This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I perceive balance to be. To me, balance is a sweet spot where I move through life easily, where I find it easy to connect to the dream that is living in my heart and live it. Life feels natural and good, really good. Imbalance, on the other hand, feels off, always. I perceive imbalance from the moment I experience boredom, a sense of listlessness.
Imagine we’re walking the tightrope again. For me, listlessness or boredome would be the moment when I feel I’m not one with the rope anymore, I become aware of the fact that I have lost focus. What happens next is the result of my training, whether I react or respond.

Reacting is going with the resistance, thinking things like: “I can’t believe that photographer used a flash, how stupid.” or “I can’t believe I got distracted by a flash, I’m such a cow!” or  “Here we go again, lost my balance, this is gonna take ages, now I have to regain my balance again before I can walk again, I hate this!” or “O no! I’m gonna fall! I’m never gonna regain my balance again, I suck at walking the tightrope!” Going with these feelings of resistance leads to more imbalance and before I know it, I am swinging back and forth on my feet, fighting to stay upright. Sometimes, my reaction to the perceived imbalance is so strong that I lose my balance completely and fall. What I have learned is that in order to fall I must have lost sight of my vision of all that I can be.
Getting on the tightrope, be it for the first time or the zillionth time, requires that you are aware of the tightrope. In order for you to live your best life, you have to know it is there, waiting for you, always. Then  you have to get up there. Getting up there means doing things differently than you did them before, instead of walking the ground floor, you have to climb the stairs, just a few steps or many meters, depending on where you are in your mastery of walking the tightrope.

Walking the tightrope literally is moving on a different level. To be clear, a tightrope walker is a top athlete. Top athletes are aligned with their vision, they have learned to stay balanced long enough to do their trick. What differentiates top athletes from amateurs is their ability to focus and their willingness to stay focused. Top athletes will do anything to make their vision come true. Their lives are in service of their vision, their lives are geared to excell. To excell they need focus and balance and they foster those by taking care of their body, mind and spirit through food, rest and physical, mental and spiritual exercise. They do what needs to be done, they live their vision to allow it to unfold. This seems paradoxical, but it is the only way to do it. For me that means that what I need to do – the quality of my food, rest and exercise – to get balanced and stay balanced are just as much part of my vision as walking the tightrope is.

Taking top athlete care of myself helps me to respond to imbalance in a constructive way.  When balance is part of my vision, when I focus on being balanced in order to walk the tightrope, I know that focus precedes balance. When I lose my balance, I can see that I have lost my balance because I lost focus, I am no longer aligned with my vision. When I am physically, mentally and spiritually fit I know that I can consciously regain focus by thinking a thought that brings ease, that relaxes my body and mind. You see, being balanced holds the middle between being focused and being relaxed. What creates instant ease and relaxation for me is compassion. I might need to play with my thoughts a bit before I hit a thought that feels right. The first thought I introduce might be: “No problem, everybody looses balance,” but when my mind retorts “what do you mean ‘no problem’!, it is a huge problem, because….”, then I start looking for a thought that may feel better and I might come up with: “you will be fine, just take a few slow breaths,” and somehow that clicks with me because that has helped me before. So I take few breaths, I feel my body getting more relaxed with each breath, I can feel the distribution of my weight on the rope.  And I think to myself: “That’s better, so far so good.” I relax my body and mind some more and I do feel more confident than I did a few breaths ago. “This may work. I may just pull this off.” Just feeling that thought creates more ease. “I think I will be fine. Just breath and focus on the rope.” Finding my balance. “I can do this. I am getting to the other side.”  Taking a step. “This feels good!” Taking another step. “I love walking the tightrope!”, walking with ease now, “There is nothing better than this. I am the master of the tightrope. Let’s do some tricks!”

Living my vision is not about doing tricks, but it is about a pure Love for Life that inspires tricks. Living my vision, walking the tightrope is about knowing my true, unlimited nature and living it, it is about being free and feeling ecstatic. That doesn’t mean I won’t loose my balance from time to time, or even fall off the tightrope completely, but that’s part of the thrill. If walking the tighrope would be completely safe, I might as well be exercising on ground level.

photo by Lies Meirlaen

Somehow most years come with a theme for me. Where last year’s theme was healing, this year’s theme is balance. I need balance to function optimally, to live my best life. I’m guessing that’s universal. The ingredients, most likely, are universal too – nurturing foods, rest, exercise, quiet time, play time. But what these are, how these are mixed and what balance looks like for you will be very personal.

My balancing act is not juggling as many balls as possible. My challenge is walking a tightrope, putting one foot in front of the other, not swinging more than I can handle, not falling off. Some days, I’m actually balanced enough to walk some steps. Those days feel awesome, I feel like I understand the trick and I’m invincible. But most of the time, I’m doing my best to stay on the rope, regaining my balance. I am getting better at regaining my balance and then be able to walk some steps again. Sometimes, I get out of balance too much and I fall.

