If you’ve been working on yourself for years, trying to improve your health, your relationships, your finances, your sense of inner peace, or simply become a better version of yourself, there’s a good chance you already know a lot about what you’re “supposed” to do.
You probably don’t need another person telling you to eat healthier, exercise more, meditate, think positively, manage your stress, communicate better, set boundaries, believe in yourself, work harder, let go of the past, or create better habits. You may already be doing many of these things. You may have read dozens of books, listened to hundreds of podcasts, gone to therapy, attended seminars, worked with coaches, practiced meditation, explored spirituality, changed your diet, or spent years trying to understand yourself.
And yet, there may still be areas of your life where you know what you want, you know what you should be doing, and somehow you keep finding yourself stuck in the same patterns.
This is something I’ve become fascinated with over more than 20 years of studying health, healing, personal transformation, spirituality and human behavior.
Why can we consciously want one thing, sometimes more than anything else in the world, while continuing to think, feel and behave in ways that move us in the opposite direction?
Why can someone desperately want to improve their health while continuing behaviors they know aren’t helping them? Why can someone want a deeply loving relationship but continually become triggered, shut down, become defensive or choose partners who repeat the same painful patterns? Why can an intelligent, capable person want greater financial freedom while continuing to procrastinate, undercharge, overspend, avoid opportunities or sabotage their own growth?
And why can someone spend years doing personal development work, understand exactly where their patterns came from, and still not feel truly free from them?
I believe one of the reasons is that we’ve been trying to solve many of these problems at the wrong level.
Your Conscious Mind May Not Be Running the Show
Most of us have been taught that if we want to change our lives, we need to change our behavior. Set better goals. Develop better habits. Become more disciplined. Think more positively. Make a plan and follow through.
And those things absolutely have value.
But what happens when there’s another part of you that doesn’t feel safe doing the thing you consciously want to do?
What happens when your conscious mind says, “I want to be successful,” but somewhere underneath that desire is a belief that greater success will mean greater responsibility, pressure, judgment or the possibility of failure?
What happens when you consciously want love and intimacy, but some part of you learned a long time ago that opening your heart leads to rejection, abandonment or pain?
What happens when you want to improve your health, but food, sugar, or substances have become one of the primary ways your nervous system knows how to comfort you?
You can fight those patterns with willpower, but eventually willpower gets tired.
This is where The AWAKEN Process™ begins.
Instead of asking only, “What do I need to do differently?” we begin asking a much deeper question:
What is happening within me that makes this pattern make sense?
That question changes everything because instead of treating yourself as the problem, you begin becoming curious about the intelligence underneath the pattern.
The Patterns You Want to Get Rid of May Be Trying to Help You
One of the most important principles we work with inside TAP is that many of the behaviors, reactions and emotional patterns we struggle with today began as intelligent adaptations.
At some point, they served a purpose.
Maybe you learned to people please because keeping other people happy helped you feel safe.
Maybe you became a perfectionist because getting things right earned approval or helped you avoid criticism.
Maybe you learned to stay in control because uncertainty once felt dangerous.
Maybe you learned to disconnect from your emotions because feeling them was too overwhelming.
Maybe food became comfort.
Maybe achievement became validation.
Maybe work became escape.
Maybe withdrawing became protection.
Maybe constantly taking care of everyone else became the way you learned to receive love.
These patterns aren’t necessarily evidence that something is wrong with you. When we understand them correctly, we often discover that there is tremendous intelligence underneath them.
The problem is that an adaptation created 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago may still be influencing your life today, even though you’re no longer in the environment that created it.
That’s why simply telling yourself to “stop doing it” often doesn’t work.
We need to understand what’s underneath it.
The 3 Limitations to Growth
Inside The AWAKEN Process™, I teach something I call the 3 Limitations to Growth: Borrowed Beliefs, Binding Behaviors and Adaptive Addictions.
Borrowed Beliefs are the conclusions we’ve accumulated throughout our lives about ourselves, other people and the world. Some came directly from our parents or culture. Others came from experiences we interpreted when we were very young.
“I’m not good enough.”
“I’m not safe.”
“I don’t matter.”
“I have to prove myself.”
“I have to take care of everyone.”
“I can’t trust people.”
“I don’t deserve success.”
“Money is hard.”
“I have to struggle to get what I want.”
“If I let go, everything will fall apart.”
These beliefs can operate underneath conscious awareness and influence how we interpret experiences today.
