The Remembrance Codes

From Loops to Spirals: Choosing Growth Over Comfort

• Susan Sutherland

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Have you ever felt like life was moving… but somehow you weren’t? Like the days blur into one another, familiar, even comfortable, yet strangely stagnant. What if that sense of comfort isn’t growth at all, but a ring quietly keeping you in place?

In this episode, I share a realization that came through one of my most intimate life experiences - a truth that reshaped how I see marriage, motherhood, purpose, and even my daily practices. It’s about learning to recognize the difference between cycles that keep us looping, and the spiral that keeps us alive.

This conversation is for those who feel called to break free of repetition, who are ready to step out of “safe sameness” and into deeper presence, expansion, and soul truth.

If you’ve been sensing that it’s time to rise - to walk with new eyes, new breath, and new courage - this one is for you. 

Speaker 1:

Welcome back, friends. Today I want to share with you one more realization that Lilith brought through to me, one that has shifted the way I see my walk and the choices that I make in my life. It has reshaped how I perceive my relationships and my walk-up purpose, and even my daily practices. When I was experiencing the discomfort that I shared last week, the velvet cage tightening around me to get my attention, I kept seeing the image of a wedding ring, the loop, the circle of sameness, and I had this realization that I am not here to walk in a ring, I am here to walk in the spiral. And this understanding was brought to me through the lens of marriage. But as I began kind of unraveling what I was meant to realize, I realized how it touches every aspect of my life, and so I wanted to give this thought and this discussion the full episode.

Speaker 1:

Today. A ring feels familiar, it is safe and it is predictable, and it looks like rhythm. Safe and it is predictable and it looks like rhythm, but it is really repetition. It's what I started calling our marriage groundhog day the same conversations, the same roles, the same choices, the same loop. Nothing was necessarily bad or off, though it could be, but for us it was just predictable. The spiral, however, carries movement. It circles back, but with each turn it rises higher and deeper and more expansive. When we walk this ring, we mistake comfort for growth, we mistake safety for truth, and you can live years within the same pattern, believing that you are moving forward when in reality you are circling. So some examples of the rings that I have identified some that I was walking, spinning, spinning, spinning like I'm on a freaking carousel, and some that I have just brought into my awareness to share with you but marriages that cycle through the same arguments without new resolution or a new approach, or, if you are living in predictable monotony, friendships where the same conversations or the same tone or the same conflict is discussed over and over, or relationships that just stay circus level. Many of us have jobs that don't ask more of you, or even new jobs that may look different on the outside but feel exactly the same on the inside. We even allow our spiritual practices to loop. They once opened us and felt expansive and connecting, but they become rote. The cycle of dieting and starting over, returning always with the same vigor but at the same starting line. And we have so many collective rings that we are walking hand in hand the politics, the outrage cycle, the consumerism. It feels like movement. The dates change, the candidates change, the products change, but the systems don't evolve, y'all. The ring is not evil. It simply doesn't grow. And if you are listening to this podcast, that's not for you. I want to share a ring that I've walked myself.

Speaker 1:

Parenting by nature will keep you in a spiral. You absolutely cannot parent a teenager the way you parented your toddler or your eight-year-old. It is a forced spiral. Their change is imminent. It is going to happen. Therefore, you must too, or else it really doesn't work.

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But for years I also believed that I had to finish this chapter of motherhood before stepping into my greater purpose. I told myself later, after the children are grown, after the season shifts, after I launch these babies, then it will be the time. But what I realized is that later was a ring. I was walking, I was circling in the belief that purpose must wait, and in that ring I was needlessly delaying the very thing that my soul came here to do. But awareness has shown me that pattern and the spiral asked more of me. It asked me not only to stop resisting by saying it will happen later, but to start embodying in a new way, to walk both at once to mother and to live my purpose more fully. To weave them together instead of deferring one for the other. To understand how to be a vessel of truth while parenting teenagers that can cringe at my very presence, regardless of what I share publicly, but deferring until they are gone. That's a ring. Learning how to stand so unshakably in my knowing that they too can hear the truth in my frequency as they walk through the halls of their high school. That is the spiral. It asks all of us to expand, not to delay, not to repeat.

