TURNING LEAD INTO GOLD

This week’s newsletter is more personal in nature, as I share my insights into the experience of transforming my own self-judgements, shadows and deepest desires into gold.

The gold I speak of is an expression of how I choose to create myself in the world, comprised of thirty ‘statements of being’ that capture the essence of Who I Am. This ‘document’ is the culmination of my own inner work in service of what Joseph Campbell put perfectly:

“It is a privilege of a lifetime to be who you are.”

I will also share the process for creating your own Document.

My hope for you in reading this is that:

·??????You’ll gain insight into what might be holding you back from living as freely, creativity and joyfully as you know in your heart you could be.

·??????You will see how your current ways of being and behaving based on unconsciously and consciously held maps, beliefs and conditioned programming are not written in stone. However, as they stand, they do combine to create your past, present and future.

·??????The process of self-enquiry as a sovereign choose in pursuit living an authentic life is normalised and humanised. We may all be unique in how we experience ourselves and the world but we do all have access to the same resourcefulness and capacities for insight and transformation.

·??????You’ll expand your lens of perception on how you not only see yourself, but how you see and relate to other people – both those you know and those you encounter or experience in your day to day life.

Why go on this journey in the first place?

Most of the people I work with talk about ‘getting out of their own way’ in pursuit of??fulfilling their potential and achieving their goals. What I have seen first-hand both for myself and with my clients is that there is a reflex of get caught up in ‘Doing’, as we strive to achieve what we want in the chaotic and unpredictable systems that make up society today. We each live in a complex and multi-faceted constellation of relationships and responsibilities and it’s all too easy to get caught up in the hamster wheel of both the busyness of our minds (engaging with our constant inner voice and self-talk) and the never ending busyness of day to day life.

To solve our problems and to make some kind of change the question we often ask ourselves is:

What do I need to do differently?

If only it was that simple; as human beings we are each a collection of habitual thoughts, feelings and behaviours that become engrained at the level of our identity. To put it another way, try ‘doing’ your way to a better relationship, becoming a more effective leader or creating a healthier lifestyle; what often happens? We default back, we fall off the horse, and with that a whole host of self-judgement is added to an already aircraft style hold of personal ‘baggage’:

What’s wrong with me?

Why can't I change?

Why is it so hard?

The mindset shift that is invited is to step off the hamster wheel and ask ourselves:

Who Am I Being?

As Steve Hardison (aka The Ultimate Coach), whose process for creating a Document I am sharing here, states:

“Beingness as a possibility is something we create when we think and we speak. Every deed that has ever been done or will ever be done grows out of who you are being. Being as a possibility is the seed of all doing. If I plant an apricot seed, I get an apricot tree. The seed becomes the fruit! Understanding the seed of my being alters everything I do.”

If we want to have a richer and more fulfilling experience of life, the invitation is to look beneath the surface at who we are being, and to enquire about where our beingness is coming from, including its intent and origins.

I am always looking for the common threads in the different approaches to personal development, the theories and psychological models that explore thriving and human potential. Well, here is my taking based on answer this question:

What is the good life?

“Living the good life comes from a sense of personal agency and autonomy, where we realise our potential for living freely, consciously and intentionally, whilst recognising we are one part of a greater whole. Living the good life is a self-aware life, where compassion for self and others is second nature. We hold ourselves to account, we take full responsibility for ourselves as creator and manifester. We are learning and creativity in action: we clean up our messes, we are open to change, we live into possibility and we know the power of being truly committed.”

What is your take on this question? Worth pondering I suggest.

So, if we are to live more consciously and intentionally in pursuit of the good life, first we must voyage into the unconscious.

Stepping into the shadows

As a possibility, we are?all?already are living a document, albeit one made up of our?unconsciously and consciously held maps, beliefs and conditioned programming. As a thought experiment consider these questions:

·??????What beliefs and judgements do you have about yourself?

·??????Where do your biases, prejudices and preferences originate from?

·??????What do you hold most dear? What is important to you? To what extent are you living in alignment with your values?

·??????What is the overall ‘tone’ of your inner voice? Is it kind, loving, powerful, curious and grounded in possibility and openness? Or is judgemental (of self, others and circumstances), critical, doubting, etc?

·??????What kind of feelings dominate your day to day experience of life? Do you mostly feel confident, happy and content? Or do you experience fear, anger, insecurity and shame more than you would like to admit?

