I’ve been thinking how to start this blog and it’s been coming out in quite a clunky way. So instead of waiting for the words to feel more beautiful, I’ve surrendered. We’re going to go through this together like we’re chatting as we drive a bumpy road.
You drive, I’ll ride shotgun.
So, here’s the thing. Most of us have ‘a thing’ we want to move through.
Something, if you like, we want to ‘get over’. A situation we want to leave behind that makes itself known with recurring feeling, its own special type of ground hog day. The type that’s frustrating and bewildering.
Maybe it’s a trauma, of large or small design. Where we remember how we were ‘before’ in a way that feels so different to right now.
Possibly: A situation that’s caused a bruising of our heart, a bruising of our mind, that we carry round like a heavy, loaded backpack and can’t find a way to put back down.
And yet.
And yet, we find ourselves resilient. We don’t take this lying down. We’re out there doing stuff. Despite not knowing how to deal with it. Despite not knowing how to move through it- we still try.
And we find:
We learn more about ourselves. Maybe ways to deal with thoughts when they’re quite negative. Ways to manage our body when we feel tight. Perhaps we learn about the breath. We feel in many ways we ARE different. And yet when we show up with our horse or with that person or in that situation, the whole *thing* plays out yet again.
And then:
We feel deflated, like we’re right back at the start.
But here’s the thing. To create a new pattern. To have a new experience. To really let yourself be new…
You have to allow yourself to have the experience that’s true for this moment.
You have to let yourself be in what’s real for the here and now.
It’s just like going on a bear hunt (if you have no idea what I’m talking about here, I’m referring to the children’s book)…
… there’s no way over it.
… there’s no way under it.
…there’s no way around it.
…you have to go through it.
Where I find a lot of people despair is when they find themselves amid recurring, negative feeling and define that as a failure.
But it’s so far away from that.
Being IN that feeling—allowing yourself to have the experience that you want to change, avoid, or reconcile—is a necessary part of the alchemy.
The start point has to be where you are now. All the tools and support you have (in most cases) won’t do much to change that (if we’re speaking of a well established pattern).
If you’ve been nervous, then nervous is the start point.
If there is an experience that relates to a trauma from the past, then that’s where we begin.
We don’t avoid it or mistake it for something not being right.
We take our new tools and support WITH us to that place, and it’s from that point change really can begin.
To create anything new, you have to let yourself have the experience you are in right now.
You have to let yourself have the experience.
Onwards,
xx Jane
A photo from the weekend taken by the lovely Claudia (thank you!).
