LIFEUNLOOPING - THE ART OF RADICAL SELF SURPRISE

Dissolve your Energetic Loops and be free!

I realised I was looping on an ordinary Tuesday morning, standing in my kitchen. I was making the same cup of tea I had made every morning for what felt like years. Same mug and same spot by the window. In fact, writing this now, I realise I often write about standing in my kitchen drinking tea. Not sure what that’s all about.

But I suddenly became aware that the same actions were leading to the same sequence of thoughts, which was leading to the same energetic state. It wasn’t anything dramatic. I simply had the realisation. Layers of sameness.

I now have these realisations often. I unloop as a way of life. That moment of realisation feels for all the world like taking scissors to tangled cobwebs. That’s the sensation of the energetic loops breaking.

There’s a similar moment of realisation in the movie Groundhog Day. The main character realises that no matter what he does, the day is going to keep repeating. At first, he uses this to his advantage. Free money, free cake. He memorises the answers for his date. But nothing changes. He’s looping and getting nowhere. Every clever move he makes is still another version of the same loop.

His looping only starts to change, and eventually breaks entirely, when he changes. He starts doing things he’s never done before. He learns piano and speaks French. He is kind to someone he’d normally ignore. None of these were large acts or part of a plan. They were just different. Different is the thing that changes everything.

It wasn’t a decision or a plan or will-power that dissolved my looping that day. It was spontaneity. I spoke to the cup in my hand in Shakespearean language. “O steaming brew, thou amber-hearted friend! Your fragrant breath doth warm my chilled nose-tip. Prithee scald me not, thou treacherous saucy vessel of delight!” It may not have been quite as good as that at the time. But whatever I actually said, it was unscripted, silly and strange.

There is magic in the unscripted, the silly and the strange.

And my brain didn’t know what to do with it. And in that small gap of not-knowing, energy shifted.

From there, the concept of LifeUnloop was born.

Why we build loops

A healthy brain is supposed to create patterns. I cannot verify this, but, apparently, the basal ganglia are a cluster of structures that sit deep in the brain. They are also called the brain’s habit centre. Habit formation researchers have found that rewards work by triggering dopamine release. This strengthens the connection between a cue and the routine it triggers. Once a behaviour is repeated enough, something occurs at a neurological level. Our prefrontal cortex quietens down. In other words, the effortful part of our brain switches off. The basal ganglia takes over, and our behaviour happens on autopilot.

This is, of course, a brilliant design, for the most part. We truly don’t want to relearn how to walk down our own stairs every morning. Automaticity frees up enormous amounts of energy. And our brains are always seeking ways to save energy.

But the brain doesn’t sort our habits into those which are for our highest good before automating them. It only looks at what worked last time. It operates based on what it expects, not what is actually the highest decision for ourselves. The looping isn’t because of a flaw in our willpower. It’s a system working as designed.

Simply making a decision to change rarely works. A decision is made in the conscious, effortful part of the brain. Loops live somewhere our decisions can’t reach. Loops, at their heart, are energetic, and they are compounding. (I go much deeper into the metaphysics of Timeline Loops here.)

The Power of Surprise

Novel situations require executive function. Novelty disrupts patterns, on many levels. When we behave in unscripted way - silly, strange ways - we can’t run on autopilot any longer. We must wake up and participate. It brings us into the now.

This is the premise behind the LifeUnloop 30-Day Challenge. It’s about performing unplanned acts that sit outside our existing scripts. It’s not about punishing ourselves with extreme acts of discipline or trying harder. It’s about doing unscripted things such as taking a different route or changing our language. The ideal self-surprise is small enough to do right now, but strange enough to bypass our habituation. It doesn’t need to be large - it just needs to be unscripted.

I’ve run the LifeUnloop 30-Day Challenge three times now, on social media, in large groups of people. It has been amazing, but my bandwidth isn’t allowing for it right now (it takes a lot out of me. My apologies to all those who were waiting for the next one.) But it now has a proper home here on my Substack publication, as a self-guided 30 day challenge. There are ideas for each day, guidance, and a daily inspirational art video. Several people have been doing it, and they have told me they are benefitting from it and enjoying it immensely.