·??????How much ease, flow and peace of mind do you experience in your day to day life?

I’ve asked these questions of myself over the last few years as part of my own personal development and I was confronted with many bitter pills to swallow: just beneath the surface lay a whole host of harsh self-judgements, originating all the way back to my formative years and since then suppressed, denied and hidden in shadow, all carried around within my unconscious.

Yes, I have done a lot of personal development over the years; I’ve learned loads of great technique and tools; I’ve had massive insights into both myself and how the mind works through exploring something called The Three Principles.??However until recently I had not truly examined my deepest fears and insecurities. Hell, I was a great doer – hard working, creative, caring, adventurous and risk taking but I had spent many years running away from myself, always seeking the next thing to bring me happiness, not asking myself the hard questions, living an avoidant life, not truly comfortable in my own skin.

This was journey that I was actually forced into three years ago when life brought me to the threshold of a new chapter: I got back together with my first love having been apart for over twenty years and we made the decision to move our lives back to Manchester, to start a new life together. The na?ve and heroic parts of me thought it was all going be a happily ever after scenario, but what I did not expect is that I began to become serious reflective on my life, including processing the ‘ending’ of a 23 year chapter living in London.??Hitting the age of 50 was also an activating milestone. A mid-life crisis? Maybe, but I knew I was being invited on a journey of self-discovery that life presented to me as a Hobson’s Choice.

All I knew was that to create the life I both wanted and I felt in my heart I was capable of, I had to enter the fiery den of my shadows and greatest fears.

The power of releasing one’s self from judgement, shame and guilt

Historically I was always very forwards focused, living a kind of forced optimism, albeit a rather manic and over the top version of positivity. This I now see, through a compassionate lens, was my masked attempt to conceal my deeper sadnesses, traumas and unmet needs. I was busy ‘doing’ life, without really asking myself who I was being, and the extent to which I was living authentically and honestly. I achieved success, and created a huge range of memorable experiences and adventures, but at what hidden cost?

What I now see even more clearly is the huge power of unearthing all of the fears, insecurities, limiting (even toxic) beliefs because within them lies our inner gold. That is the meaning of alchemy, turning base metal into something beautiful. Indeed one way of seeing our fears and limiting beliefs is that at their core they express what is most important to us. For example, beliefs about being a good parent are coming from a place of love, beliefs about being clever enough reflect that you value knowledge and intelligence – the beliefs we have are all what a mentor of mine calls ‘material for liberation.’

But what is forgiveness?

Even since my recently posts that cover the topic of forgiveness, I actually now see forgiveness simply as a showering of non-judgemental deep presence and love on to the parts of ourselves that we feel ashamed of or uncomfortable with. Or put another way:

Being with.

That simple.

And from that, the process of alchemy then begins, where we open up to??the magical transformational process of turning base metal into gold.

It is actually our deepest fears that contain the seeds of the highest version of ourselves.

For example, I held a fearful belief that I was ‘running out of time’ in life. As outlined earlier, this acted as a seed of being. I was that I BEING running of time. And what kind of DOING (and feeling) did that create? A rushing, a low level panic, moving too quickly, distractibility, restlessness, etc. This resulted in a self-fulfilling prophesy, taking me even further away from what I really desired in life.

With the help of my coach Peter McCammon I then went the process of forgiving myself for judging myself as running out of time and all that entailed…

This is how the process went:

OLD BELIEF: I am running out of time.

THE FORGIVENESS: I forgive myself for judging myself as?being someone who is running out of time.

THE ALCHEMY: For what is more true…

Being in the alchemical space require an act of surrender. In this example my logical and conscious mind did not have the answers….

And from ‘beyond’ came these words from my mouth:

WHO I BE: For what is more true is…I am that I have all the time in the world.

This was not a simple polarity to the old belief. I actually broke down and felt a huge surge of emotion through my body, as the deeper power and truth of this statement seeped into every pore of my being. I then heard in my head Louis Armstrong singing the words to the song ‘We have all the time in the world’, most poignant, as this was the very last song he ever recorded and he was to die soon after (I got goosebumps just writing these words…)

Cathartic, liberating and powerful.

And the funny thing was that a good friend had said a few years before these exact words about me when answering a question of how he experienced me, someone who I have many deeply exploratory and philosophical conversations.