Speaker 1:

I was shown the wedding ring because most certainly my marriage was a ring that we were walking. It was a nice path. It was pleasant and predictable Long days of running a business and evenings filled with sports and hours in carpool and then plopping on the couch to scroll our phones or zoning out if we had a few minutes of downtime before we washed and repeated. Predictable, comfortable, safe but not expansive. We didn't challenge each other in meaningful ways. We were lap swimmers Surface level, efficient, but not seeking wonder and fascination that can be found when you seek depths intentionally.

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Together we had to choose. Okay, fair enough. I threw a grenade and then together we chose to step out of the ring to engage with each other when we are fully present and can be invested and, to be quite honest, that has been really fun sitting in the dark on the porch at 5.15 in the morning and having conversations that matter, and if logistics start to wibble their way, planning the day, we have to pause and say that's not what this time is for. This is not the time to check calendars and discuss schedules or even dinner plans. This is for something more, and to intentionally try to go deeper with one another has been really really profound. He is getting to know me, but I think the part I personally love most is that he is getting to know himself, and kind of when he was saying, hey, you know, I'm invested in this, I want to know you. When I said you don't even know who I am because I haven't shown that to you, and he was engaged and interested and he said, well, do you want to know me? And I had to say I really want you to know yourself, because I probably read his field with more clarity than he has allowed himself to know himself. But that's one of the fun things about these conversations is just being able to ask questions and sit and hold presence for him to really start engaging with himself in this way, and it has been really, really fun. But if I wouldn't have thrown the grenade and we would not have had this shake up the velvet cage collapsing in on me, we would still be walking the ring because the ring was working, the ring was safe and the ring was comfortable and we weren't forced to say what are we doing here? And so it has been a really beautiful thing that we had that shake up, because it has allowed us to realize where we had these patterns of sameness and the monotonous marriage round-hold day that was just looping and looping and looping.

Speaker 1:

People get stuck in these rings all of the time. I hear the ring now when I listen to a prayer spoken before a meal and I often want to pause and say what did that mean to you? Or where did you feel those words in your body, because I know that the answers would be nothing and nowhere. They are just words. They are spoken in a ring, they are predictable meal after meal, even spiritual practices like a gratitude journal or pulling cards where it used to maybe be exciting, something you did on a Monday morning before your week started. It can become this checkbox. This is just what I do. This is what I'm supposed to do, this is how my day starts, but there is no presence and expansion and excitement and fulfillment from those activities. They've lost the meaning and they had just become a habit, a ring. So how do you know if you are walking in a ring? You feel deja vu. You can predict the ending before it begins. This is what happens. I know how this is going to go. You can feel drained instead of expanding, or you feel nothing. It's just another task, another habit.

Speaker 1:

It's kind of like when you hop in your car my daughter just went to the DMV and got her permit and it's a very different thing when you hop in your car. My, my daughter just went to the DMV and got her permit, and it's a very different thing when you hop in the car as a 15 year old and you have to check all the things and it feels like there's a hundred things to go through before you start driving. And when you're my age, you can get in the car and be so mindless about it that you drive 30 minutes out of the way before you realized that you should have been going the other way. But driving just becomes a non-event. You just do it and your mind is free to wonder and maybe you don't pay attention to where you're going.

Speaker 1:

But some things that start when you begin them. You have so much presence and attention and you're invested in what you're doing and after time it becomes mindless and we have to check those situations and say what am I doing without full presence? What am I doing just to do? And they've lost their expansiveness and it may require switching things up. Maybe you take a break from that and come back to the practice, when it would feel new and fresh and alive. Even Mark and I, when we started our morning connection, we were sitting and chatting for a little bit and then we were doing Qigong, and then he was going and doing Tai Chi and then his cold plunge and he even said now that is starting to feel a little monotonous and so we need to switch it up where perhaps he does that some days, or we check in and say what does it feel like we need today? Maybe we sit and meditate together, maybe we don't need conversation and maybe we need stillness and quiet and presence with one another.

