Perhaps you find yourself standing at such a crossroads in your life.
You may feel that conflicts are difficult to resolve, and that issues and themes keep popping up in your life.
It may be that you have had glimpses of what it feels like to be at your greatest potential and wonder why those are rare. It could be that you are always seeking and never finding.
You may have read many self-help books, or you may have never picked one up. You may feel that you have been on a spiritual journey for a long time, or you may not relate to the idea of spirituality. You may have lived a satisfying life or you may have felt a low level of dissatisfaction throughout your life. Each of us has had encounters with feelings of success and feelings of failure. We have all felt the grace and magnificence of life and we have all fallen low in our hearts and felt that, at times, life is too much to bear. The experience of life seems vivid and colorful, and yet, one has to wonder: is there another way to live this life?
Whichever category you place yourself in, if we are honest enough with ourselves, we all feel as though there is something wrong with us. If we are honest, we all feel as though we, and others, are somehow flawed. The idea that we need to be fixed implies that there is something inherently wrong with the way we are.
When we have feelings we don’t understand, we feel as though something is wrong and attempt to find out ‘what’s wrong’.
Feelings start out as something needing to be felt. They end up not truly being felt, but considered a pathology and, in the attempt to fix them, we miss the pearls of wisdom hidden beneath. We live in a short-cut society, seldom sitting with our feelings, and more often than not, trying to escape them, rather than looking inward to see what it is that hurts.
While it is practical to fix a broken ankle, is it practical to want to fix our personalities? Our character traits? I wonder, if a nose could think, what would it think of being shaped and sculpted into ‘perfection’? I don’t think a nose could see anything wrong with itself. Unless it’s causing back problems, could a breast want itself to be different than it is? If a mountain, or any other part of creation, could speak, would it say, ‘Please fix me, there is something wrong.’
Ironically, the feeling of something being wrong is the drive behind the search for meaning. If the search brings you to BreakThrough you begin to understand that defenses do not protect us and neither do over-reactions, and yet that is the way we live. Defending and over-reacting. True to the old adage that if something is true, it’s opposite is also true. In this way, defending and over-reacting serve to teach us, if we make ourselves a priority in our lives, and question why we feel the way we do.
If we could trade ourselves in, or do an upgrade, would we want to keep anything, or would we re-design the whole package, and what would that look like? Do you know anyone like the one you would like to be?
What if we could like the one we are with?
What if we could sit effortlessly in the center of ourselves able to respond to the ups and downs of life?
What if we could feel natural around everyone in any situation?
I wonder if we may be what we are looking for.
It’s a bit like the pearl in the oyster. You can’t see the pearl from the outside. The shell looks rough around the edges and is hard to crack open. One might even say it’s a bit ugly. You need tools to open it and then you have to dig through the meat, never imagining that the slippery, smelly thing might yield so precious a gift as a pearl; a pearl that started as a grain of sand and transformed amidst an unsightly mess.
We can all imagine ourselves as the oyster. Few can imagine that we are the pearl.
You’ve probably noticed by now that life is going to happen no matter how much we protest. The peaks and valleys come and go.
BreakThrough isn’t self-help. It doesn’t try to fix anything. It’s a tool to crack the oyster shell and reveal the pearl. It reveals our true nature and that delivers the feeling of being natural and joyful around ourselves and others. It is about the kind of self-realization that leads to being able to take practical action every day to get your deepest needs tended to by yourself and respected by others. If you do this work with commitment, it shows us that there is another way to be.
By Brenda Miller, CBr1
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