There’s Not Always a Block.
Reprogramming industrial conditioning. (We just need time.)
I was talking to my friend the other day about her business when she mentioned she wanted to find the “unconscious block” that was holding her back.
She’s doing everything she can to build her business. She’s creating amazing content, is constantly researching her platforms and demographics, she provides a good service.
Her business is also less than a year old.
As a life coach and hypnotist, my field is drowning in content and advertisement talking about unconscious blocks and how they’re holding everyone back.
I’ve had plenty of my own blocks and I’ve worked with clients on theirs and it really does transform a life but not every obstacle is a block.
The irony of the “Block” market is that it treats a person like a machine while selling a service about their unconscious human nature.
It’s part of the expectations we have been conditioned to expect by our industrial capitalist society but it doesn't meet the reality that things take time.
The “Block” Market
The truth of the matter is that while unconscious blocks do occur and plenty of people have them there are also plenty of people making money off of them.
The underlying message of this market is that you have something inside holding you back that the purchase of a book or service will either solve or help you solve your problem.
This is why I left my job at the hypnosis clinic I first practiced at. They’d promise their clients the Sun and Moon and then blame their mindset when things didn’t change.
Meanwhile, a little bit of coaching would consistently demonstrate that there were other very real barriers to success occurring in the client’s lives.
This didn’t fit the narrative or the marketing of the clinic however so when I tried to work with clients on their very real challenges outside of unconscious blocks I’d get in trouble with the company for breaking with the script.
The problem with the “Block Market” is that it focuses on a narrative of purchase “x, y, z” to cure “a, b, c.”
It must perpetuate its story that “x, y, z,” works for “a, b, c” in all cases in order to market its services and goods but the world is more complicated than that.
The “Block Market” and Industrialization
Although in human beings the archetype represents a collective and almost universal mode of action and reaction, its activity cannot as a rule be predicted; one never knows when an archetype will react, and which archetype it will be.
— Carl Jung
The “Block Market” has an internal contradiction.
The state of success that it is advertising to people is endless productivity, efficiency, and inspiration.
It is essentially making the argument that you too can become a well-oiled machine creating your dreams if you’d just get over this “block.”
It then sells this service in a capitalist market of “x problem?“
“Buy y solution.”
And so people buy to try to be the better machine just like we buy supplements, medications, self-help books, and everything else promising to make us better and more efficient.
Often these solutions are cookie cutter so that they can be mass produced whether that be a book, a course, or a “customized program” that really runs you through the same exercises as everyone else.
Even when the solutions are unique the promise that they’ll bring about a more productive goal still reflects the industrialized nature of the market.
The thing is, the unconscious is not a machine. It doesn’t have an input-output transaction. It is a living organism with cycles, shifts, complex patterns and mysteries.
As the unconscious makes up much of who we are we have cycles, shifts, complex patterns, and internal mysteries.
So while our conscious expectations are conditioned by the industrial-capitalist culture to expect a simple purchased solution our unconscious and bodies are evolved to seasons and cycles.
Our Unconscious is Archaic.
Man’s unconscious… contains all the patterns of life and behaviour inherited from his ancestors, so that every human child, prior to consciousness, is possessed of a potential system of adapted psychic functioning.
— Carl Jung. The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology
The unconscious has grown up through the evolution of hunters and gatherers and then farmers.
The current guess is that life started 4.5 billion years ago.
It’s believed that humans diverged around 5 million years ago with humans as we know them appearing between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago depending on the theory.
The agricultural revolution occurred around 6–10,000 years ago.
Most of the experience of organic life has been spent hunting and gathering at the mercies of the seasons, the day/night cycle, and environmental shifts.
A small fraction of that experience has been spent in an agricultural society which is what has conditioned our traditional cultures.
The industrial revolution only occurred 260 years ago that’s 0.00000577777778% of the experience of living organisms. Only 0.13% or 0.26% of the experience of humans depending on the theory.
Our inner world is archaic. At best it’s agricultural, which is great because agriculture teaches us that things take time.
The difference between industrial and agricultural expectations.
The industrialized expectations of our modern minds expect things to happen immediately upon purchase.
We discover a need, we do some research to find out what needs to bought, and then we purchase what it is we think we need.
An agricultural mindset knows that things take time to sprout, bud, fruit, and ripen.
My friend wasn’t suffering from an unconscious block she was suffering from an industrial expectation on a process that moves at an agricultural pace.
The world moves in seasons and cycles, things take time.
What about you?
How are your expectations measured? Are you running with an industrial narrative or one that makes room for the ripening of time?
Love and share.
I’m starting something new. Writing every day as I put my random thoughts down on binary paper.
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