous progression: continuous self-improvement can only make the old environment inhabitable for a little bit longer; it cannot leap to another plane. The leap is made possible not by more effort of the individual in improving its conditions but rather by suspending all engagements with those very conditions which are by nature tied to the old self and the old environment. There’s more details on this type of leap in another post on Geometry of Spiritual & Psychological Transformation.

The new life is waiting for you to stop using the old life. It will not reveal itself as long as you remain engaged in the old environment. You start by stopping to use the old beliefs and not by changing them at fist. Why? because the old belief cannot make a new belief; a problematic thinking cannot solve its own problems. it goes against its survival.

Much of unsustainable efforts in changing behavior is due to the fact that we appear to have replaced old beliefs by new beliefs that still contain the seed of the old environment; it’s just a new narrative told by the same narrator. Transformation is not about creation; it is about making space for revelation, revelation of new, transcendent meanings.

So, instead of forcing new beliefs, a more practical and simple approach would be to practice abstaining from using the old beliefs. We can give it shot and try something like this in familiar beliefs arise and we bite without hesitation, “what if I didn’t use this belief (about myself, others, or the world, etc.) just for today,” or just for the next 5 minutes, or however long you can, and see what happens. Will your world fall apart, will you die, will you disintegrate into nothingness? Find out for yourself. Start by test-driving uncertainty, absence of theory about everything.

Once you begin to starve those beliefs, consistently and without drama, something else takes their place; you don’t replace them; life does, and how it does it isn’t your business. Remember, the old self cannot envision or construct the new self; it can only annihilate itself by releasing itself. The replacement, i.e. the revelation, comes from an altogether different place that is entirely closed off to the the cognitive possibilities of the olds self and the old environment. That is not an idea or a belief. It is simply the nature of how things unfold.

Don’t make an endless self-improvement project out of this practice. Make it a fun game, a play; that’s the only way out. You are not here to fix the old self, to fix anything at all, but to let of fixing and managing an unsustainable environment; you are here to release the old with a trust in the unknown that’s about to replace it. You have no idea about the experience of freedom that’s before us and accessible at any given moment, an experience that’s shielded from view by the very beliefs we maintain about how things should look like, shrunken selves in shrunken environments! A freedom that’s free and not dependent on any particular arrangement of affairs in the external world, where we don’t have unmet needs anymore, for the very idea of need and the demands for certainty and stability were nothing but constructs of the old environment. We are always already free, always already ok, unless we say otherwise!

Stay in the unknowing; that’s where magic happens.