Balance for me is a very fine line, I don’t have much wiggling space. My brains are more sensitive to input than most people’s brains, this means that my brains need to process more input and that takes more time. When I don’t manage this process well, I get overstimulated and I don’t function well until my brains get time to process it all. I am slowly learning to live with that, and interestingly it has allowed me to learn one or two things that I would not have come up with otherwise.

There is one ingredient that helps you keep balanced more than anything, and that is compassion. Compassion not only counteracts negative momentum, it creates mental balance when you need it most. Living without compassion is like walking the high wire without safety net. Compassion is reminding ourselves of what it means to be human. It is seeing that every person carries a unique story that has shaped their views and behavior, including you. Your story is as valid as everybody else’s story and vice versa. Everyone does the best they can, including you. Your best is not only different from my best, it also is different from moment to moment, and so is mine. Beneath our story, we are one.

When I am balanced, I know this, it is easily accessible. When I’m out of balance or have fallen off the rope, knowing this takes effort, but of all the things I could do to get balanced again, compassion takes the least effort and creates the most dramatic results.  When I’m out of balance, I don’t make the wisest decisions. When I fall, things are worse, and apart from feeling physically ill, I am upset with having fallen, again. It usually takes some time before I get to the place where I can say: that’s life, falling is part of life, and when you know better you do better. When I say those things to myself, I can feel my body and mind relax a bit and that feels so good that I cannot help but focus on it. And before I know it, although it doesn’t look like it, I know that I am doing the best I can at that moment, and that my best is different from moment to moment. Feeling the truth of these thoughts gives even more relief. It helps me cope with things like snapping at my daughter, it creates the space I need to help us both let go, and to do better next time. When you feel compassion towards yourself, you are forgiven upfront for your wrongdoings and you are able to love yourself for who you are, you are able to see the best of yourself and live the vision that is unfolding in your heart.

Balance is a state of mind. When your mind is balanced, body and rope move as one, there is no telling where your body ends and the rope starts. You know when to move and how to move. If you have ever seen an act on the tightrope, you may have noticed that after a risky move the artist waits before continuing. I imagine she waits for her body to merge with the rope again. Balance is created, always in the present moment. Balance is going with the flow, or rope in this case, moving with it, obeing it, trusting it. Balance is a choice that is made anew again and again and again. You cannot stockpile balance. You can create conditions that are favorable, but you cannot trick or cheat your way into it.

There is no balance without compassion, they are inseparable. Balance and compassion are one. Balance is seeing that your story is as valid as everybody else’s, that your life, however you choose to live it, is equally important. Balance for me is being at peace with not being able to do as much as I want to do, taking small steps in the direction of my dreams. And recognizing that, for me, nothing creates more imbalance than feeling resistance towards that. The thing I need to learn most is to wait for the rope and my body to merge again. I now know that I am capable of doing phenomenal things on the tightrope. And I am finally getting to the point where I see that the extent to which I allow myself to become one with the rope again defines the act I will be able to pull off. I can only muster that amount of patience when I feel compassion towards myself, when I don’t judge the parts that I don’t understand yet, when I dare to obey the rope and trust my body.

I really would love to learn from you. What does balance look like for you, how do you maintain it. What has it taught you? Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

photo by Taro Taylor

I remember really wanting to go to Art School. Instead I ended up studying French Linguistics and Literature. For all the wrong reasons. After a year of pushing myself, I knew  I made a humongous mistake, but not wanting to rock the boat, I continued to the point where I got my Master’s degree. After five years of hard work, I felt no pride, just relief.

As the people around me moved forward on what seemed to be a logical course, I had no clue who I was or what I wanted. I was stuck. For all of my life, I had followed other people’s directions. Now life had come to a screeching halt and nothing I tried worked out. Faced with my deepest fears, I hit rock bottom. A blessing in disguise, in retrospect, as it forced me to make a choice. I choose to live, really live. I decided I was going to get happy, not just happy, but as happy as humanly possible. The only thing was, I had no clue how. So, I went to the library and started reading self-help books by the dozen. Most of them didn’t make any sense, only some did, just a bit.

I worked out a vision for my life and started to pursue goals to get there. I did not realize that most of my vision was constructed, that I was pursuing goals that weren’t mine, or that I was numbing the pain pursuing them. But I did the best I could and I was happier and more empowered than I had been in over 20 years. I got fit, physically, mentally and emotionally, but the thing I still wanted most, a career, remained elusive. It frustrated me more than anything. When it came to work, everything felt backwards. Whatever I did,  I had this constant nagging feeling that this was not what I was supposed to do. What is it I need to do? What is my calling? I would ask over and over again. It felt like going in circles. I wasn’t finding any answers, at least not where I looking for them. Instead, I got answers in places where I wasn’t looking, and it took some time, read years, before I recognized a pattern.

