“I KNOW IT INTELLECTUALLY BUT …”
But? But your heart can't rise to such lofty thinking? Your gut's in a wad, like it just got punched, and won't let the message filter down? I'm fascinated to watch people push the logical mind away from matters of the heart, as if head and heart don't speak the same language. In fact, they do. I want to invite you to bring them both to the table for parley. You're out of whack when you feel this divide, and it's important (and actually not that hard) to realign. SAY THE WHOLE SENTENCE. When someone bringing me active pain launches some “I know it in my head” sort of statement, I often hit the pause button and have them find what they're actually saying—and actually say it.
THERE'S NO PROBLEM WITH HEAD-HEART LAG. So what that you know the truth but you're not feeling it yet? You'll get there. Feelings do come along later—have you noticed? Nobody says, “I know in my heart that it's okay she died peacefully in her sleep at 85, but my head just can't wrap around it.” You're right on schedule if your wounded feeling self is limping along (even dripping a bit of blood) behind the seemingly cold, antiseptic facts. Those facts could actually support your emotional self in its healing (I'll tell you how—read on). So really, truly: there's no problem. YOU COULD MAKE IT A PROBLEM, THOUGH. Don't use head-heart lag as an excuse not to budge. When coaching clients tell me, “I know it intellectually, but ...” they're often starting to argue for limitations or declare that they're stuck stuck stuck. Okay, so you see you're not fully aligned with the truth of your situation. Good to notice—actually useful to take in. But don't stop there. Having noticed, now move toward alignment. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T PUT YOUR HEART IN CHARGE HERE. If the heart leads the head, you'll just get more out of whack. I'm not talking about distrusting the heart or making the head more important. In this specific case, when you know something to be true that the heart has not yet gotten behind, you'll just make trouble if you decide for the uncertain, hurting heart and disregard what you understand as true for you. Have you ever watched in horrid fascination while someone you love talked themself back into the bad relationship? Ay, bolstered by the beating bruise inside the chest, they listed reason after reason why this (perfectly normal, if harsh) pain meant they must hurry back to Way Wrong. What you watched them do was yank the mind into alignment with the heart. Anyone can find or fabricate reasons those strong, compelling feelings must be telling the truth. The mind is adept at digging up evidence for any idea, true or false. (Remember your high-school self in speech class compiling proof for both sides of the debate?) But you're going the wrong direction if you try aligning head with heart, and this could mean a costly detour. Go the other way. How, again? DO USE YOUR HEAD TO SOOTHE YOUR HEART. Make soothing yourself a priority, especially when feelings are raw. If you put your head in charge, this doesn't mean you have to shove down feelings (bad idea!) or treat them like they don't matter in the face of sound logic (odious self-invalidation). Instead, you can actually use your capacity to reason to gently bring the heart along. (It actually wants to catch up.) Tell your feeling self anything you can believe that's actually true. Let's say you made the short list of job candidates but didn't get the offer. Tell yourself: I was one of three seriously considered out of many. I got their attention. The interviews went swimmingly—I even had fun. I presented well. This is good news, not bad. My experience is solid—I feel great about my resume. It doesn't mean I'm not good enough if someone else was a better fit. That won't keep me from the right job for me. I even see why this wasn't the one (and name those reasons specifically). … Do carry on. Keep using what you know intellectually to speak sweetly to the heart, and be sure you tell only the truth. ONE CAVEAT! Here's a trick: Don't expect what the head comes up with to make the heart instantly stop hurting. You're just soothing the heart—not fixing it, not making it all better. You're being there for yourself, letting the wiser part of you help you scooch from wretched to bearable, and eventually to total healing. Allow the journey, and trust it. Trust your knowing. What you know intellectually can help your heart find its way to alignment. TRY SAYING THIS I know it intellectually and I'm holding my heart kindly while it catches up to the facts. I know I don't need to rush this, and I'll review what I know to be true often so I don't start telling myself lies or yanking my tender heart in the wrong direction. I trust my process and intend to make it as kind as I can. Love & blessings, Jaya
