Not Getting What You Want In Life? Your But's Getting In Your Way
Why Am I Here? Why am I here? My biggest desire my whole life has been that I just want to live my purpose on the planet, be doing what is is that I was put here to do, accomplish what I was meant to accomplish. In the last few newsletters I decided to detail a bit of my internal journey. I figure some of you are going through similar things on your own healing journey. Maybe it will be useful for you. There's Something Wrong With Me So what's been happening to me is that occasionally, I run into a stint where I start to feel bad about myself. Often it's triggered by the number of people in my practice. When life doesn't look the way I think it's supposed to look I immediately go down the rabbit hole of, "I can't get my practice to be bigger so there's got to be something wrong with me." In that past I always took that as my cue to start doing marketing. Do some events. Go out and round some more people up. Working like this wasn't sustainable so I'd have to stop at some point. As soon as I stopped doing that my practice would always shrink back to the same place. Then I had a child and, as you may or may not know, we were going through a rather tough time, there. She got cancer (she's all good now, by the way). So I couldn't devote the time to rounding more people up anyway. I just had to let it ride. Interestingly, my practice has just stayed at that level that it always shrinks to, which is juuuuust enough. So life was supporting me. I saw that. Seeing that life was supporting me gave me the space to step back and re-assess what it was I might have been missing instead of doing the same thing for the millionth time. Complete Experience I had just finished up with a retreat led my by teacher and mentor, Lawrence Conlan. He does these weekend long retreats designed to connect you with your authentic self through direct and complete experience. So what I started doing was whenever the fear would come up around there not being enough people in my practice, I would breathe deeply into the sensation of that fear. I would welcome it. I would even thank it for being there. The idea was to have a "complete" experience of the sensation of that fear, not the story in my head mind you, just the sensation in my body. I'd do the same with the sensation of "there's something wrong with me." A New Awareness Started To Emerge Over the course of a few months a new awareness started to emerge. When I would notice the fear come up and start thinking about pushing against it by winding up the marketing machine and wondering what's wrong with me, I had to admit something to myself which seemed important: There's part of me that, for whatever reason, DOESN'T want there to be more people in my practice. This seemed like a revelation. No wonder the size of my practice is kind of stuck. Part of me wants there to be more people BUT there's a part of me that really doesn't. There was a but there. How could I expect it to get bigger when the whole of me wasn't on board. Your But Is Getting In Your Way There might be parts of your life where something similar is going on. Part of you really wants to be in a relationship, but... Part of you really wants children, but.... Part of you wants to make more money, but... Part of you wants your relationship to look different, but... Part of you wants to get promoted at work, but... Part of you wants to live somewhere else, but... Part of you wants to lose weight, but... We're unconsciously getting in our own way. We're unconsciously pushing that part of ourselves away. In fact, that part of us is the thing we push off of when we go into action around making more money, or trying to have that kid, or trying to lose weight. When we're pushing off of a part of ourselves those actions are probably not going to be so effective and we're going to find that they're unsustainable. Like how many times have you decided that you're going to start hitting the gym or change your diet or do daily affirmations or get to bed at a decent hour or not watch so much TV, or whatever it is, and always ended up where you were before? If you're human like me then the answer is a lot of times. Well, recently I started to go down that rabbit hole again. But this time it was different. More quickly than ever I admitted to myself that there's a part of me that doesn't want to see more people. I tried to honor that part of me. It has some wisdom somehow. Pure Desire I went to a house concert and saw a women named Ellis. Whenever I see Ellis live I get a download of some sort. As I was listening to her sing, I suddenly had the most intense desire to just serve the people in my life: my daughter, my wife and my practice members. I was accessing this pure desire for service. It had never been that clear before. This felt like progress. The next day I went to get entrained at my practitioners office in Boulder. If you're in Boulder and are scared of how far away Louisville is, check out Amanda Hessel. She's the best in Boulder, in my opinion. I was at her office and she seems to be doing well. It seems to be growing over there. In the past this would create overwhelming jealousy and self comparison and anger and I'd get hard on myself. This time I was honestly in admiration of what she's been able to do in such a short time. And I was sad that, though I have some amazing gifts to give, I hadn't figured out how to get them out to the masses. And I was sad because of all of the people I could have helped over the years but haven't because of my inability to figure this out. You see I was having compassion for my humanness instead of pulling out the whip. Again, that felt like a major breakthrough. The Great Mystery This weekend I did another one of Lawrence's retreats, before getting entrained, I prayed that this new found desire would be further clarified and sharpened. While on the table I had an experience of "The Great Mystery" as I saw the two opposing parts of myself, the part that wants more and the part that doesn't, without judement. I laughed. I suddenly had access to compassion for my opposing parts and then started sobbing. And then I came into contact with pure desire. Not even a desire to serve, just pure desire. It's so sweet and so innocent just to want. Before, the part of me that wanted to serve and the part of me that, for whatever reason, didn't want there to be more people at my office, were all tangled up, and largely unconscious. As I went for a complete experience of the sensations associated with the emotional backwash that would come up around this, that tangle started to unravel. I could feel more clearly that part of me that didn't want there to be more people in my office. But then I could also feel much more clearly my desire to serve. That's got to be good. It'll be easier for me to choose. The universe will be getting a clearer message from me and I can only imagine that that will make things different. I'll let you know...
Sincerely,
Jay
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