When my daughter was born, the first time I looked into her eyes I knew that she was part of my purpose. I knew I was meant to be her mom. A few years later, when I was healing a series of life-long traumas, I knew that too was part of my purpose. I knew I was meant to heal the overwhelming pain that had been stored in my soul. And there was peace, deep peace in knowing that. And somehow that peaceful knowing gave me the strength I needed to go on. After years of searching for my life’s calling, last year I finally realized that it is our purpose to live the life our heart is dreaming for us. And that when we do, we unlock our calling. Our calling is a deep knowing that surpasses the mind. It can’t be grasped rationally, but it feels natural and logical. Our calling is in the things we keep getting back to. It is in the things that give us peace and joy. It is in the things where we feel most connected to ourselves and others. It is in the things that make us feel unequivocally good, because on the deepest level of our being we perceive a vibrational match. And because who we are in that moment resonates with the dream that is living in our heart, we feel purpose.

Sometimes, it takes years for us to see. Or at least for me it did. But once we are willing to accept that our vision can’t be rationally explained, once we dare to follow that quiet whisper off the trodden path, then things mysteriously start falling into place.

photo by Leonardini

Over the last weeks, I mentioned the vision we all have for ourselves, a deeply personal vision of all we can be. This vision is not a constructed idea of all that we think we should be, do and have, it rather is growing despite of it.
I believe we are governed by an evolutionary principle that is creating and organizing life. We are not only governed by it, we are part of it, all of us, allowing it to create and evolve through us. Our vision is our personal interpretation of this universal principle, it is where our personality and the evolutionary principle meet. Allowing this vision to unfold freely allows life to evolve abundantly. For life to unfold through us unhinderedly, we need to let go of all that is holding us from living a great life.

In the age we live in, we equal a great life with a grandiose life and we feel like we need to take giant steps to get there. In our quest for this grandiose life, we are tempted to believe that growth only happens when we push ourselves. Yet in most of us, this idea creates such resistance that we just don’t do it. It simply feels too big. As a result, most of us feel like we’re falling short, like we’re not measuring up. I tell you, this is not true. We all do the best we can. Everyone of us is exactly where he or she needs to be. You are perfect as you are, and to grow into the vision of all that you are, you don’t need to push yourself to the limit. Growth is natural, it can be optimized, not forced. The same is true for letting go. They go hand in hand. In nature, this is beautifully illustrated by the snake shedding its skin when it has outgrown it. The snake slides forward inch by inch, and in moving forward it lets go of its old skin. Life is inviting us to move forward, to evolve. Evolution is a gradual process. When we gradually move forward, we automatically leave behind the things that don’t serve us anymore. Living our vision doesn’t mean that we are living the end result, because there is no fixed end. Like life, our vision is ever-evolving. Living our vision means living towards our vision, shifting our self-image as we go.

We all have a bandwidth in which we navigate with relative ease. The middle matches exactly with our current self-image, it is where we feel most comfortable. At the bottom is the self-image we are shedding and at the top is the self-image we are growing into. Both outer ends are pulling at us, the lower because it is what we know best, and the upper because of the promise it holds. Yet both feel uncomfortable, the bottom because it doesn’t fit anymore and the top because we aren’t ready yet to show our new colors.
Living our vision is leaning into the upper half of our bandwidth, only just above the middle. By that I mean either finding the best feeling thought you have access to and focusing on it until it feels so real that you start acting from it. Or if you prefer the process to be the other way around, practicing a slightly improved habit until it feels natural. This way, without you truly realizing it, the image you have of yourself is evolving in the direction of your dreams. It is an inch by inch process, but if done consistently your new self-image starts showing and the old starts coming off.  And then one day, without forcing anything, your old ‘skin’ is gone and you realize you have completely grown into the self-image your heart had envisioned for you. This new you feels natural and logical.  And because your heart follows the same evolutionary principle, new dreams are ligned up for you and the process continues. For this is true, there is no limit.

Photo by Thomas Picard

In the past weeks, I always had an article up my sleeve. This week, I came to the shocking conclusion that I had run out of articles in a week where most of my time had already been allocated. Tuesday, I started writing frantically. Everything I tried didn’t work. With every minute that passed, I got more frustrated. “But tomorrow it is Wednesday. I want to post on Wednesday.” was playing in my head like a broken record. I got stuck, completely stuck.
On Wednesday morning, it finally dawned on me, I was not going to publish a good article that day, however much I wanted to. I had to make a choice between publishing an article that was not up to my standards or not publishing at all. Now I don’t publish for the sake of publishing, I publish because I want to make a difference. So the choice was simple, but it turned out to be not so easy.

Like you, I have a vision growing on the inside that wants to come out. It’s a gorgeous dream. And part of me can’t wait for it to be a physical reality. Yesterday morning, that part had a break down. “What if this is never going to happen?” it wailed. “What if I do the best I can and it proves not to be good enough?”, “What if no one will like what I write?” “Why would anyone want to read my writings anyway?” It was ugly. And it was untrue.
You see, it is happening. I am doing my best, and people tell me that they love how and what I write. But the three-year-old girl that is still living inside of me wants it now. She has to see to believe. And if I don’t hand her what she wants on a silver platter, she’s going to kick and scream.

