This week, I want to share a way of looking at early conditioning - the quiet shaping of how we see ourselves and the world - that’s helped many of the people I work with. It’s a metaphor I often use to describe what happens to us - quietly, invisibly - without us even realizing it.
Imagine this: You’re born into a vast and beautiful castle.
There are so many rooms and corridors just waiting to be explored. Every room is a new possibility and each one has its own unique color, sound, texture and feeling.
As infants, we do not have words and we do not know the names of things. We don’t even know there are “rooms.” There is no map. No rules. No judgement. Just sensation, sound, light, presence. It is all one.
As children we are open and curious about all of it. The only thing we want to do is to run through the corridors, throw open the doors and discover every room.
Then, little by little, we start to learn, and the labeling begins.
This room is “good.” That one is “bad.” This one makes people smile - keep going in there. That one makes people angry with me - best to close this door. Some rooms feel too loud, too messy, too strange. Others are praised, celebrated, visited often. And slowly, a quiet sorting out begins.
Each door we pass through gives us a new word, a new concept. We start to form an image of the world - and of ourselves and we start giving everything the meaning it has for us. Over time, these words and images of how things "are" are repeated over and over, the environment seems to confirm them - and they are naturally reinforced.
At some point, they just don’t feel like thoughts anymore. They feel like absolute truth.
And that’s how the voice begins. The one that says you’re not enough. Not talented enough, not smart enough, not beautiful enough, not strong enough, not kind enough. Handed down from caregivers who had their own fears, their own experiences and wanted something better for you. From a society trying to keep us safe and teaching us the rules and ways to do things to keep us safe. From teachers and peers, all shaped by their own fears. It’s not malice, it' not unkindness. It’s love, in disguise.
Of course, as children, we don’t question an of it. As children, we know we don’t know. And we assume that adults do know. So we believe it all.
Without anyone meaning to, we’re gently taught which rooms are safe and which are not. Bit by bit - through habit, fear, and the quiet hope of belonging - we learn to quiet our curiosity and close the doors that once made us come alive. Eventually, we start closing them ourselves, forgetting how natural it once was to explore freely.
Eventually we forget the vastness we came from and end up living in a two-room apartment with a tiny kitchenette...
But here’s what’s quietly miraculous: the castle never left.
The doors never locked - we just stopped trying to open handles.
The rooms are still there. The doors are still ours to open. What was once freely given - curiosity, wonder, the excitement of running through the corridors - never disappeared. It was just covered up. It was just forgotten.
Each time we recognize that a belief is just that - a belief - we take a step back into the castle. We remember a door. We jiggle the handle. And it opens.
Conditioning is not the enemy. It's just what happened. And it is deeply innocent. The moment we see it for what it is, it begins to lose its grip. And each time we question what we’ve learned - not to judge it, but just to see - we find ourselves remembering something we didn’t even know we’d lost. We start to sense the space we forgot. A hallway we hadn’t walked down in years.
And the castle reappears.
Not because it had disappeared.
But because it has always been a part of us...
My invitation to you is to just notice which doors feel closed today.
Not to force them open - but to remember they are still there.
They usually start with words like "I should" - "S/He should" - "Things should" - "This is wrong" - "Why can't we just" + so many more.
There’s nothing to fix. Nothing to force.
There's just the next door… and the simple willingness to try to jiggle the handle.
The voice that said you were not enough never saw the whole castle.
But you can.
All my love,
Suzanne
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