Changing Your Life
by Richard Harvey on 06/24/16
You
bring an issue, a difficulty, a problem to your inner work, and perhaps to your
therapist or counselor. You discover the deep historical root of the problem,
the course of the pattern of action and reaction in your early life. As a child
you discovered a way to deal with early-life challenges and difficulties. This
way was repeated until it became time-tried and tested, and dependable. Other
strategies for coping, overcoming, and meeting life-problems were added until
you possessed a reliable set of resources. These strategies and resources
became automatic -- default settings you could depend on for your ongoing
protection and to ensure your continued well-being.
The
problem now is that the very strategies that protected you now limit you. The
restrictions they place on your life mean that you do not thrive, expand, grow,
or develop in ways that are natural and life-enhancing. You are stunted in your
life, in your relationships, in the enjoyment and satisfaction of your very
existence.
Your
therapist and/or perhaps your own inner wisdom counsels you to pull up this
pattern at the root. You have to entirely eradicate it. You can only do that by
digging. You have to get to the very bottom, to the point where the root
receives its nourishment, the life that sustains it.
How
do you do it?
You
can practice and the healing therapy practices include: therapy note-book in
which you write out anecdotes, make associations, recall relevant times and
periods from your early life, connect events, for example the first time
anything like the present difficulty appeared in your life. You may dialog with
the relevant protagonists -- people like parents, friends, teachers, relatives,
family acquaintances, members of your extended family. If any of these people
are part of the narrative unfolding around the issue at hand, take a pen and
paper, close your eyes, and talk with them. Tell them your intention to
explore, to discover, and to resolve overdue issues that arise and re-arise in
your life to urge you to complete the unfinished business inherent in them.
Draw,
write -- pictures, words, illustrations. Illustrate your anecdotes, make
diagrams, and abstract pictures. Paint, use wax crayons for expression, be
creative, compose poetry, dance the rhythm of life, in movement, singing, make
models, create altars, discover rituals, and inventive expression of all kinds.
Discover and practice creative ways to release your emotions, thoughts,
feelings, tensions, holdings, and frozenness. To give form to inner experience
is to release the hold that inner reaction and defensiveness have on you. You
will begin to feel more free, more loose, and less burdened.
Keep
expressing, keep putting it out onto paper, into the air, into your notebook,
your drawing book, giving form to the invisible. Drawing, writing, body work,
movement and dancing -- expressing in every way that feels right for you.
All
these activities and more will help. But they will be all the more potent and
effective if they are done within the context of therapy or counseling with a
skilled practitioner. The therapist is able to reflect on the inner exploration
with you, to be present sometimes when it is happening, to conduct you through
the process, and crucially to facilitate the integration and stabilization of
your insights and breakthroughs.
Ultimately
the aspect of therapy that really counts is the relationship -- the healing
relationship itself -- and the alchemical and catalytic aspects of healing
therapy that are inherent in the therapeutic encounter.
All
of this, and more, may be summarized in three words, which describe the process
of change that takes place in us when we truly remove the very source of an
inner pattern by severing it at the root. Those three words, or sequential
stages, are Awareness, Acceptance, and Change.
Deepening
in awareness of the usually unconscious patterning and defensive strategies, we
begin to see the whole figure, the entire structure of the character defenses
at the center of our default protection. Gradually, through deepening
awareness, we reach a place in ourselves where we are able to see clearly and
transparently our reactive behavior in all its fine detail and complexity.
Accepting
it as it is, we may be able to see too how wise and effective the strategy of
defensive behavior has been for us in early life. We begin to understand the
history of our protection: how it worked so well and protected and saved us,
and conversely how it is now outmoded and restricting -- our angels have
become our jailers.
When
this knowledge is held clearly and transparently in our awareness, we wait. We
are ready after all -- more than we have ever been before -- to change. Yet we
may not hurry the process, which is natural and true and clear, to unfold in
us. We enter into a profound period of waiting in which we deepen in our inner
world. Then something quite unexpected happens. Grace falls upon us like a
Divine gift. This gift is the intercession of the last missing ingredient and
it is beyond our power to either hurry it or manifest it. It occurs in our full
surrender to circumstances just as they are.
Grace
ushers in the changing. Change most certainly occurs, but remember always that
it is most certainly a more circumvoluted and intense experience than you can
foresee.
So
here are the basic ingredients for changing your life. Other ways are proposed
of course. They include shamanism, meditation, pharmaceuticals, and acts of
will or self-manipulation. However, the preeminent way to self-understanding,
emotional release and personal transformation is through consistently applied
awareness with a trusted and skilled guide and inviting the mysteries of grace
through surrender. Within us are powerful forces for change and transformation.
Rely on them, discover them, learn to trust their presence in your life.
BLOG entry #49