What I know for sure is that things happen at the speed that you allow them to happen. The speed at which things happen is in inverse proportion to the resistance you are feeling. And that’s good, it means that things come our way when we are ready for them to happen. If my dream would unfold over the course of a night, it would knock me completely of my socks the next morning. I wouldn’t know what hit me. I would not be ready. My vision is unfolding at a pace that fits me. All I have to do is allow for it to unfold. Let’s see if I can make this more tangible.

Over 8,5 years ago, we moved from the city to the country. I had always travelled by bike, bus and train, but then I needed a car. The day I figured that out, I immediately started browsing the internet for cars. I was dreaming of a BMW roadster, but I was looking for a Toyota Starlet. We actually did have the money to buy a secondhand BMW, but not only wasn’t I comfortable spending that kind of money on myself, I wouldn’t have been comfortable driving it either. I was however ready for a car. The next day, we went to see granddad and he told us he was selling his car. It was the ugliest car I had ever laid my eyes upon, but it was running like a clock, it was bigger than a starlet, it had the right price and it was available.
Interestingly, when people saw me arrive in that car they would always be flabbergasted and comment that they had expected me to drive in a much fancier car, and they would always name a car that was very much like the car I was dreaming of. But I wasn’t ready yet. In the past 6 years, I have often prayed that my car would go to car heaven, but it turned out to be a persistent little bugger. I would dream of better-looking and safer cars, but on some level I wasn’t ready to take the necessary steps. In the past year, healing life-long traumas and letting go of so much emotional baggage, my self-image has drastically changed – it finally got up to speed with who I have grown into.
A few weeks ago, driving on the highway, praying for a miracle, or should I say a new car, I heard such a disturbing sound that I decided to stop on the emergency lane. It turned out I had a flat tire. The man who came to replace my tire told me that all my tires had to be replaced because the rubber of the tires was breaking down. It was the answer to my prayers. It was as if the Universe knew I just needed a little nudge in the right direction.
That evening, browsing the web, I did not look for the cheapest car. This time, I set a budget and looked for the car that I loved the most. One and a half week ago I found and bought the perfect car for me. It has every feature I hoped for and more. Yesterday, driving to the dealer to pick her up, I felt nervous. I had clearly grown out of my old car, but my new car was still at the upper end of my comfort zone. When I stepped into my new car, that feeling vanished. Driving home felt soooo good! I could not have imagined that having a car could possibly feel so delicious. It feels perfect. I am ecstatic. I just keep grinning.

Even though driving this car thrills me, it is my journey towards becoming this person who has allowed this car to become a physical reality that thrills me even more. My vision is unfolding, this car is physical proof.

In the previous posts, I’ve discussed overexpectation and overgeneralization as cues to stop thinking and start feeling. The last cue I’ll be discussing (for now) is overreaction. I’ve saved this cue for last, as it is the trickiest. It is a broad subject. You could even say that overexpectation and overgeneralization are forms of overreaction.

An overreaction is any sudden compulsive reaction that is out of proportion to what just happened. What makes this difficult to selfdiagnose is that you don’t recognize your  overreaction as out of porportion or illogical. To you, it is not only normal, it is completely logically and any other reaction would be viewed as abnormal.
One moment nothing is the matter, the next you’re livid, blaming others, bursting with tears, victimizing yourself, unable to speak, experiencing a social freeze, hitting the bottom of a tub of Ben & Jerry’s or the limit on your credit card, finishing the fifth cigarette in five minutes or your third glass of scotch. You may also experience instant tiredness, the need to watch the complete Downton Abbey series or you read two romance novels in a row, like I did recently.

An overreaction is usually caused by a situation in which we unconsciously stumble upon an old unresolved pain. Because we have learned to fear pain, our first reaction is to make it go away, to do anything to not feel it. Although our reaction is an overreaction in response to what just happened, it is always proportional to the pain we are trying to avoid. Your overreaction gives a temporary relief. After the relief usually come feelings of guilt, and these are often coped with through rationalization and justification.
By overreacting, we numb our feelings. Your logical reaction may be, ‘But when I’m angry or sad, I am not suppressing my feelings, that’s stupid.’ And up to a point you’re right, yet what I’m suggesting is that those feelings are a diversion. For years, my primary reaction was sadness. It was the tip of the iceberg, I was ignoring what is under the water. And I have learned that this is part of our development. Everyone has icebergs, we have to learn  to see what is under water.

Sometime ago, someone shared her pain with me. When she left, I felt sad and unable to concentrate on my work. The next day, I was still feeling sad and unable to concentrate and I had a deep need to just do nothing. I felt like sleeping. Instead, I went for a walk. And instead of going to the park, as I planned, I walked to the mall and bought a double romance novel, headed home, made a cup of tea and started reading. I intended to read just one and then start working. When I finished the first one, I had figured out that I had stumbled upon unresolved pain. Years ago, I made a row of bad decisions and caused pain in others. Eventhough, I had forgiven myself for the bad decisions, I had not forgiven myself for the hurt I had caused. Instead, I had rationalized and justified it. Now, the guilt emerged to be dealt with. I wasn’t ready to deal with it and read the second romance novel, in order not  to feel all the pain I had been feeling all these years ago.

