On the run - one woman's quest for answers

The following article was published in March 2010 in Positive Life, an Irish magazine for which I write a regular column.

When I was growing up, I used to dream of running away from home. I’d jump out the window, climb over the front gate and then belt down the road as fast as my short little legs could carry me. In my dream, I was always caught and brought back home. I varied my route each night, in the hope of evading my faceless pursuers, but they always found me. As soon as I was old enough, I did run away from home. I left Ireland and kept on running. I ran to Scotland, to Italy, to Switzerland; I ran all over Europe; I ran to Canada and the States, the Caribbean, Mexico and all over Latin America. I ran to Kenya, Bali and the Seychelles. Over 35 countries and 26 years later, I’m back in Ireland, breathless and dizzy.

My globetrotting opened up a whole new world of awareness. I realised, of course, that it wasn’t home I was running from; it was me. And then I realised that it wasn’t me, either; it was all the things I’d been taught about myself that had created a frantic web of angst and insecurity. I’d been running from what I thought of as the truth—that I was not good enough, I was an imposter waiting to be found out, and I didn’t deserve to have the love or life I wanted. I was driven by generations of negative programming that created struggle, anxiety and disappointment—the inevitable product of an oppressed, religious nation that preached penance and low self-worth.

Fortunately, my worldwide marathon led me to some deeper truths. As a kinesiologist and counsellor with a questioning, sceptical mind, I delved into the human psyche, exploring the subconscious dynamics that drive our relationships, our health, our economy and our world. What I discovered was a reality that transformed my life, bringing love, enlightenment and more laughter lines than I thought possible on a human face. But it’s a reality that few can conceive of: when I tell people that our negative beliefs literally determine our circumstances in life, and that we all attract particular people, partners, challenges and crises, as a result of how we’ve been subconsciously programmed as children, their eyes glaze over and they’re back to worrying about how to pay their Visa bill.

Ironically, the programming itself (the beliefs, fears and limitations we absorb from parents, teachers, the church...) is the very thing that gets in the way of us realising that it’s the very thing getting in our way. In fact, it’s probably the ONLY thing stopping most people from leading, or even imagining, their ideal life. It doesn’t just determine the way we think, how we perceive the world or what we think is possible for us; it has a physical, magnetic quality that literally causes us to attract a certain level of love, money, ease, success and fulfillment in life.

Finally, I’d begun to make sense of my world and to understand why I (and a few billion others) was driven to behave a certain way, to believe certain things, to expect certain outcomes—and to attract exactly that. I began to see that the root of our problems lay buried in our subconscious minds and that changing our negative programming changed everything.

It’s not the loss of our booming economy that we need to worry about; it’s the loss of our self-worth, our emotional freedom and our ability to see beyond the negative beliefs that keep us stuck. Those beliefs keep us from seeing our true value, from feeling good about ourselves, from having healthy self-esteem, from expressing our personal power, from having loving, lasting relationships, from being healthy and whole, from fulfilling our dreams, from boosting our bank accounts ...and from being happy.

Of course, the miserable Irish weather doesn’t help. If I could just hire a massive tug and haul the whole soggy island southwards about 1,000km, I think we’d all feel a lot better. Failing that, though, the single most effective, powerful thing we can do is identify and address the negative programming that’s stopping us from being—and seeing—all that we can be.

Our negative programming sets us up for a life on the run; we’re either chasing something, in the hope that it will bring the success and fulfillment we seek, or we’re running away from whatever seems to be causing us grief, burying ourselves in denial with alcohol, cigarettes, soap operas, anti-depressants, cream buns and yummy dark chocolate. Only when we understand what’s really driving us can we finally stop running and come face to face with the deeper truth: we’re powerful, we’re creative, we’re worthy and, yes, we’re Irish.