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Consider that you may have it backwards: solutions don't make you feel better; solutions come once you've made yourself feel better. If you're a match to the problem, here's what it looks like: You're walking around feeling what it makes you feel—frustrated, scared, sad. You talk about what's happening as a problem to be solved (or as hard or impossible to solve), as urgent, as being terrible (or infuriating, or hopelessly unfair, or whatever the emotive flavor du jour). You think about it a lot (as a problem). You worry, strategize, agonize, obsess. This keeps you in the problem. If you're a match to the solution, you trust there's already a solution on the way—called in the moment you observed or named the problem. You know it's already okay and will resolve—all will come clear without your needing to know how right now. You're able to let go of the parts you can't control. You're watching for where you can step in gracefully; you're open to inspiration, which you can grasp and respond to quickly (catch the wave) because you're not weighed down with worry or even hopelessness. In short, you can hold the thing with curiosity and expectation, trusting that this problem is ultimately no problem, and simply move toward or open to the solutions as you see each next step or possibility. This brings in solutions. How do you get out of hard emotions that perpetuate the problem—or keep you as a match to the problem? The short version is, Quit putting a story to the feelings, and just be with the feelings. Or, since the story will assert itself, notice what you're saying to yourself or others about it, and quit saying it. Of course, you'll have thoughts. Thoughts happen. The trick is not to get involved with them. I have a client currently going through a break-up and she worked beautifully on simply witnessing thoughts moving through. They're so typical, those break-up thoughts, aren't they? I'm not lovable, No one will ever love me, There's something wrong with me, I'm no good at relationships. Later, in session, she and I were able to question and deconstruct those thoughts. On her own, she just put them aside and took care of her emotions. She let herself feel and cry without telling herself lies (or without focusing on and running with any lies that temporarily whispered to her). Think of writing thoughts down as a great and crazy-simple tool for getting them put down and put away without your losing track of what they can reveal. (Ah, a break-up still shows me what's left of my illusion of unworthiness.) If you want to look at them later and pull them apart, call them for the lies they hold, or see what else is true besides what you were believing at your worst, do that. A how-to note: Try making lists of short, simple sentences, one thought per line, instead of journaling—which can have the same negative effect as telling it all to a friend. You expand the problem and all the feelings around it as you tell detail after detail, and embroider without even noticing, and throw in a bunch of interpretations as if they were facts. (She undid everything I'd worked on since the project began. They threw me under the bus.) Focus on soothing what feels bad—not understanding it, fixing it, or making it go away; not coming up with solutions so you can feel better. Consider that you may have it backwards: solutions don't make you feel better; solutions come once you've made yourself feel better. Thus, simply being with the feelings kindly becomes your first priority, and you can feel good (not irresponsible) about not thinking it through. Look away from the story, and make it your one and only job to soothe the feelings. Be your own mama to your own inner sick kid, and do anything to make things feel better. (If you're male, ungendered, gender-fluid—whatever—still be your own mama.) Maybe it won't look like reading aloud, bringing juice popsicles, making soup, stroking a forehead, or singing songs (though it could). It might initially look like simply witnessing the pain, allowing it, dropping into it, giving it breath (the only balm you can apply from within). If you don't have my book, Scooch!, you can get it from Amazon as a real book or an e-book (you can also peek in and read a bunch with Look Inside feature). Chapter 3 walks you through separating out minding the pain body and tending the mind. Chapter 5, “Good Tears versus Bad Tears,” describes how to release emotion without getting sucked into story. Quit figuring out the solution. Get out of ploblem solving. When effort and striving characterize a search for solutions, you're still a match to the problem. Instead, scooch toward trust that you're fine and the solutions will come. Then you're in what Abraham-Hicks calls a space of allowing, and solutions can come in (more) effortlessly, perhaps in unexpected ways. A how-to note: Speaking of Abraham, you can use their tactic (and easy-to-remember two-word admonition) GO GENERAL. Pan out and away from the details you've got under the microscope, and tell yourself general things you can believe: I don't have to figure this out right now. I've been in worse places and it worked out. I can think of one person right now who's had a similar experience and got through it. They may be able to provide support and resources. I'm doing fine. I can think of three things I've done right recently in this realm and whatever I've done wrong is probably fixable and certainly