I’ve been practicing to recognize overreaction in myself for almost 15 years now, and still the need to numb the pain can be so strong that I do not (want to) recognize it. I’m not a particular fan of pain. Like most of us, I’d rather avoid it. What I have learned however is that beyond the pain is the absence of pain, which can only be described as exhilarating. Even though I have never skydived, I imagine it is somewhat alike. Before you, jump, you feel resistance to get out of the plane, because you don’t know what will happen. What if your parachute won’t open and you will die. When you jump you don’t feel well either. You’re experiencing massive turbulence, you feel immense fear. After a while, you realize there is nothing you can do about that, you relax and you start to ease into the uneasiness. The fear subsides and you allow yourself to free fall, you are able to look around and see the landscape beneath you with clarity. And just when you think about opening your parachute, you stop falling  and you glide through the air. And you remember you were tandem skydiving all along. Having landed safely, you want to do it again, because there is no better feeling. You feel exhilarated.

To be able to let go of unresolved pain, you first have to learn to recognize the behavioral pattern that you use to numb the pain, you may have several. Once you how you numb yourself, you try to bring awareness to it. You could do that by stopping dead in your tracks, but I don’t recommend that. There is a good reason why you’re numbing the pain. I don’t want to force you to feel pain when you’re not ready to, that could cause an even deeper trauma. You, only you, know when you are ready enough. Instead, lean into it, bring awareness to what you’re doing. When you’re emptying that tub of Ben and Jerry’s, know that it is not the icecream that you’re craving. Try to taste each individual scoop of Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Eat it slower than you normally would and allow yourself to feel what comes up. Then lean back, let the pain pass. The pain your feeling feels as real as it felt when you first experienced it, but it isn’t happing now. Be curious. Be kind. Don’t blame your younger self and don’t victimize your present self. Simply allow it to pass through you.  You don’t need to analyze, that is just another form of numbing, all you need to do is feel the pain and be compassionate with yourself. If you have difficulty feeling compassion for yourself, imagine yourself at the age the pain was created, as a kid, or as a baby. If that is too difficult imagine something you can feel love toward, even if it is your cat, a puppy or your favorite bearded dragon, feel the pain while feeling kindness.

I can tell you this, you will never be completely ready, there will always be a part of you that will want to run in the other direction. These are the moments when you rely on the vision that is growing in your heart, and you jump even if you fear that your parachute won’t open. This isn’t a quick fix, you may not feel better after you have brought awareness to it and you may need to do it again and again. Letting go of unresolved pain is an act of courage. And everyone who is willing to go through the pain is a hero in my book.
What I know for sure is that you are carried by a force greater than you. You will find support in the unlikeliest of places and you will land safely. With every ounce of pain gone, you will feel incrementally lighter and you will take quantum leaps in the direction of all that you can be.

In part 7 in this series on letting go, we covered overexpectation and how to deal with it in a way that is empowering. In this part, we’re going to do the same for overgeneralization. While a generalization is unspecific, most generalizations are true (like this one). Overgeneralizations, on the other hand, are always untrue (even this one).

Cue 2: words that indicate overgeneralization, the all-or-nothing words – always, ever, never, no one, everyone, everytime, everything, anything, nothing. Our mind has the tendency to overgeneralize, distort or delete information. There is nothing wrong with that, that is just the way our brain works. And if it is working for you – “I always win the lottery.” -  then I wouldn’t change it. The thing is, in most cases it isn’t. Negatively stated  overgeneralizations often feel like an attack. When we feel we are being attacked our body gets into fight-or-flight mode as a result. When our body gets in that state, our amygdala heats up, ready to sound the alarm. To take leadership of your thinking, you have to challenge your mind.
“She never listens to me!” When you hear an overgeneralization, you get in your imaginary pause box and ask yourself, “Really? Never? …” This will cool the amygdala a bit. Then you specify your statement so it doesn’t contain any overgeneralization and as a consequence comes closer to being true. “I feel she doesn’t listen to me when I talk about    crocheting.” The more specific, the better. This will cool your amygdala even more. Then find the opposite of your overgeneralization. “She always listens to me.” Of course, this isn’t true either. Now find real examples of when she listened to you. “She listened to me when I called her in the middle of the night after my cat died.” Do these answers change how you feel about the situation? Ask yourself if or how you want to react now? Which reaction is in keeping with your vision?
Of course, you may come to the conclusion that indeed this overgeneralization is a close representation of what is actually happening. She only listens when you talk about your sex life. It isn’t never, but it may not be what you want it to be either. Then this conclusion leaves you with a choice.

This is just a different form of bridging. By questioning your deep-rooted negative thoughts, you uproot them. Think of a garden filled with weeds. These weeds prevent your plants from growing, because they usually are better at extracting the necessary nutrients from the soil. By clearing the weeds, you give your creative thoughts room to grow. When the weeds are gone, you have the freedom to grow thoughts and feelings that are in keeping with your vision. Personally, I am not in favor of ‘realism’. I do believe in cultivating positive thoughts and feelings, even if they distort other folk’s ‘reality’. It is my experience that these positive thoughts and feelings will eventually become ‘my reality’. Yes, it may be ‘true’ that you live in a dumpster, but that doesn’t mean you have to have dumpster thoughts “Nothing ever works for me” and dumpster feelings “I am nothing”.  You don’t have to deny living in dumpster, to deny the thoughts and feelings that usually go with it.

