Day 9

There’s a shift that’s happening in my coaching. It’s gotten even deeper lately, mirroring (as always) the internal shifts I’ve been experiencing.

I had some incredible sessions today. Deep, transformational stuff. The stuff that’s the reason I fell in love with this work. The stuff that fuels me and fills me with gratitude that I’m right here, right now, doing this.

Here’s one of the things I’m noticing and playing with.

People have fears, worries, insecurities, and concerns. We know this. Let’s just call them fears right now, since they are all forms of that.

When we try to solve a fear by disproving it, seeking evidence to the contrary, or otherwise making it illegitimate—as many approaches put forth—we are actually reinforcing the realness of the fear.

Why? Because we are acting from a foundation of fear. What we are doing is based on us believing that this fear is legitimate in the first place—otherwise we wouldn’t need to be doing all of that.

The fear doesn’t need to be disproven. It just needs to be loved.

That’s all. Because the fear is a pattern that represents a younger version of you who experienced the original wound from which the fear was generated. And that pattern—that younger version of you—doesn’t need to be argued with or gaslit. Just loved.

Let’s look at an example.

Say someone is afraid of not being good enough. Very common.

And say that person makes it their life’s mission to be good enough. So they accomplish and succeed and acquire and win and consume and all that stuff. Also very common.

And since the pattern continues to run in the background, none of that really ends up mattering. It’s never enough. No matter what they do, they still don’t feel good enough. And they keep seeing reasons they aren’t good enough because they are looking through the lens of that pattern.

So maybe they are aware of this and they ask a loved one for help. They tell the loved one they feel like a failure. And the loved one says, “You’re not a failure! Look at how much you’ve accomplished!”

And so the loved one reinforces the lie upon which their fear is based: that their worth as a person is based on their accomplishments.

And then this person with this fear goes to a therapist and the therapist is trained in CBT and this therapist teaches them how to challenge and reframe their thoughts. So when the thought of “I missed that deadline. I suck at this job" (or some version of that) arises, they would look for evidence to the contrary and reframe it: “Even though I didn’t get that project done on time, I’m still making progress and seeing great results.” And that new thought feels better.

These things do nothing but placate fear and perpetuate the illusion of it being valid enough that it needs to be disproven.

People are at war within themselves. You can’t win that war.

You can only stop it.

How?

By stopping the very thing that keeps it going: resistance.

We can say the opposite of resistance is acceptance, but that word doesn’t always resonate with people. It feels a bit too passive for the ego to get on board with.

So lately I’ve been loving the term allow. It implies some degree of power—the power to choose— which we certainly do have when it comes to our relationship with our emotional patterns.

I’ll say more on this. A lot more probably. But let’s start here with the same example as before.

Let’s say that person comes to me and they want to change this belief of not being good enough, and they have all sort of ideas and goals in mind for how they can do that.

We’d put that aside and go to the causal point.

I’d guide them inward. We’d call forth the pattern. We’d locate it in the body. We’d feel it and observe it.

And up until recently we would stay with that—being present with the embodiment of the sensation—and that can be very effective in terms of integrating it. But lately I’ve been adding in a little something: the allowance.

So after going inward and feeling this pattern, they’d say to themselves, “I’m allowed to not feel good enough.”

Yes. Try this at home. It’s surprisingly relieving.

And then they’d remove the identification and say to the pattern, “You’re allowed to not feel good enough in my body.”

And the pattern will receive all it ever wanted: love and acceptance.

And that person will end the war within themselves—the war in which they are trying to fight against a pattern instead of loving it.

Resistance to the pattern will drop and they’ll stop trying to compensate for it. There will be no need.

And they will speak to that younger version of themselves and give themselves precisely what they needed at that time.

There will be no need to disprove, overcome, or avoid that fear anymore, because the origin of that fear has been given what it was always looking for, but they were too busy trying to solve, fix, and avoid it to notice.

There will be harmony in their field. And they will move forward unbound. Free. Liberated.

It was only once I ended the war within myself that I could help others do the same.
Every part of me I choose to love releases its hold.