Saving your own life is an inside job
I can feel the moment when a client realizes the horror and the beauty of this truth: saving your own life is an inside job.
I can’t do it for them. Nor can any book, or workshop, or downloadable podcast, or therapist, or counselor, or coach, or school, or series of accomplishments. Getting married and having kids won’t do it. Making millions of bucks won’t do it. The right friends, career, or house won’t do it.
Even positive systemic changes won’t do the job of making you feel good on the inside. People still struggle even in societies where there is more collective justice and better systems for equitable resources. (Am I saying that we therefore shouldn’t fight for more just systems or equitable resources? Of course not. I’m just pointing out that those aren’t any guarantees that we will internally feel happy and whole).
Saving your own life is an inside job…
Because if you can’t live with yourself on the inside, you’re not really living.
It’s horrifying to realize that the internal work is always required, because in seconds one’s entire identity is stripped away–the entire identity that is constructed out of a set of beliefs or assumptions or expectations that if only the world, or people, or systems, or some external item you could buy would work in a certain way, you’d be happy.
No chance. Not at all. It’s so untrue that it’s laughable, funny, when I sink into the truth of it–that is, it’s funny when it’s not terrifying.
It’s also beautiful to realize that, because holding onto the idea of some external thing or set of circumstances to save us is exactly what holds us in place and keeps us tripping all over ourselves. The realization of the fallacy is the key to the opening up and the awakening.
There are tools, yes. There are practices, yes. There are perspectives, yes. It’s all within your power, and it’s all a choice. All of that is true, and it sounds so simple, because it is, but at the same time, like the layered complications of everything else in life…it’s not that simple.
If you’re interested in profound shifts, though, there’s only one game in town, and that’s to BE the hero you’ve been waiting for.
It’s scary to acknowledge, yet oddly freeing: you are the one who has the control to change your life.
“Your life changes as fast as your stories change.” — Brianna Wiest
It will take time, to do this internal work. You will transform organically, when you’re ready to transform, not because you followed any steps. The work will be subtle, and will not always involve action steps.
Even your willingness to watch and observe that which is stuck in your life, to understand it even when it hasn’t changed yet, is a form of doing work.
So, chin up. Keep on keeping on. Imagine the you that has already traversed this journey, as she steps out onto the other side, and she comes back for you, willing to put a warm palm on that tight place between your shoulder blades, the place that doesn’t want to relax.
It can relax.
It is okay.
It always has been.
It always will be.
All is proceeding, just as it will, and the thread of your life is woven in the vast tapestry of the world, in just the right place to knit the pieces into the whole.