No matter your circumstances, you can choose to create a different reality by taking leadership of your thoughts, by bridging your thoughts and feelings to a place of abundance, where you feel gratitude for the many blessings that befall you and see ways to realize the vision that is living in your heart.

In the next part, we will discuss overreaction and how pausing can help us let go of this behavioral pattern.

photo by Manny Proebster

Welcome to part 7 in this series on letting go. If you’re new, here’s part 1 and if you missed one, here’s part 6.

Let’s bring to memory part our first session of the Mind Agility Training. I asked you: If the training field were to represent your life, what course are you going to run? What do you dream for your self? What vision for your life is growing on the inside? What do you want to give birth to? Who is it that longs to come out and show herself to the world?
Pause obstacles are spaces designed to become still, this stillness allows for self-awareness to emerge, which helps us connect to the vision we have and make choices that are in alignment with it.

To train our mind to pause we’re going to combine our mind’s ability to recognize patterns  with the command ‘pause’. Imagine the dog running over the field, like a whirlwind, going over and under obstacles. When it comes to the pause box you say ‘stop’, ‘wait’ and after several seconds ‘go!’.
Let’s make the pause box a simple designated area on the ground. The first time the dog encounters the pause box, it will most likely pass it without noticing. Our job is to associate our command ‘pause’ with certain cues. As I said in the previous article, our minds are very good at recognizing these cues. All we have to do is activate our inner-Google, type our query in the search box and hit the looking glass button. After we have done that our mind will start highlighting thoughts that match our search query.  There are several kinds of cues we can instruct our mind to look out for.

Cue 1: look out for words that indicate ‘over-expectation’ – should, must, ought to, have to, are supposed to, or any conjugation of those verbs.
When you hear yourself say ‘he should’, ‘they must’, ‘she ought to’, ‘it has to’, your expectations are off. You cannot control other people’s thoughts, emotions and actions, let alone the NFL Super Bowl scores or what weather it will be on any given day. You can only control your own thoughts, emotions, words and actions. Confronted with situations that clash with your expectations, ask yourself whether this is important to you or not. Are you just getting upset because you are used to getting upset when your expectations aren’t met, or does this situation have bearing on your vision? If it is the first, you respond inwardly by telling yourself that there are sides to this story that you aren’t seeing and you do your best to see other possible sides to this story. This creates empathy, compassion and understanding. Outwardly you do nothing, you just let it pass. If what happens is connected to your vision, for instance your vision on how you intend to be treated, then you ask yourself how you would like the situation to be and what you can do now and in the future to generate a different response. For instance, ‘You should listen to me!’, might become ‘I want for us to communicate respectfully.’ or ‘I want us to find a solution that works for both of us.’ By changing your focus, you change your behavior and consequently you change the outcome. You move from a place of neediness and false expectations to a place of contribution and service.

If your expectations are off when it comes to other people, your expectations of yourself will undoubtedly be too high as well.  If you hear yourself say ‘I should’ ‘I ought to’ ‘have to‘ ‘need to’, you need to stop what you’re doing and get your motivation clear. Very likely you are living someone else’s vision, not your vision. Suppose you catch yourself thinking, ‘… I really, really have to go, Mom will kill me if I don’t attend her Easter egg hunt’. This is very likely a false thought. In reality, no one is forcing you at gunpoint. You may feel like you have to go so much that not going doesn’t seem an option. Still, if you feel reluctant to attend the family egg hunt, you have two options: you either change your motivation and go or you have a honest conversation with your Mom and you don’t go. Don’t kid yourself by thinking that changing your motivation is easier than the dreaded conversation with your mommy dearest. And often in life, changing your motivation is just not an option. Once we’ve become aware of a ‘false thought’, we go inside, we close our eyes and we see the person that is longing to show herself to the world. Does she love spending time with her family, is that important to her?  How does she want to spend Easter? What would she do? And how would she handle this situation? And that’s what you do. In this case you may decide that you love spending time with your family, that Easter for you really is about connecting and you don’t want to have all your nephews and nieces near your carefully decorated easter tree, so your parent’s house actually is the perfect place. Or you really love spending time with your family, but you love to be home for Easter. In that case you call your Mom, or your Pa, and you tell them that you love spending time together, and you want to organize this year’s egg hunt and you invite them to your home. Or you love spending time together, but for some reason, that is important to you, you won’t be attending the Easter egg hunt this year or the next five years, and you don’t waver when you Mom starts shouting, sobbing or doing her little guilt dance. It may be quite possible, that you are actually terrified with the prospect of having to confront your mom. And that’s okay, it doesn’t have is to be perfect. And maybe, for this moment, it is too big a step, that’s okay too. Knowing who you really, really want to be, will allow you to make tiny steps and work your way to it.