Those beliefs then contribute to what I call Binding Behaviors: the things we repeatedly do, or avoid doing, that keep the old belief system intact. People pleasing, perfectionism, procrastination, overworking, controlling, avoiding, withdrawing, self-sabotaging, staying silent, constantly seeking approval or pushing ourselves beyond our limits can all become binding behaviors.
And then we have Adaptive Addictions, the things we use to change how we feel.
Food, alcohol, shopping, social media, television, work, achievement, approval, sex, exercise and countless other behaviors can become ways of temporarily regulating something deeper.
This is why I don’t believe the answer is simply to attack the behavior.
We want to understand what’s driving it.
Because when you begin changing the root, you’re no longer spending your entire life cutting weeds off at the surface only to watch them grow back.
This Is About More Than Your Past
I also want to make something very clear.
TAP is not about spending 12 weeks endlessly analyzing your childhood or blaming your parents for everything that happened to you.
Understanding the past can be incredibly valuable, but the goal is freedom now.
We use the past when it helps us understand what the mind, body and nervous system learned. We work with the present to recognize how those patterns are still operating. Then we begin creating a different relationship with those patterns so they no longer have to control your future.
The process I teach moves through 12 core stages: ORIENT, NAME, FEEL, REMEMBER, CONCLUDE, REGULATE, UPDATE, INTEGRATE, ACCEPT, EXPAND, APPLY and CLOSE.
You don’t need to memorize those stages. What matters is what they allow us to do.
We learn to identify the pattern that’s actually operating. We become aware of what’s happening in the body rather than staying trapped entirely in the thinking mind. We explore where the pattern may have originated and the conclusions that were created around it. We work with the nervous system so that change isn’t happening from a place of overwhelm. We begin updating beliefs that may no longer be true, integrating new understanding, accepting what has been, expanding beyond the identity created around the experience, and then applying that freedom to your actual life.
Because transformation that doesn’t change how you live isn’t complete.
There’s Another Layer That Changed Everything for Me
There’s an important spiritual component to The AWAKEN Process™ as well, but I use the word spiritual very intentionally.
You don’t have to believe anything.
There’s no religion you have to follow and no philosophy you have to adopt.
In fact, the deeper part of this process is less about believing something new and more about discovering what is already here beneath all of the beliefs.
For me, meditation became an important part of my own transformation more than 20 years ago. Over the years, through studying yogic traditions, Buddhism, Vedanta and other contemplative practices alongside modern approaches to trauma, behavior and the nervous system, I kept coming back to a simple but profound realization:
You are not your thoughts. You are not your emotions. You are not your beliefs. You are not even the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are.
You are the awareness that can observe all of it.
When you begin experiencing that directly, even for brief moments, your relationship with your entire inner world can begin to change.
Instead of “I am afraid,” you recognize, “Fear is present.”
Instead of “I’m not good enough,” you notice, “There’s a belief that says I’m not good enough.”
Instead of being completely consumed by anger, anxiety, shame, worry or self-doubt, you begin witnessing those experiences without allowing them to define you.
This is what I mean by awakening.
It doesn’t mean you never feel pain again.
It means you stop confusing every thought, feeling and conditioned pattern that moves through you with who you fundamentally are.
And from that place, we can begin making very different choices.
Why I Created the 12-Week TAP Transformational Experience
I created this 12-week experience because I wanted to give people enough time, structure, support and repetition to actually work with these patterns in a meaningful way.
A single breakthrough can be powerful. I’ve seen people have extraordinary insights in one session.
But transformation is not just about having an insight.
It’s about integration.
It’s what happens when you go back into your relationship and get triggered again.
It’s what happens when you look at your bank account.
It’s what happens when fear shows up around your health.
It’s what happens when you have an opportunity to speak up instead of staying quiet.
It’s what happens when the old behavior becomes available again and you suddenly realize you have another choice.
That’s why this experience happens over 12 weeks.
We’re not looking for a temporary emotional high.
We’re creating an environment where you can learn the process, experience it, practice it, observe what happens in your real life, come back, go deeper, integrate what you’re learning and begin developing an entirely new relationship with yourself.
Who This Is For
The people I believe will benefit most from this work are often people who have already done a lot.
They’re intelligent. They’re self-aware. They care about their growth. Many have spent years learning about health, psychology, spirituality, relationships or personal development.
But there’s still a gap between what they know and what they’re experiencing.
Maybe your health is the area where you feel stuck. You know stress affects you. You know there are behaviors you want to change. You know you want greater peace around what you’re going through, but fear, uncertainty or old patterns keep taking over.