People who have done the challenge in the past have chosen very surprising things. One woman rearranged her living room at eleven o’clock at night. She sat in the dark afterwards feeling how different the room was. Another wrote a letter to someone she hadn’t spoken to in a decade. She cried and experienced emotional release, even though she didn’t send it. A man wore his watch on the wrong wrist for a day. He said that he caught himself looking at the wrong wrist all day and realised how automated his behaviours were. But he also said he now felt more aware. None of these were dramatic transformation stories. They were small gaps in the usual script, But, in every case, energy was disrupted and rearranged.

And there have also been bigger transformation stories. One woman used the challenge as support during her narcotic withdrawal. Another reported fewer physical pain symptoms. Someone else repaired their marriage. Many people have told me their lives were forever changed.

The Strange Road

In Norse stories, Odin sacrifices one of his eyes for wisdom. He was loop-breaking. His unscripted act broke him out of the known. In countless folk tales, the sibling who takes the strange road becomes the hero. It’s the one who spoke to the stranger everyone else ignored or did something outside of the expected. The dutiful, pattern-following sibling rarely finds the treasure. The miller’s daughter breaks the loop she is caught in when she uncovers Rumplestiltskin’s name. Sleeping Beauty is woken up by an unexpected kiss. Puss-in-Boots’ lateral thinking lifts his master out of poverty.

The trickster figure comes in many forms. We have Loki, Anansi, Hermes, Coyote. The trickster is the embodiment of pattern-interruption. It’s the force that arrives to break loops. Bugs Bunny is a trickster figure. He refuses to follow anyone else’s script. He pops up out of the unexpected hole and turns the hunter into the hunted. He answers every carefully laid plan with a carrot and a cheeky shrug. No wonder kids used to love him (I’m not sure they even know him now? But I’m guessing you know him.) The other characters are stuck in loops. Bugs is always the surprise.

What actually changes a stagnant situation? It’s not more will applied to the same path. It’s about a departure from the course.

A repeated pattern is stagnant or stuck energy. It’s energy circulating in the same closed loop rather than moving freely. An unscripted act is a way of disturbing the stagnant energy, and allowing it to flow once more.

The biologist Bruce Lipton says most behaviour results from subconscious programming. The programming happens in early childhood and is replayed ever after. Real change requires something other than willpower. Vadim Zeland, author of Reality Transurfing, uses different language. People become caught in what he calls pendulums. These are self-sustaining patterns that persist because our energy keeps feeding them. They break only once a person stops reenforcing the pattern.

In Ayurvedic thought, blockages in the flow of prana are said to result in stagnation or illness. These blockages are addressed by clearing the channel. In Buddhism, samsara is the cycle we remain caught in until awareness comes. Christian tradition has its own language. Metanoia is usually translated as ‘repentance’. But, more precisely, it means a reorientation of the mind. It’s not about incremental improvement of the old pattern, but a clear change of direction.

Disrupting the pattern loosens what’s stuck.

The Self-Directed LifeUnloop 30-Day Challenge

Unlooping doesn’t always happen in one large dramatic moment, although it can. It is more likely to happen accumulatively, surprise by surprise. Each unscripted act creates a little more room than there was before. A loop isn’t one thing but dozens of small automated behaviours running underneath every day. Each one reinforces the shape of our lives.

The self-surprises keep interrupting until the interruptions dissolve the loops. And, somewhere in that process, we become unstuck.

The 30 day challenge can be done entirely alone. Simply do one surprising thing a day for 30 days. I recommend writing the surprising thing down each day.

Or, if you’d like a little more structure and some inspiration click on this button here and upgrade to unlock the challenge here.

Happy Unlooping everyone! May your days be bright, merry and loop-free!

The LifeUnloop Journal is your Unlooping companion.

And The Radical Unloop is here for the deeper, ongoing work.