I want to lightly touch on ‘I want’ and ‘I need’ These words that can indicate both healthy and unhealthy need or desire. A healthy want or need will contribute to your vision and will be a step in the right direction, the unhealthy variety is your inner-3-year-old throwing a power tantrum. The first is about trusting your inner-vision, the other is your mind trying to control your outer-world. Pausing is a way to learn the difference and get in touch with what is truly important to you an act on it.

If you’re somewhat like me, you’ll want to get it perfect from the start and you don’t like the uncomfortable feeling of doing things differently. I don’t know how to break this to you gently, but there is no perfect way to do this, unless perfect includes stumbling, falling, getting up again and being okay with it. Feeling uncomfortable is part of the process of growing, and it is something you better get used to as soon as possible, for it is the base of living your best life.

Next time, in part 8, we’ll continue with the next cue, overgeneralisation and we may even get to overreaction. For now, take it easy. Lean into it. Celebrate the cues you noticed and celebrate the cues you missed. You cannot do it wrong, you can only do it better next time.

photo by Maja Petric

Welcome to part 6 in this series on letting go. (if you’re new, go to part 1 or if you missed getting out of the thread wheel go to part 5) In the past two articles, I did write on letting go, and although I recommend you read them if you want to learn more about the process of letting go, I did not include them in the series for the simple reason that they didn’t fit the format. Today, we’re going to continue the Mind Agility Course. And have a got a great subject for you, training your mind to pause on purpose. Such a powerful concept. So excited.

In dog agility, pause obstacles are marked off areas where the dog must pause, by either sitting or lying down for a designated period of time, usually about 5 seconds. Imagine a dog running full speed through the various obstacles and then when it arrives at the table, instead of crossing it one way or the other, as it does with all the other obstacles, it has to stop. You would think that it is a difficult exercise, however it is not, for the dog it is like any other exercise. Like our mind, the dog’s mind works with cues. The new cue is a marked off area, like a table or a box, which means stop. In these exercises, we’re training to stop the mind on purpose, even when it is going full speed.

Our minds are used to running around, simply because we have let them for so long. No more. If we want to get to the finish smoothly and quickly, we must teach our mind to follow the cues. In this exercise, we will train our mind to stop when it sees marked off areas designed for stopping. The reason we want our mind to stop is so it won’t keep running as it usually would. By stopping, we interrupt the normal flow of things. And in that moment, awareness is born.

What do I mean when I say, ‘awareness is born’? To be aware means that you have knowledge, that you are conscious, sensible, awake and alert. When you interrupt the flow of your thoughts, there is space for awareness to arise. It is a space in which we are conscious of what is happening, perceptive of underlying patterns, awake to new possibilities and alert to danger. In that space we go from being reactive to being response-able. In that space we are able to create responses that are aligned with the vision we have for ourselves. And we can let go of old patterns, as well as blame, self-victimization, taking anything personally.

When the dog gets on the pause obstacle, it stops and waits until it is allowed to continue. We’re going to create our own pause obstacle. Our brains are ingenious scanning and sorting devices. Give them a search command and they will find it. Stop reading for a moment and look around you. <stop reading> <look around> <start reading again> What did you see?

Now give your mind the command to search for all red items and look around you again. What did you see now? If you are like the rest of us, this time all the red items in the room were highlighted, standing out from the rest. It’s the same when you decide to buy a new car and all of a sudden you notice the car you intend to buy everywhere. This part of our brain is called the recticular activating system, or RAS. It is a group of cells that sort through the massive amounts of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis and bring to our attention anything that is related to what we are focused upon, consciously or unconsciously. We’re going to use this mechanism to our advantage. We’re going to train our minds to recognize certain patterns and stop when we come across them.

In the next parts, I’ll be discussing the three patterns we’re going to look out for: overexpectation, overgeneralization and overreaction. These are immature reactional patterns, think kindergarten. The cool thing about being a mom is that I get to see  reactional patterns as part of evolution in the form of a beautiful daughter. She is six now. Recently I have discussed the pause box with her, for the first time. She got it. Six, people, she’s six. I don’t know how old you are, but I can tell you these patterns are long overdue. It is time to get over them. In part 7, we’ll start with how to let go of overexpectation.

photo by Bruce Brouwer

Letting go is a process of releasing what is weighing us down and consequently holding us back. Letting go is the releasing of energy that we have stored in our bodies and minds. When we resist something, the energy contained in the event is stored. Everything is energy vibrating at different levels. Everything in the Universe is vibrating in and out of existence. The slower the vibration the more solid we perceive it to be. On some unconscious level, we know a rock to be more solid than our bodies, and a pansy to be less solid. When we resist what is happening in the moment, we resist the flow of life,  we don’t allow the vibration of an event to pass through us. Every trauma is stored away energy, and everytime it is activated and we don’t allow it to be released, we add to it. Everytime we add to it, the vibration slows down and this package of energy that we are holding onto is becoming more dense. At first it may have been just be a twig in the flow, but before we knew it we created a dam and it is blocking the flow, considerably if not almost completely. We built it to feel safe, at first it worked for us but when we grew up it  and kept adding to it, it started working against us. Now we have to let it go to feel safe again, let go of the pain and the fears that hold us back. Letting is coming full circle. Letting go will allow you to be who you have always wanted to be.