Maybe it’s money. You want greater abundance and financial freedom, but fear, scarcity, guilt, avoidance or beliefs about what you deserve continue influencing your decisions.
Maybe it’s your relationships. You love the people in your life, but certain situations trigger reactions that seem almost automatic.
Maybe it’s your purpose. You know you’re capable of more, but some invisible wall keeps appearing every time you move toward the thing you really want.
Or maybe your life looks good from the outside and you can’t even fully explain why you still don’t feel the peace, freedom or fulfillment you thought you would feel by now.
This work is designed to help you discover what’s underneath that.
What You Can Expect Over the 12 Weeks
This is an experiential process.
I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned about beliefs, behaviors, nervous system patterns, protective parts, emotional regulation, awareness and transformation, but the purpose isn’t simply to give you more information.
The information gives us a map.
Then we use the map.
You’ll begin identifying your own Borrowed Beliefs, Binding Behaviors and Adaptive Addictions. You’ll learn how to recognize protective patterns without fighting them. You’ll begin understanding what your body and nervous system may be communicating. You’ll learn practical ways to regulate yourself when emotions become intense. You’ll explore the deeper conclusions that may be influencing your current life and learn how to begin updating them.
You’ll also practice stepping back from the constant activity of the mind and experiencing yourself as the awareness behind it.
And perhaps most importantly, you’ll begin applying what you’re learning to what you actually want.
- Your health.
- Your relationships.
- Your finances.
- Your work.
- Your purpose.
- Your inner peace.
- Your spiritual connection.
- Your life.
Because the goal isn’t to become endlessly fascinated with your wounds.
The goal is freedom.
Imagine What Becomes Possible
Imagine:
- recognizing a trigger and, instead of immediately reacting, being able to pause and understand what’s actually happening inside of you.
- noticing the old belief that says you’re not good enough without automatically believing it.
- recognizing the part of you that wants to control everything and understanding what it’s actually afraid would happen if it let go.
- feeling anxiety arise without immediately becoming the anxiety.
- being able to sit with yourself without needing to escape, fix, numb or distract.
- making decisions about money from clarity instead of scarcity.
- communicating in your relationship without the same old protective patterns taking over.
- treating your body from a place of love rather than fear.
- pursuing what you truly want without needing to wait until every fear disappears.
- beginning to experience something underneath all of it that has always been there: a deeper sense of peace, presence and freedom that isn’t entirely dependent on everything outside of you going exactly the way you want it to.
That’s the direction of this work.
Not perfection – Freedom.
You Don’t Have to Spend the Rest of Your Life Fixing Yourself
This may be one of the most important things..
I don’t believe your life needs to become one endless self-improvement project.
There will always be more to learn. There will always be another layer. Life will continue presenting challenges. Old patterns may sometimes reappear.
But there’s a profound difference between spending your life believing you are fundamentally broken and discovering that the things you’ve been fighting within yourself may simply be patterns that were learned, adaptations that once protected you, and beliefs that can be questioned and updated.
You can appreciate the part that protected you without allowing it to run your life.
You can honor what happened without allowing the past to dictate your future.
You can experience fear without letting fear make every decision.
You can have difficult thoughts without believing every thought.
And you can begin creating your life from a much deeper place of awareness, choice and freedom.
That’s what The AWAKEN Process™ is ultimately about.
Is The 12-Week TAP Transformational Experience Right for You?
I’m intentionally not asking everyone reading this article to sign up for the program.
This is deep work, and I want the right people in the experience.
That’s why the first step is simply a conversation.
If you’ve been working on yourself for a long time but still feel stuck in certain areas, if you’re tired of repeating the same patterns, or if something you’ve read here resonates with you and you’re ready to discover what may really be standing between you and the life you want, I invite you to schedule a free Discovery Call with our team.
This is not about pressuring you into something you don’t need.
The purpose of the call is to understand where you are, what you want, what you’ve already tried, where you believe you’re stuck, and whether the 12-Week TAP Transformational Experience is genuinely the right next step for you.
If it is, we’ll explain exactly how the program works and answer your questions.
If it isn’t, that’s okay too.
But if you’ve spent years trying to change what’s happening on the surface and you’re finally ready to discover and transform what may be happening underneath, I encourage you to have the conversation.
You may not need more information.
You may need a different kind of experience.
Schedule your free Discovery Call today and discover what may really be standing between you and the health, relationships, financial freedom, inner peace, purpose and life you truly want.
–>> Book your free discovery call here
I look forward to supporting you on the journey.
Yours in health and happiness,
Nathan Crane
Founder, The AWAKEN Process™