Turn Limits into Opportunities Using Morphic Resonance

Your struggle is a portal, not a black hole

In transformational periods, it’s easy to believe that your challenges are uniquely insurmountable.

Perhaps you’re interested in starting a podcast but have three children and a massive to-do list. Or you lose motivation while you publish blog posts out of a concern that your niche is “saturated.” Neither of these situations mean you’ll fail at what you’re doing. But if these perceptions dominate your mind, you’ll have a hard time convincing yourself otherwise.

You might resent the people who have achieved what you haven’t. They become harbingers of your absence of opportunity. You think: if only you adopted blogging earlier then the effort would be worth it. If only you had children after successfully starting a podcast. And so on.

Instead of pouring over what you should have done, there’s an easier way. By merging with the creators who inspire within you a sense of motivation untarnished by jealousy or comparison, you can reverse engineer their success.

Let Thy Wandering Eye Be Thy Energizer

“Every time you take a step forward, the probability that you’ll take another increases.” — Jordan Peterson

In the masterpiece The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, Charles Eisenstein describes a movement beyond separation (which he calls “inter-being”) with the power to initiate collective healing. In his chapter “Morphogenesis,” Charles recounts being on a retreat when someone, clearly in a process of healing and forgiveness, showed the group a scar on his penis from a burn mark a foster parent inflicted on him at five years old.

Charles said to the man: “J., if you accomplish nothing else in this lifetime but to heal from this, you will have done the world a great service.”

In Western culture, we assume that our individual experiences inspire growth and change solely if and when they’re directly presented to other people. Progress occurs only when we write a book about good parenting, create a comic strip warning about the plastic crisis, or organize a protest.

But what if there aren’t such rigid boundaries between our experiences? What if, when I move beyond resistance or heal from a wound, I illuminate a path forward not only for myself but for you?

Morphic resonance, a hypothesis introduced by author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake, describes an organizing principle of nature; namely, that patterns are contagious. Every action exacts a ripple effect that makes it easier for others to enter the same crucible of transformation. Morphic resonance points to a new sort of causation that defies current scientific models of causality. When an event occurs in one place, it becomes easier for it to occur in another.

One example is a 1920 experiment conducted over a period of 15 years. Rats learned to escape a tank of water by exiting through one of two gangways. One was brightly illuminated while the other was dark and difficult to see. When the rats exited through the illuminated escape, they received an electric shock. While the first eight generations of rats made an average of 40 errors before escaping through the dark gangway, this number decreased to an average of 20 in later generations, even though the younger rats weren’t given any further training.

People often cite the four-minute mile as another example of morphic resonance. While it was once “impossible” to run a mile in less than four minutes, Roger Bannister broke the record in 1954, and now it’s the standard for professional middle distance runners in many different cultures.

Your Alibis Are Another’s Path

“I often think about the fact that someone with my same exact characteristics could have wildly different results and outcomes based on nothing more than their attitude and self-perception. Maybe you tell yourself that you’re not talented enough, intelligent enough, good-looking enough, or well-connected enough to get what you want. I guarantee you there are people with similar characteristics that are crushing it in life.” Ayodeji Awosika

You probably perceive limitations within yourself. But your self-concept and the limits you put on it really aren’t based on your true nature. When you cite hefty rent payments or that rare illness as reasons you can’t write a book, start a business, travel the world, whatever, know that these assumptions largely speak to constraints you’ve put upon yourself, not your scenario itself.

While encountering struggle is all but inevitable, your pursuit of growth doesn’t need to stop there. For every one of your perceived limitations, there’s someone else who overcame the same or a similar struggle. Undoubtedly, another person has escaped the wrath of those limits holding you hostage. That person might even cite that struggle as the very reason for their success. If another person was able to see an obstacle as a driver for change, is it sensible to let your limits discourage you?

No. In fact, every time another person becomes successful, defies limits, or overcomes pain, the likelihood you’ll do the same increases. Let’s say you’re interested in writing a book yet stumble over resistance or fear of failure. No matter what, I promise you there’s a person who successfully authored a book in spite of experiencing exactly what you are right now. If that person transmuted the hesitance into persistence, can’t you do that too?

If you want to start a business, don’t forget that the creator of Domino’s Pizza faced a $78 million lawsuit because of the company’s promise of pizza delivery in under 30 minutes. Yet he managed to transform this obstacle, and Domino’s is still one of the most well-known pizza chains operating today.

If you’re lacking resources, also consider that Tony Robbins, to name just one example, once found himself $790,000 in debt as the result of a bad business arrangement. He’s now one of the most prominent figures in personal development.

These examples indicate that reversal of challenge is possible, yes. But they’re also invitations. When you’re feeling under-resourced and demotivated, you can draw upon the morphic fields these people occupied and use them to your advantage.

All it takes is the willingness to peer into the psychologies of the people who motivate you. In the classic Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill describes imagining the gathering of his own imaginary council consisting of those he admired — Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, and others, and eventually even the Buddha and Christ.

In his imaginings, he’d ask for guidance from individual council members based on their life experiences. It began to feel extraordinarily real to him, and Napoleon cited these meetings with his invisible council members as crucial to his later success.

Stepping into morphic fields can be even simpler than this. When you’re struggling, remind yourself of those people who’ve felt similarly yet transmuted their disempowering feelings and stories. Allow them to live within you. Or simply enjoy the feeling of knowing they exist.

Knowing that something is possible is its own kind of morphic field. That belief begets more beliefs like it, and over time, you can stack experiences that insist on your success until your belief in it makes it inevitable.

Morphic Resonance Is Your Personal Motivational Guide

“I believe in the power of desire backed by faith because I have seen this power lift people from lowly beginnings to places of power and wealth; I have seen it rob the grave of its victims; I have seen it serve as the medium by which people staged a comeback after having been defeated in 100 different ways.” -Napoleon Hill

However you go about it, know that this concept is unique in the many forms of motivation it inspires. By drawing on the power of morphic resonance, you integrate the success of others while participating in the widening of a field other people can enter because of you.

Think about the person who creates a podcast in spite of feeling exhausted after taking care of multiple children and working a non-ideal job for eight hours. When busy people listen to and love that podcast, it acts as inspiration that invites them to adopt the belief that they too can move beyond their limits. In this way, the question of whether morphic resonance is scientifically valid becomes a different discussion. Considering that mere knowledge of someone else’s experience often carries a tremendous amount of power, it’s hard to deny the psychological utility of the concept.

As demonstrated by Napoleon Hill’s invisible council, you can inhabit the psychology of motivational figures via thought. In fact, I’d argue that any time you’re motivated or inspired to write or pick up a guitar, paintbrush, or camera after being moved by an artist, you just might be entering the morphic field they created. Enjoy it.