I started the deconstruction of my dam over 10 years ago. I did not really know where to start, so I just took twig after twig. At times, the water would start pooring through and I would fear the unleashing of all that water, the loss of control, and I would stop taking twigs or even start putting them back. This is exactly what I did when I encountered a real big branch. I knew that taking it away would  break the dam. I feared I wasn’t ready and with the last energy that was in me, I rebuilt my dam. When I finished, my dam was bigger and better than before. This time, I had done a real good job. I was a master Beaver. My creek had run dry almost completely on one side and on the other side the water pressure was building. The dam I had built on the inside was manifesting in my real life. I got ME and was left without energy, I had a hurting body that moved at snail speed and thoughts that went so slow that I was unable to hold a thread for longer than 5 seconds.

I have always felt a presence greater than me. As I grew up in a conservative christian family, this presence was called God. I loved going to church, I loved to sing God’s praises and I loved to pray, but most of all I loved how God’s love for me felt. It was the most amazing feeling, timeless and so precious that it would move me to tears. Growing up, this Love never left me, but it was muffled by the voice of my mind, which grew increasingly loud. Yet, in the midst of the noise there was always the memory of what I knew to be true and how it felt to be Loved that way. That memory pulled on me, even when I wasn’t aware of it anymore. In my twenties, my life was centered around the church. But I became increasingly uncomfortable with the words and works of men, who claimed it was of God, while I did not recognize God’s signature. I became uncomfortable with the personification of God, because I knew deep down that God was too big for us to know. And finally I became uncomfortable with the word God, because I knew the experience of this presence is undefinable and indescribable. I stopped going to church, but was at a loss. I did not remember how to reconnect with this unnameble Source of Love and Joy. Doing my best to fit in, I had unlearned to recognize God’s voice calling.

In September 2011, after having lived with ME for over a year and a half, I had no other option but to start deconstructing my dam again. This time, I was ready to start at the bottom. I took away a bigger branch. The dam didn’t break, but the energy started flowing again. A year ago, I was ready for the biggest branch. My energy level returned to normal again and I was in heaven. I loved feeling this energy flow through me. My paradigm had shifted, but old habits die slowly. First, without realizing, I tried to swim very hard with the flow, which was almost as exhausting as swimming against the current. It didn’t feel right, in my heart I knew that Life was flowing easily. Feeling that and acting on it, turned out to be two different things. It took some time to see that. When I finally got it, I stopped trying so hard and started to study how my energy and the remainder of my dam were interacting. At one point, I recognized how the movement of energy in my body interacted with the energy of the stream, and I could feel when they joined. I could feel the rise of energy when intuition kicked in and I knew it would be a good decision without having any rational back-up. This led to a series of synchronistic events, one of them being a workshop Release Technique led by Jan Bommerez on the last Saturday in February.

I had been able to ‘work’ on issues when they got up, but after the workshop I could actually recognize the density of a branch in my stream, I could feel in my body where my energy wasn’t flowing freely. It’s like when you look at a dam and you see the water pooring over and under a branch and you know that it will come lose easily with the help of the water that is already flowing around it. When I woke up early the next Sunday, everybody was still asleep. With the intention of releasing anything that was holding me back, I scanned my body. In my stomach area I could feel a density. Simply by focusing on it, it came undone and the flow took it downstream. In that moment, I just focused on the next and the next and the next. I let the Stream guide me. Then I felt my dam break and the flow equalized, it was an amazing feeling. On Monday and Tuesday, I was feeling sluggish and I didn’t understand, because I could feel the energy flowing, but I was not going with it. Until Wednesday, when I felt inspired to watch an interview with Panache Desai. Listening to him, recognizing Life’s Love flowing through him, I felt a shift. In that moment, I realized that I was still holding onto the trunk in the middle of my stream, I was holding on to the fear of being fully loved by Life, the fear of shining brightly for all to see. Then I let go. It was the most breathtaking and humbling experience. I felt God’s Grace and Peace washing through me. I say God by lack of a better word. For me, it was coming home, reconnecting to the Love I had been immersed in singing God’s praise as a kid. Imagine being so touched by something really kind someone does for you that tears are welling up in your eyes, and then multiply it by some. It feels GOOOOD!

Life is circular and I just gained access to a new level. Gone is the fear not to be good enough, gone are both the need and fear to either fit in or to stand out. I AM perfect as I AM. And so are you. You ARE as gorgeous and talented as you have always secretly dreamt of. Life is good, even if you can’t see it. Life is the expansion of all that you are and that includes a life jacket. Will you play the game of life with me? Dare you start taking down your dam and flow on the current of Life? Dare you start living the life of your dreams and share your gifts.  I’d love to play with you.

photo by Victor Maltby