forgivable. Keep talking for as long as you need to to reset your mind toward the general, believable, and kind without needing to work out any particular kinks in the tubing. By the way, I'm not categorically against problem-solving. Brainstorming and pushing around puzzle pieces have their place. Do them after the soothing, when you're in a space of allowing. How fine and well (relaxed, trusting, joyful, present) can you be before the solutions come in? Being a match to the solution does much more than bring in solutions. It allows you to be fine before solutions come: you're already okay; you don't need solutions to make you okay. It creates the openings for solutions to come. It allows you to see when radical solutions are needed or, conversely, when there's actually nothing to do whatsoever. It also releases you from urgency and the illusions around timing and time that we human beings so easily fall prey to. The basic concept in this writing comes from Abraham-Hicks, and their language goes like this: “Be a vibrational match for the solution, not the problem.” I know that as soon as the word vibration gets in somewhere, it can sound airy-fairy. That's why I saved it for last. And have you read up to this point? This is so solid. If you're not sure it'll work, I invite you to experiment with it (and make it a grand experiment—what have you got to lose, except a furrowed brow and tense muscles?). For myself, once I got past the languaging, I found that Abraham's teachings often come to me in an instant on a deep level, and then I tease them out to understand the application through various means: things they say and things I experiment with on my own and the seemingly magical ways, right when I'm working with a particular idea, that my clients seem to have stuff come up that obviously asks for just that concept. Now that this is part of my conceptual tool kit, I notice that people can have a releasing ah-ha when I simply point out that they're being a vibrational match for the problem. So hey, what problem are you a vibrational match for right now? Wanna be a match for the solution? Love & blessings, Jaya I was feeling sad sad sad over the apparent end of something I'd begun with someone in that crazy-elusive romantic realm, and a sweet friend was sitting with me by phone to help me witness my pain body and listen to my spoken thoughts. I heard her say back to me something like, “I hear you [my cue she was reflecting back what I'd said], it's so frustrating when you're on a certain trajectory with someone and then it just drops off into nothing.” Trajectory? That caught and shifted my attention. What trajectory? I hadn't used that word but my friend was responding to what I was presenting. I was deep enough in conversation mode that I began with, “Yeahhh ...” but that's as far as I got going down that track. I stopped and started explaining my theory of models, to which my friend, bless her, listened patiently. I keep getting fascinated by how much we live out of models. Don't get me wrong: models are wondrously useful sometimes. I give my clients models all the time that they find very helpful (when the models resonate—a helpful model will resonate), and that allow them to understand themselves (like locating their personality programming as a number on the Enneagram), or to drop rigidity and perfectionism (like using Molly Gordon's 7-5-4 standard), or get to forgiveness, trump procrastination, shift a relationship with sleeplessness—any number of things. Models can be lovely, especially if we recognize them as models and take them on consciously with the awareness of how they serve us. We may even think of them as positive ways to trick ourselves, as one client is currently doing with a just-get-ready model. She's taken to Just Getting Ready for the activities she avoids (put on coat and winter gear, grab the yoga mat or relevant supplies) and even physically going to the place where something's happening, telling herself all the while that she still doesn't have to go if she doesn't want to. It gets her there. It allows her to live into her intentions even when she feels she isn't up to it. You gotta love a good model. The problem with models is that we adopt them all the time without recognizing them as models. It's similar to the problem of walking around believing your thoughts as if they were narrating reality to you (that's just never what thoughts are up to). When we use models unconsciously, we turn conceptual frameworks into statues and treat them as if they really existed as concrete entities. We give them way too much respect. We get hooked into total illusion, believing ourselves to be on a trajectory, for example. There's really no such thing. I could draw a cute little diagram illustrating this trajectory I'm on with someone, and while it may help me understand or express something, I'm also now at risk of believing this trajectory is real. If I think I'm riding it when it's interrupted, I have to screech to a halt or possibly get thrown off or take some free fall into nothing—ay, get me off this thing. But a trajectory is only one way to understand the collection of events and