When we’re triggered, it is a clear indication that we are behaving as if an external person or circumstance is cause over our life experience, which triggers our protector (ego) to come in and rescue us from the experience with a fight, flight, freeze, or tend & befriend survival response. Our protector (ego) is merely the effect of our originating belief that the external realm is cause over our internal experience, but if we are able to peel back the belief and correct it, where we finally realize that our internal state (being) is cause and our external experiences (doing) are effect, we will experience peace and tranquility, no matter what storms might be raging outside of us.
When Jesus said “you of little faith” to Peter when he sank into the raging waves of the sea, he was speaking to Peter’s lack of being internal cause over his experience; in this interpretation, faith equals a person’s internal state of being (cause). It is up to each of us to reverse engineer the reasons “why” we perceive that our external circumstances are cause over our internal life, so that we might return to a more natural state of being cause from the inside-out. This will result in a perception shift where we realize that there aren’t any external people or circumstances that have power over us, and we will be able to navigate any storm with an inner calm and joy that would have seemed impossible before.
~Nathan & Aline
Anytime we believe that an external person, circumstance, or event has the power to affect us in any way, we are externalizing our personal power. This means that we are reaching outside of ourselves for an experience to consume outside-in, rather than self-generating it from the inside-out. An inside-out person is cause in their life, while an outside-in person perceives that the external world is cause over their life. (The outside-in perception of life is the root cause for consumeristic resource usage and the concept of externalized authority figures.) Our triggers show us where we still believe that the external world is cause over our lives, and we can use them as a we would a mirror, to make conscious changes to how we perceive life, so that we can transition from externalizing cause to internalizing cause, and from internalizing effect to externalizing effect. ~Nathan & Aline
