Who Do You Need to Become in Order to Realise Your Dreams?

Listening to Lynn Twist talk to Tammi Simon this week, she said that the more she herself suffered the more her perspective shifted from helping people to serving people. As a recovering people pleaser and fixer, I can relate to this. Her view is that helping suggests the other is weak, fixing conveys they are powerless whereas serving acknowledges they are whole.

Then I was listening to Katherine Woodward Thomas talk about a pivotal moment in her life when she was sharing her intention for a major change in her life and her friend said “I’m going to hold that intention with you and for you if you give me permission to hold you accountable for being who you need to be in order for that to happen”.

Now, many years on and having achieved and surpassed that original intention, when she wants something she takes the time to envisage it in her five senses, to see how it feels, tastes, smells, sounds and looks in her body, and if it feels right she asks “How will I need to grow in order to receive this? What or who will I need to let go of? And what is my next step?”

While she is a proponent of who we are becoming rather than what we are healing, preferring to focus on the future rather than the past, she fully recognises that “A critical part of what we need in order to achieve different outcomes is to look at who we are being. What beliefs do we hold? What is our world view? That is where we get stunted if we don’t know the consciousness we are speaking from”.

One of the things Katherine is well known for is her book and teachings about Conscious Uncoupling. She says “Your next coupling will reflect how well you uncoupled from your last partner, how you’ve learned, expanded or grown – or not”. That can of course be applied to career roles, other roles we hold such as parents, community members as well as friends and partnerships.

A few years before my last relationship ended I chose to become more aware of the patterns that had repeated again and again in my life across different areas and the consciousness I was speaking from. Katherine’s joint publication with Claire Zammit on the unhelpful patterns at play in my psyche continues to be one of the most useful resources in my work.

But that also opened up a sense of grief, for who I had been, fully identified with the fake self that was created though early relational wounding, which is another way of saying many of these patterns emanate unconsciously from early childhood.

A Buddist monk once told Lynn Twist that “Grieving is medicine for the attachment, when the grieving is done all that is left is love”. I think this applies to all grieving, be it someone we love who dies, a relationship that has ended, or the person we used to be.

Underneath all this though there is a “me” that is absolute and unchanging. It’s not the me I identified with most of my life, but it’s the me who inwardly reflects back whether I am at peace or out of sorts.

Caverly Morgan, whose practice included 8 years of training in a silent Zen monastery, challenges us to recognise who we are in the timeless sense. One of the best exercises she found to demonstrate and feel into this unchanging part of ourselves, is to get into a meditative state and then bring to mind who we were at age 5, how that felt, and then once we have a good sense of that do the same in 5 year increments. Then look for the common “me” at all those ages.

I’ll confess the first time I did this I kept tapping into “anxious me”. However, Dr Laura Berman talks about “finding your home frequency” by first grounding ourselves and then thinking of a time in our life when you felt pure, unadulterated, all-is-right-with-the-world joy. Go into that scene as if it’s happening right now and you are experiencing it firsthand (not watching it happen) and notice what the sensations in your body are. If I do that exercise in the 5 year increments I get a profound sense of the timeless me.

Uncovering my authentic self is an ongoing journey, sorting through many of those unhealthy patterns, figuring out what my own needs, wants and values are, learning the skills and capacities to hold boundaries and communicate those, and recognizing and handing insecurity in myself and others with compassion.

And, as Katherine Woodward-Thomas says “We don’t become ourselves by ourselves. We all need support to become ourselves fully. We all need health in our relational field, people who are holding us and uplifting us and can help us to realise the higher purpose of our soul’s calling”.

But that is also another lesson, recognizing that I am choosing that for myself. In the past I would often be attracted to people for their potential, and hang onto some of those golden moments of glimpsing it in relationships early on, and then get disappointed when they didn’t realise their potential. Briana MacWilliam makes an excellent point that unrealized potential can be as much of a soul purpose as realized potential can.

Thus it’s been an important lesson to me to serve only those who are not only asking, but in ways that support the degree to which they are willing to become who they need to become in order to realise their desires.

And that is also part of the grief process for me, letting go of my attachment to other people’s potential and loving both myself and them for who we are right now, in this very moment. Because it’s from here that I am not resisting myself, and I can embrace the journey to becoming who I need to be to realise my desires.

So who is the you that is showing up right now? Do you love that you? And who is it that you need to become in order to achieve your desires in life? How will you need to grow in order to receive this? What or who will you need to let go of? And what is your next step?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Life of Your Dreams? How Would Life Be Different if You Believed in Yourself? Be Purposeful in Your Focus - Your Glass Is Actually Still Half Full, Dreams May Be Free but They Are Also Essential to Progress and Make the Invisible Visible - Celebrate the Gold in Your Emotional Reactions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.