The State Before the Strategy

Why the state we live from may shape the reality we create

Lately I have been noticing something in my own life, and maybe you have felt it too. We become deeply committed to changing our lives. We create plans, write intentions, set goals, buy books, attend workshops and promise ourselves that this time things will be different. We gather strategies and search for the next step that will finally move us forward. Yet often, without realizing it, we attempt to create an entirely new reality from the same internal state that created the current one.

For years I believed transformation began with action. If I could just become more disciplined, more focused, more productive or more organized, then things would shift. I think many of us have inherited this way of relating to change. Push harder. Do more. Try again. Keep going.

There is beauty in discipline and there is beauty in effort, but I have started wondering whether effort alone is sometimes trying to solve the wrong problem.

Because underneath every thought we think and every action we take, there is a state.

Not simply an emotion, but a state of being. A state shaped by our nervous system, our body, our chemistry, our attention and our energetic orientation toward life itself. It quietly becomes the atmosphere from which we perceive reality. It influences what we notice, what feels available, what we believe we deserve and what we unconsciously expect from the future.

When we live in survival, even subtly, the world begins to narrow. Possibilities feel further away. Creativity becomes harder to access. Rest becomes uncomfortable. We become focused on certainty, control and keeping things together. The body, in its intelligence, is not asking, What beautiful future would you like to create? It is asking something much simpler and much older:

Am I safe? And this is where many of us begin building our lives.

We create careers from pressure. Relationships from fear of losing. Success from proving. We create movement while our nervous systems remain in contraction. Then we wonder why, even when we achieve what we wanted, something inside still feels unchanged.

I have become increasingly fascinated by a different question:

What if transformation begins not with strategy, but with state?

What if, before changing our external reality, we create the internal conditions that allow a different reality to emerge?

This is one of the reasons practices such as meditation, breathwork and somatic work have become so meaningful to me. Not because they simply help us relax, but because they change the way we experience ourselves. They create small moments where the body remembers something different. Space appears between reaction and response. We breathe a little deeper. We soften. We become curious again. Possibility returns.

I have also found resonance in the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza, who explores how thoughts, emotions and the body continuously shape our experience of reality. One idea that has stayed with me is that when we repeatedly think the same thoughts and feel the same emotions, we reinforce the same identity again and again. This may be where many of us become unintentionally loyal to our past while deeply longing for a different future.

The work is not becoming somebody else. The work is becoming familiar with a different state before external proof arrives.

This Thursday, 21 May, is World Meditation Day and I find myself wondering whether meditation was ever simply about becoming calm. Meditation may be a rehearsal space. A place where we practice possibility before life reflects it back to us. A place where the body learns that safety can exist without control, that openness can exist without certainty and that we can become intimate with a future before we physically see it. A place where we remember that learning how to be with ourselves is also learning how to become better at life.

As I write this, I realize that this is also part of what we will be exploring this Wednesday during Seat at the Table, inside our women's circle. Not because I want you to adopt new ideas or because I want to convince you of anything. Some things only become meaningful when they move from concept into experience.

We can speak endlessly about energy, presence, nervous systems and possibility, but there comes a moment when the body simply knows. A moment when your breath changes. A moment when something inside you softens. A moment when you feel more open, more expanded, more alive.

Whether we call it energy, biology or consciousness, something real happens when we shift our internal state.

I want you to experience that for yourself.

Because before changing our lives, we often need to learn how to inhabit a different state.

And this may be where reality begins to change.

With love and wild possibility,
Lorena
Founder, AMART3