Guard Your Mind: Projections Shift Perception
5 Suggestions for Staying True to You in a Time of Rampant Projection
Projections. We wield them, we deflect them, we believe them, we become them.
How do we expand into a reality that serves our personal well being, inner peace, mental freedom, physical vitality and spiritual expansion when we're bombarded with projections aimed at programming our beliefs about our enoughness, our rightness, our value, our morality, our humanity, and our meaning of this world?
Below I share 5 Suggestions for Staying True to You in a Time of Rampant Projection.
As we sit on the precipice of our future, a new world order is literally taking shape.
We're either envisioning and projecting it, colluding with someone else's vision being projected about it, or collaboratively projecting and iterating it with discernment and hyper-intentionality.
As our external realities shift rapidly, we're intentionally or unintentionally spending energy to make meaning and calibrate to the new. It's natural if you find yourself questioning your purpose, your work, your contribution, your relationships, your choices, your communities, your activities, your location, and even your truth.
This VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous - an acronym typically used to describe business landscapes and the state of specific industries coined by the US Military after the Cold War, also applies to our inner landscapes.
These 4 words depict the internal state of many of us as we navigate the disruption to our ways of being, interbeing, doing business, collaborating, and harmonizing (or deharmonizing) with life on this planet.
Use discernment as you read these possibilities as this indeed is a projection!
Do you feel that VUCA energy inside?
How is it impacting you right now?
What plates are shifting in your personal / professional / physical life causing you to question what you're doing, where you're headed, what no longer feels aligned?
Does it feel as though your mission or purpose is changing in response to the new organizing principles subtly oozing under foot?
These shifts are impacting our psyches, our emotional bodies, our physical bodies, our businesses or workplaces, entire industries, the economy, our relationships, the ethics of technological innovation, and even what we believe to be true, why?
Because of projections.
Projections shift perception.
They can be intentional to get others on board with your vision- through influence, storytelling, selling, or downright manipulation. When I share my cosmovision with you, I aim to influence and bring you on board with my view of reality. In fact many paragraphs in this email are my projections.
Projections can be subconscious and unintentional when someone displaces their perception of a scenario or emotional response, toward another person - or group- as a defense mechanism. In this situation they're likely avoiding feeling that emotion and deflecting through their projection.
What’s Your Truth?
From media, the ecosystems we hang out in, to the zeitgeist of our time, our reality and the meaning we give it is consistently crafted through projections. One person born and bred in New York City is now scared to go there lest he be jumped by someone. That's simply not my experience.
Projections activate our fears, old beliefs, and inadequacies, as well as our hopes and desires.
As spiritual warriors, walking with protection - in harmony with life and life giving energy- this is a time to build our muscles of discernment, research, self gnosis, and meaning making such that we receive the projections we consciously choose.
Who is telling you what the truth is?
Who is telling you what our future will look like?
Who is telling you what you ought to do with your one precious life?
Who is telling you that it's going 'this or that' way and there's 'nothing you can do about it?'
There's the larger narrative shaping the world. There's family, community, and social influence, and there's 'projection marketing' through influencers in your professional and social ecosystems.
How do you discern the projection?
When you listen and a tiny nudge feels like it's buying in, then you feel the emotional effect for a blip, then you're like, "wait a minute, that's you're truth not mine."
Here are 5 examples of what to watch for in projections:
Example #1. Spiritual entrepreneur who's business is business and sales coaching, says, "you're a failure if you don't close half a million in sales from a live event." literally. She is selling the solution. You love this person and learn from her, so you believe the projection and you feel like a failure- and buy the program.' Or you realize she honestly believes what she's saying, yet you don't agree. You discern, listen and move on.
Example #2. Spiritual entrepreneur selling relationship coaching casts a spell of her truth - and is unaware of the impact of the spell on many vulnerable minds, yet this spell conveniently positions her as the go to person in her field. Her belief may be true for her, yet it's not a truth for all. You discern, listen and move on.
Example #3. American politics right now. Need I say more?
Example #4. The metaverse and AI. Watch the stories being told about the future and what is coming, how it's going to be. Some who believe in a dystopian new world order may cast that spell, others believing technology will somehow 'save' the earth because we're dying.
Yes we are in an evolutionary VUCA moment, yet what if we chose a more expansive projection about how we navigate through this portal? Discern the worldview espousing the story, and casting the spell, feel into your truth and vision for our future, and cast your projections instead.
Example #5. Space. I'm reading an article in my alma mater's (Boston University) magazine, about General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations for the US Space Force (began in 2019). The force's core mission is " maintaining access to outer space, exploiting that domain for US interests, and controlling that domain if contested by an 'adversary.'
While we all benefit from GPS, weather reports, and rapid global communication thanks to our friendly space skies, I can't help but read Space Force's mission through the lens of a worldview, a mechanistic belief about the world that projects dominance and authority over our relationship with space with no acknowledgment of the sacred cosmic order!
Not a word about ET- extra terrestrial life in our galaxy, consciousness, or cosmic origin stories and how our relationship with interstellar beings impacts life on earth! Because one worldview is dominant, it's projecting this reality on all the subjects 'under' its domain - or that it has dominance over.
If you've not had an experience of sacred connection or taken time to contemplate the universe beyond Earth, you might conveniently believe the projection served by the dominant narrative of the ruling body.
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5 Suggestions for Navigating Projections:
1. Keep a sovereign mind. If you're not sure what I mean by sovereign mind, a good place to start is to determine how much of your life, your choices, and your destiny are driven by other people's idea of the 'right path', or a system or family's pressure, or any dynamic you buy into where you feel constrained, inauthentic, or not living true to your deepest wishes and desires. You are allowed to decide for yourself. Ultimately everyone around you benefits by you being true to you.
2. Know thyself deeper - The more self aware and connected to your inner being, your overself, your Soul, and the more willing you are to truly see yourself, the more easily you discern if something is true or not for you.
3. Exercise discernment. Am I being influenced? Is there emotional manipulation here aimed at my vulnerability? Is this true for me? Is this based on one worldview? What's the agenda behind this projection? Can I challenge assumptions here?
4. Take stock of where you exert projections. Stay vigilant in observing yourself and where you project your ideas, beliefs, or emotions onto others, and what's the motivation. Observe, observe, observe. This is a practice that with refinement, allows you to catch yourself casting projections. When you master this, you master catching the projections of others.
5. Have a person be a sounding board - someone you're willing to be called out by on your own projections about reality- if they're not serving you - as well as someone who can hold space as you find your truth - without judgement.
Interesting times.
{Projection} Remember there is so much more happening in the invisible!
A take away….
In these times of tectonic shifts, connect to earth energies and the cosmos, apply the deepest of ethics in innovation, assess the unintended consequences of your words, inventions, ideas, and solutions -and feel into the possibility that we are spiritual beings, and not the only ones in the universe.
What do you think about this topic? I'd love to hear from you. Please comment and share your thoughts below to add to the conversation.
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Want support, a sounding board or strategy on navigating these changes? Schedule a Coaching Session
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Stephanie Trager - Transformational Agent, ESQ
Bridge Between Worlds | Guide to the Wayfinders at the Bow of Our Ship | Repurposed Lawyer | Speaker & Facilitator | Remember Who You Really Are So You Can Do The Work You're Really Here To Do
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