Speaker 1:

But being open to this doesn't have to be a daily routine that gets into just another loop, even if it starts as connection. When you lose that feeling of yes, I'm here, this feels good to me, you have to bring awareness to the fact that it might be looping. You might be in a job that keeps repeating itself, that you just show up it's just the job you do. Or perhaps you've got a new job that looks different on the outside but it feels the same on the inside. You have just shifted the location of the loop. You may have a friend that every time you speak to her, has the same or similar complaints. You may have an inner dialogue that keeps circling. Have an inner dialogue that keeps circling. I'm never enough. This always happens to me. Everybody hates me, my body is broken.

Speaker 1:

The ring. The loop asks you to forget who you are divine, creative, expansive. The spiral, on the other hand, asks you to remember. When you're walking the spiral of these encounter with familiar things, you know that you're doing it with new eyes. You can face the same wound again, but you know it's from a new vantage point. You can step into the same room. But you know you are carrying a deeper truth. The spiral doesn't erase the past, it integrates it. It is sacred repetition, repetition with expansion. So if you picture a labyrinth, the way you circle near the center again and again, yet each time you are closer to the heart, that is the spiral path. Many of us have been walking a ring. Many of us have been walking many rings.

Speaker 1:

So I want to take you through the six steps that I took or am taking to shift from the ring to the spiral. Number one, surprise, surprise is awareness. You have to be able to name the ring. I see this is a ring. I am repeating what feels familiar here. How do I already know it is coming? This can be in your daily life, it can be in your relationships, it can be in your workplace. How do you know the sameness is involved, is involved. Two have a comfort check. Why am I staying? Am I walking this ring for comfort or for truth? What do I fear losing if I step out of it? If I step out of it?

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Three is pattern recognition. You have to see the loop. What is the pattern that's repeating? Who else is cast in the script? What role do I keep assigning myself Four disruption you have to choose differently.

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What one small choice would shift the outcome? If I were walking in a wisdom forward, what is the gift of this pattern? How can I carry the wisdom without repeating the story? Six is alignment ensuring spiral movement. Am I expanding or repeating? Does this choice stretch me to greater truth?

Speaker 1:

For me, disruption came in the motherhood ring that I was walking, when I stopped saying. Later, I began sharing my voice more fully, in truth now Letting my children witness my unfolding instead of hiding it away in my room waiting on another season. And that integration is the gift that motherhood itself has given me. Motherhood has given me the codes that I need to carry forward Patience and adaptability and fierce love. These aren't gifts that are meant to be left behind in the rain. They rise with me in the spiral. So I can recognize that this relationship, this season of motherhood, has given me what I need to take into the spiral with me. And it is not a choice of either or it is a walk of both. So I have to ask myself daily am I expanding or repeating? Am I deferring or embodying? Am I engaging with others that seek expansion or are content to walk the ring, y'all.

Speaker 1:

The ring is seductive because it feels safe the same arguments, the same habits, the same patterns in relationship or daily life. They offer familiarity. But familiarity is not the same thing as growth. The spiral asks more of you. It may look similar to the ring from above, but each turn takes you inward, deeper, wider. It invites you to revisit old things, not to repeat them, but to see what has changed in you since the last turn.

Speaker 1:

A few years ago, I signed up for a year-long mentoring program and I did the same thing this past year and both were financial investments and both I knew I felt out of alignment with six months in and the first time I stayed through.

Speaker 1:

The whole year I had paid and I felt obligated to myself to see it through. And when I felt that this last time this same feeling, virtually the same money invested, I could recognize the value of my own energy and my own alignment and value that more than the money paid for a program. I saw the pattern and, instead of repeating the same decision, I knew that I was asked to choose in a different way. Lilith has shown me that I cannot live in rings. My soul made an agreement to walk the spiral, even if it cost me money or comfort, even when it asked me to step into the unknown. And so I offer this to you May you find the courage to name your rings, may you choose to disrupt the loops that keep you small, and may you remember that you were never meant to circle in place. You were meant to rise. I love you. Have a great week.

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Susan Sutherland

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