During a recent conversation on Inspire Vision Podcast, my guest Sonika Cottman shared something that has stayed with me. After more than twenty years working in human resources in the technology industry, she experienced a profound inner shift. She began to recognize that the constant voice in her head, the thoughts and stories she had lived with for years, was not necessarily who she was.
What fascinated me was what happened afterward. Or perhaps more importantly, what didn’t happen. She didn’t leave her job or move to another city. Her home, her work, and her everyday responsibilities remained much the same. Yet the way she experienced her life had changed dramatically.
And I found myself wondering how many of us are searching for a different life when perhaps what we need is a different way of experiencing the one we already have.
When a life starts to feel wrong, the usual instinct is to rearrange it. A new job, a new city, sometimes the end of a marriage. Occasionally that is exactly the right decision. The difficulty is that patterns which live inside a person tend to travel with them. Within a year the new office develops the same tension as the old one. The new relationship arrives, eventually, at a familiar argument. The address changes and Monday morning feels the same.
Of course, we need to be careful with that idea. Does recognizing our own patterns mean we should never leave a difficult situation? Certainly not. Some circumstances are genuinely harmful, and staying in them in the name of spiritual growth can become another way of avoiding what genuinely needs to change. Sometimes leaving is not only appropriate, but necessary.
Yet changing our circumstances doesn’t necessarily change the patterns we carry within ourselves. We may leave a difficult job or relationship, only to discover familiar feelings and reactions appearing somewhere else. A new environment can offer a fresh beginning, but it cannot automatically resolve what we’ve been carrying for years.
So perhaps the more important question is this: How do we begin to recognize the difference between a situation that needs to change and a familiar pattern within ourselves that is asking to be understood?
One test is surprisingly simple. When a strong feeling rises, ask when you last felt exactly this. The question is about the feeling itself, apart from whatever set it off. It helps to locate it in the body, whether it sits in the chest, the stomach, or across the shoulders, and even to give it a color. A frustration that shows up in a Tuesday meeting tends to feel brand new, because the mind immediately pins it on whatever is in front of it. Followed backward, it often turns out to be old. Someone who grew up in a house full of volatility may discover that the dull, dark anger they have been blaming on a coworker is the same anger they carried at five years old.
That changes our relationship with blame. If the feeling existed long before the job, perhaps the job isn’t the whole explanation. It may still be contributing to our discomfort, and the coworker may genuinely be difficult. But something shifts when we begin to recognize that we’ve been meeting the same feeling for thirty years, only under different circumstances.
A strange problem shows up for people who take this seriously. They start working at transformation the way they once worked at a promotion. They read more, try harder, measure their progress, and wonder why peace keeps slipping out of reach. The old saying that what we resist persists applies here too. Straining toward stillness creates its own noise.
An air conditioner that has run all afternoon makes a sound nobody notices until it shuts off, and then the quiet is startling. The mind’s running commentary is like that. It is rarely heard as noise because it has rarely stopped long enough to be heard against silence, and trying harder to quiet it usually just adds another voice to the room.
I’ve often returned to the words of Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.” The Hebrew expression translated as “be still” carries the sense of letting go, of releasing our grip. I’ve come to wonder whether there is wisdom in that order. Perhaps there are things about ourselves, about life, and even about God, that we cannot fully recognize while we’re so busy trying to make everything different. Sometimes the first invitation is simply to become still enough to notice.
The practice itself turns out to be ordinary, which may be the most surprising part. The life already in place is the training ground. Brushing teeth while mentally drafting emails. Mornings with children that run entirely on logistics: did you pack your lunch, did you finish your homework, we leave in five minutes. A video call where half the attention is busy building a reply before the other person has finished speaking. Even complaining about the weather counts as a small act of resistance, and most of us manage it several times before lunch.
Each of those moments is an invitation to actually be there. Two full minutes with a toothbrush. Listening to a teenager without managing them. Letting one call end before carrying it into the next. None of this is dramatic, and it was never meant to be.
The timing matters as well. Awareness is hard to find in the middle of anger, because by then the story the mind is telling has already been believed. It works more like training for a run. Someone who has never run a day in their life does not begin with a 5K. They begin on ordinary days, when nothing is wrong, so that the muscle exists when something is.
Over time, something begins to change in how personally we take the words and actions of others. I’ve seen how differently relationships can unfold when we recognize that another person’s anger or criticism may reveal as much about what they’re carrying within themselves as it does about anything we’ve said or done.
Of course, that understanding deserves an honest look at ourselves as well. Sometimes the criticism is justified, and there may be something we need to recognize or change. Both can be true. We can acknowledge another person’s struggles without dismissing our own responsibility. And perhaps that’s where awareness makes the greatest difference. Rather than reacting from hurt or resentment, we begin to find the freedom to respond with understanding, compassion, and, when necessary, firm boundaries.
I’ve come to believe that clarity allows us to make far better decisions than resentment ever will.
Tomorrow morning may look very much like this morning. The same surroundings, the same responsibilities, perhaps even some of the same frustrations. And there may still be things in our lives that genuinely need to change. But I wonder what might happen if, before reaching for something different, we allowed ourselves to experience what is already here with a little more awareness, a little less judgment, and perhaps a little more kindness toward ourselves.
We may discover that the life we’ve been waiting to live has been quietly inviting us to become present within it all along.
© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen