We all feel this sometimes. We have a choice we need to make or something we want to do and we hesitate – it causes us to question what we’re doing. it makes us take an extra step or two. Sometimes it even makes us stop completely.
What is hesitation and why do we feel it?
Sometimes hesitation is the Universe’s way of saying “are you sure?”. Sometimes hesitation is a reflection of your own doubt of yourself or the situation. Sometimes hesitation offers a necessary extra step that allows you to get completely clear on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
What if the thing that happened, although it may have been painful, wasn’t actually the problem?
What if you could get okay with the experience and simply adjust your own way of seeing things?
Shifting your perspective isn’t about taking the bad thing that happened and trying to make it positive. It’s about removing the stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization that cause you to make the experience worse than it was.
The stories offer pain on their own, completely outside of the experience. Even if the experience had never happened, if you started telling those stories you would feel the pain of them.
Chances are you know what shadow work is because you’ve probably done some of it at some point in your own healing journey.
Shadow work to me, is a little like double dog daring yourself to go check out all this seemingly hidden pain you’ve been avoiding. Do I really want to see what’s in the back of this closet? Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, I’m going in!
Have you ever heard that phrase before? Why do we use it in spiritual circles?
It’s a somewhat known phenomenon when you heal yourself, that things keep coming back around until you fully heal them. I’ve certainly experienced this in my own life and I’m sure you’ve probably found the same is true for you.
There are two types of people. People who are afraid to feel their emotions and people that are afraid of not feeling their emotions. Which camp are you in? Is it possible to find balance between those two camps?
I was in camp “don’t feel anything” for most of my life. Needless to say that it caused a ton of pain. It caused me to have regular mental breakdowns because I was simply unwilling and unable to deal with my emotions in any sort of useful way.
My lessons lately have been fascinating to me, not because they are hard but because they are reflective of some of the very popular spiritual teachings that float around on social media and get spouted by many spiritual teachers. One common one is “stop defending yourself”. Ever heard that one before? You may have even seen me writing or talking about it at some point. But what does that really mean? How do you actually do that? Let me share what I’ve come across the last little while.
I was recording my podcast episode for the week and I had a discovery or a realization in the middle of it. This is the kind of thing that used to happen all the time, but hasn’t happened in a while and so it was fascinating when it did.
One of the things I’ve been writing about in my new book, The Art of Self Mastery, is the idea of having a captive audience. One of my biggest beefs with teaching school children was that they were captive; for the most part they didn’t want to be there. I did not enjoy teaching people that didn’t want to learn what I was teaching.
What’s that thing you keep running away from? Got it in your head? Okay, let’s talk about it.
There are a few stories we like to tell about going after goals, that keep us from moving forward with them. The first one is that we need to have the whole path planned out before we start. The second one is that problems need to be solved before we can move forward. The third one is that we need control over everything. It has to work out exactly as we envision it should. If it doesn’t that means we’ve failed or we did something wrong or we’re being blocked and we’re not supposed to do that thing.
Accountability. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it mean?
Well, there is what society tells us it means, which is to fix the problems that we see around us. Being accountable means fixing things that we think are wrong. Accountability from a societal perspective, is an ego-driven behavior fueled by judgment.
From the Oxford Language dictionary accountability means, “the fact or condition of being accountable; responsibility”.
