Pirates can be trapped in 4 types of prisons. One of them is the emotional prison.
Emotional prison means that we behave in an addictive way or in an incongruent way.
When we are incongruent we sabotage ourselves. It is like driving a car at full speed with the hand breaks on. No matter how hard we try, as long as we are incongruent, we won’t get far. Pirates are often incongruent, thus sabotage themselves, even if the problem remains unconscious.
We can turn this around and transform sabotage into motivation if we become congruent. With full motivation our actions become easy, progress arrives smoothly and achieving goals becomes automatic. Let’s explore this further.
Signs of incongruence
How do we notice when we are not congruent? When are we incongruent?
Have you ever been in one of the following situations?
- You have to push down an inner voice that keeps bothering you about something you do not want to think about. Imagine that you pirate a standard online and while you download or open the document, an inner voice in the back of your head reminds you of the fact that this action is illegal and how you could be punished for it soon…
- You are working on something, but you find it hard to focus. No matter how hard you try, you lack concentration..
- You keep starting new projects. Each project starts with enthusiasm, but sooner or later things keep happening that derail your efforts. Often you just lose interest for no particular reason and can’t pinpoint what has happened to your motivation. So you quit and start all over with a new project. But the same pattern keeps playing out and after a few months or years you keep wondering why you find yourself in a similar loop over and over, never getting much further…
If this sounds familiar, then you have experienced incongruence.
Many pirates experience this state when they engage in piracy.
Some are very aware of the symptoms listed above.
Some have little awareness, especially when they are very experienced in pushing away their inner voices and feelings.
And some pirates silence their inner voice by superimposing feelings of excitement over their inner awareness. This can be caused by an addiction, which makes it difficult for them to feel the full range of sensations that would otherwise be available to them without addiction.
Incongruence affects our thinking, our physical body and our results negatively.
On the contrary, when we become congruent then we can experience increased motivation, a state of flow and hightened productivity.
What incongruence is
Incongruence happens when our mind, body, heart and spirit work against each other. This happens when they have conflicting goals. When our mind wants something that our heart wants to avoid. Or when our heart wants something that our mind does not permit.
In such conflicts we can push down one side in favor of another side.
This is like putting a part of us, either the heart, mind, spirit or body, into an imaginary prison cell – and moving on in life with the other parts, as if the imprisoned part does not belong to us.
But this is never a sustainable solution, because repressed parts will always come back and sabotage our efforts. We can compensate such unresolved conflicts with willpower – but only for a limited amount of time.
We can never reach our full potential, as long as we repress a major part of ourselves.
What congruence is
How exactly do we work, when we are aligned?
Desires of the heart, since they’re emotional, tend to be fairly general; they’re not usually super specific or detailed. For instance, your heart may give you a desire to learn music or explore music or travel, but it may not tell you what instrument it wants you to play or what specific cities it wants you to visit. The signals from the heart often provide more of a general direction than give you a specific goal or a project to do. So see these as invitations to go explore.
Your head’s role, then, is to figure out how to satisfy the heart. Your head will take a stab at figuring that out (through action usually), and your heart will give its response. So your heart acts as more of a compass where your head is the one that has to plot the course and figure out which way to go.
There are really just two main forms of communication from the heart (i.e., You could simplify it down to just two): One is, Get me out of this; and another one is, Get me into this. So it’s: Get me out of something misaligned, or Get me into something that I feel will be more aligned. As simple as these are, these can be the most difficult and challenging messages to hear.
A key point in this lesson is that your heart’s cooperation matters. It’s important.
Your heart actually has a tiny physical brain that links up with the brain in your head. It communicates through your nervous system. Your heart-brain actually helps to coordinate what’s happening in the head-brain. The signals from your heart reach up into your brain and they branch out into multiple regions of your brain, so they actually help to provide a synchronization signal to get multiple parts of your brain on the same page.
When your head and your heart disagree then, it’s hard to function as well because you lose that synchronization signal. But when your heart feels enthusiastic or otherwise motivated to go a certain direction, it will help your head-brain get on board. So your heart helps your head align your mental thinking with your emotional feelings.
When you honor your feelings then and you pay attention to them and you seek to align your thinking with what will feel good to you, you actually function more intelligently and more creatively.
When you turn away from those feelings or try to suppress them or try to ignore them, you don’t function as well mentally because you lose those synchronization signals.
A band with a drummer: I think a great analogy here is imagine a band that loses its drummer. It’s harder for the rest of the band to coordinate without that drum beat. That drum beat, that rhythm, is the synchronization signal that all the other players align with. So without that rhythm, everyone falls out of sync; it’s harder for the other players to synchronize together.
Similarly, when you do not have the rhythm of you aligning your character with the emotional beat of your heart – the rhythm it’s trying to create, the positive feelings it wants you to move towards, and the negative feelings it wants you to move away from – the rest of your mind and the rest of your brain falls out of sync. And what happens? You get confused, you experience a lack of clarity. But when you hear that synchronization signal strongly, when you feel the truth of it, it’s a powerful form of alignment. It’s a powerful form of synchronization.
Have you ever had the experience of having really strong emotional clarity, this clear feeling that says something very simple like: Get me out of this job; or, Get me out of this relationship; or, Get me out of piracy. That signal can lead to really quick aligned action that of course sculpture character in positive ways. But without that signal, what do you have? You often have waffling confusion, lack of clarity, delay, and so on.
Piracy and incongruence
Here are three simple steps you can take in order to explore your own state of congruence or incongruence.
- Notice your inner voice.
When you pirate, what do you feel? Is there an element of guilt? Do you feel it, see it, hear it? Where in your body is it located? - What are your values?
Eg. Honesty, Contribution, Kindness, Trustworthyness, order, cleanliness
- Make conscious choice to align behavior with values
Quit behaviors
Signal:
You’ve arrived when you are in flow.
Recap
Congruence creates flow. It speeds up your pace. Continued congruence is like compound interest. It creates exponential success.