And thus a statement of who I am being emerged that for me is a surface structure for a deeper structure of beingness that the highest version of myself brings to the world:

Patient with myself and others

Relaxed and at ease

Fully present

What a beautiful counterpoint to the ‘in a rush’ energy imbued within the original belief around ‘running out of time’.

I hope this example has given you a feel for how powerful the process of forgiving ourselves for judging ourselves can be.?

At a deeper level I now see with clarity how all our fearful thoughts and beliefs are created from a lower level of consciousness founded in a worldview that we are separate beings, with no deeper nature or part of the intelligence of life itself (aka universal mind, the quantum field, Qi, The Force). That I believe, is doing the heavy lifting when we surrender to what is by its nature a spiritual process (more on that line of thinking another time).

Over the course of many months, I alchemised my old beliefs and have created my own Document. You can watch a video of me reciting my document, comprised of thirty statements of being, here: https://youtu.be/LqzR6p81TE8

If you would like to create your own document, my invitation is to step into the process lovingly and full of self-compassion.

Creating your own document

I would like to credit master creator John-Paul Morgan for being so generous in sharing his take on the process of creating a document, which I have drawn on heavily in outlining a high level version of the process below:

1.?????????Bring to mind an unexpressed or unmet desire or ‘want’ in your life. This can be in any aspect of your life. Using a coaching tool such as the Wheel of Life can offer a?useful?framework for the ‘categories’ of your life. e.g. health, career, relationship,?money.

2.?????????Notice what you feel and what limiting thoughts accompany that feeling.

3.?????????Inquire into the identity statements within or beneath the thoughts that accompany the limiting feeling. For example, the belief may be sometime like: I never feel?enough, I really worry about the future, I’ve let my family down, I’ve not achieved?anything worthwhile, etc.

4.?????????Inventory the limiting identity statements.

5.?????????One statement at a time, create a fully embodied liberation from the limiting identity.?This can be produced powerfully by a process of forgiveness. The key here is to?experience a genuine release that is felt on both a physical and spiritual level.?

6.?????????For each statement say out loud:

????????????I forgive myself for judging myself as being?[insert current belief]

????????????And then say: For what is more true…

????????????In the wake of forgiveness, 'ask and listen' for what the deeper truth of your identity?was which had been obfuscated by the contrary limiting identity.?

7.?????????Without overthinking it, capture in print the words that arise from intuition or spirit.?

8.?????????Repeat steps 5-7 for all identity statements inventoried in step 4.?

9.?????????Distil the resulting list of identity statements from dozens (or hundreds) into 15-30??powerful and unique statements of who you be.?

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As I highlighted earlier, I took my time with this process over a number of months. Whilst I did much of the work in my own time, I know that some of the most powerful alchemy occurred whilst my coach Peter McCammon was holding space for me. In one session we took 45 minutes and worked through only three beliefs, albeit these were deeply held, but what resulted was truly transformational.

What I have also realised is that when I now read my document (having finished it a few months ago), it actually contains so much more – it expresses my values, my purpose, my natural and cultivated strengths, my essence (as others experience me), my passions and most importantly of all – is a container with no walls for expressing my human potential.

To note, I acknowledge that this process is not for everyone, and for some, perhaps some form of talking therapy may be the route to working through the past to both heal and transform, and bringing even an element of this work to that process may be helpful.

Living into my document

What I do know is that if I want to consciously create a life I love, whilst responding to the challenges and twists and turns of life with grace and resilience, I have to step into the driving seat of as creator of myself, in who I am being. For me, my document is a manifesto for being, my tablets of stone to which I can live into and explore. Each statement is infinite in its potentiality, thus making for a lifetime of exploration.??Even choosing one statement to explore and live into on a given day is glorious act of conscious creating.?

Over the last month I have learned my document by heart and recite it as part of my morning practices, and sometimes before a client session or before some kind of event I am either running or attending. Similarly when I encounter a personal challenge in, for example, my intimate relationship and I notice myself not showing up at my best (being impatient for example), I can asking myself ‘who am I being?’ and ‘’ how am I creating this situation?’ I can then lean into specific statements in my document and consciously choose to embody their full power.

As I said to my coach the other day ‘now the fun part begins’, as I explore what is possible in my being.

To draw on one of my ‘favourites’ in my document:?Being my document is a journey with no destination, for that journey is mastery.

Thank you for reading.

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In my next newsletters I will be taking a left turn, exploring some new topics including friendship and health. Please share this newsletter with anyone who you think may benefit from reading it.