Weekly Wisdom #42

I took the picture above on my way to an Irish wake to support a friend who lost a loved one. The sunset was so beautiful I was just called to pull over and enjoy it. The picture is unfiltered and beautiful and yet it doesn’t begin to capture the real spectrum of color I saw as the sun set over the farm fields.

I was struggling with what to write about this week and then the thought rose up – the art of the pause. The more urgent situations feel, the more necessary a pause. The more crucial a decision feels, the more it likely needs time to evaluate the system around it. When I feel my mind spinning, it’s time for a break, pause, breath of fresh air, and an allowing of what wants to emerge. When I did that this morning, the book The Untethered Soul arose. And I am called to read it again.

I went back to my notes and pulled out a three highlights for this week’s wisdom.

“You have to understand that it is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life.”

This reminds me that we often have crazy expectations for life, work, partners and children which can rarely be fully satisfied. And in worrying about a perfect experience, we miss the actual experience.

I know I missed a bunch of my children’s actual lives while moving them toward a life I wanted them to have. When I do stop to see them, truly see them, they amaze me.

I’ve missed deeper relationships because I wasn’t fully open to the experience. When I am fully present and grateful with my partner now, I don’t have words to describe the feeling and energy that results.

When I am worried about how a workshop went in my work life, I often overlook the small indications that I’ve affected someone. Or even better, how we affected each other.

What special experiences are you living for while missing the real experiences of life?

“The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems. Once you do that, you’ll be clear enough to deal with what’s left.”

This reminds me of the internal judge exercise in my Kicking Stress workshop. I used it for myself for last week’s wisdom that got me to the internal message “Michelle, you are worthless, and you will never help anyone.” That seems dismal and scary. I do this exercise because I know these messages aren’t true but until I get to the bottom, I can’t turn them around. As I continued to review the responses to reflection questions I asked during a recent workshop, I am even more convinced I did affect people, perhaps just not all of them. And that’s okay.

This internal judge is what closes me off from an open mind, heart, and will. And the more I uncover what this judge has to say about me, the more real me is unveiled. And I really like the real me. I’ve covered her up for way too long.

How hard is it for you to go inside to examine how you are holding your true self back from life?

“Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.”

This makes me recall a conversation recently when I said “No one can make you feel. It is only I feel” and another person disagreed. Someone might have said something nasty about me and I might get angry. But underneath the anger could be a partial truth that I’m unwilling to face. Or it just might not be true at all. And, in that case, the statement is more about them than it is about me. In this culture, it takes a lot of practice not to react with anger. It takes real internal growth to pause and ask yourself if what the person saying is fully true, partially true, or not true. I have the freedom to decide my truth.

I keep working on this inner growth. In fact, I tried something recently that I’d never done before. I told a very vulnerable story and when I finished, I asked people to write on a post-it the story they were telling themselves about me, no filters. I read a few out loud. Some were true, some partially true and some were simply reflections of the person writing. Then I asked people to write down the story they were telling about themselves. As I re-read the comments, it became clearer how the stories they were telling themselves about me came to be. Where they fell on the spectrum of connected or disconnected also became clear (and had little to do with me at all).

What stories are you telling yourself about you and others around you? How is this preventing the REAL you from showing up?

If you are interested in my personal growth process, I have a whole series of workshops I’ve entitled Leadership of Self. You can check them out here and here. It might feel scary to go internal, but I assure you there is freedom on the other side! DM me for more information.

Check out The Untethered Soul and other resources by CLICKING HERE.