interactions that I'm organizing by ordering them on said trajectory. Ultimately, that's what models are for: they provide ways of organizing our thinking about something (anything—relationships, events, tasks, goals, mental health) to feel we have a handle on it. But once we set up the model, we start to think of it only in this way, as if it really had a fixed form. We forget that we could have (and still could) set up an entirely different model, and then we'd have the experience in an entirely different way. This matters! People use drug therapies or have surgeries believing these are the only way, just because of the models they (or their care providers) have adopted. With a nutritional or holistic-health model, suddenly drugs and surgery aren't necessary. Or people get trapped in ill-fitting lifestyles because they're in an either-or binary model when truly there's a whole spectrum you could posit as another model containing innumerable options. (Here's a cool TED Talk on a sexuality spectrum beyond gay vs. straight.) So sure, I can posit a trajectory if I'm exploring relationship with someone, then events get ordered on some rising line and there's some direction it's supposedly headed. There's nothing wrong with this, except that the trajectory doesn't really exist anywhere in time and space—it's not real—and my belief in it will require me to be dismayed when the trajectory is interrupted, and then I'll feel that something harsh has happened to me. A model I prefer for that exploring-relationship thing is the idea of two people moving through a series of yes and no responses, one at a time, until one or both get to a global yes or a global no. That yes-no series doesn't actually exist either, but it's about choice and agency and clarity and allows spaciousness in decision-making. (I like it.) (And I'm not saying there's no dismay in encountering a no or that sad can or should be avoided.) I catch clients all the time in illusory models about any topic under the sun. People often explain to me where they rank on a certain scale—a scale that doesn't exist in the realm of reality. The proposed scale could be their family mythology, or some lineup of a random population like the people they graduated with, or a cultural concept of beauty or strength or success—you name it. But the illusory ranking in their mind, treated as real, keeps them perpetually believing they fall short—and this affects how big they live, how much they accomplish, how peaceful they feel (I could go on). Many of the identities we posit function as models, and these may or may not be useful—they may be helpful and harmful by turns. By identities, I mean single mother, or sober alcoholic, or someone living with chronic disease, or the black sheep of the family, or the one who just can't get it together financially. If thinking about some shared challenges and concerns of, say, single mothers helps you to feel validated and supported and connects you to a group of amazing women making more happen than they ever imagined in their wildest dreams—you're connecting well to a useful model. If you reach for it when things get hard and it makes you feel sorry for yourself and believe that life is against you and you're all alone doing a bad job while your children are getting a shoddy deal—then you're turning that model against yourself. It's just a model. There are many, many moments when single mother (or your identity of choice) has no relevance to you, it's not who you are, and you don't need to refer to your set of beliefs about (or your model about) that identity. In fact, if you don't refer to it, you can just show up right here, right now for whatever's happening, whatever life is asking of you, and you can locate all that supports you in meeting the task at hand. I challenge you to notice the models you're operating from. Bring them to consciousness. And don't throw out any babies in some major dumping of bathwater! Notice where your models serve you, and notice where they don't. See if you can find alternate models for any given concept or situation, and get curious about what else changes when the model changes—your perceptions, your sense of possibility, how you feel about yourself. It's fun to play with, and the difference it makes can be none too subtle. I know someone who was calling himself a dropout when he had decided for very good reasons to take time off to do some very important exploring involving travel and learning about topics he cares about and having experiences that spark his curiosity and harness his sense of adventure. If the model says you must go to college and you must get in and out in the four years that follow high school, I guess he really is a dropout and should rightfully feel like a loser. But in a different model, he's the intrepid explorer on a fabulous journey the rest of us may envy, well on his way to learning what he's doing on this planet. Yes, models matter, and using them consciously helps. I invite you to notice them, and then adopt or drop them as they support your growth and well-being or don't. love & blessings, Jaya |
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