What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Free Article
Doing It Right
Practically from the moment you’re born, the pressure starts to do it right. Whatever “it” might be — from learning to tie your shoes to that first day of school, from your relationships to your career — you’d better do it right, or else...
During my 27 years of teaching high school English to gifted kids, I saw it over and over again. My students walked into my classroom every year with a grim determination to understand what I wanted so they could do it right. And every year they spent the first few weeks in varying states of panic, because I refused to tell them what they thought they needed to know.
All I asked was that they open to being who they really were, learning to hear that small, quiet, inexorable voice of what was true for them. I didn’t give them any rules or “1 - 2 - 3” steps to follow. There are no rules or steps to follow when you’re finding stillness, remembering what it’s like to hear and respond to that inner knowing, coming home to yourself.
It’s no surprise to me that I see this same grim, do-it-right determination in my clients and workshop participants today. And it’s no surprise to me that many of the women who talk to me about working with me, whether in a one-on-one relationship or in a workshop, are often seeking those “1 - 2 - 3” steps. When your life is structured from early childhood on into adulthood around doing it right, having no rules and no steps to follow feels rather like free-fall: scary stuff.
Just like my students, my clients quickly see that behind the uncertainty lies real freedom. When you break the habit of always looking for right and wrong, always looking for the “best” way to do something, the “perfect” accomplishment, you find a deep relaxation of tensions you probably never realized you had. It’s a great sense of freedom — and a great opportunity to take action more powerfully than ever before.
Here are a few of the doing it right traps you may find yourself falling into — and some suggestions for unlocking the trap.
Meditation
You’ve probably noticed that though I’m a big proponent of meditation, I’m not a fan of meditation techniques. They can be useful for a while, or in specific circumstances, but over time they create a doing it right perspective that is profoundly not what meditation really is.
Your meditation experience is never wrong. Whatever happens, whatever comes up — whether it’s a good feeling, a bad feeling, no feeling at all, or something else altogether — is what your experience is.
Sometimes people new to meditation question their feelings. They don’t think they’re “supposed” to feel sadness, or anger, or a deep sense of exhaustion. But meditation allows what’s really happening for you to come to the surface. So if you feel those things — or if you feel bubbling joy, quiet gratitude, or a simple, profound peace — that’s just what’s real for you in that moment.
Instead of questioning whether you’re doing it right, simply allow your meditation to express what’s true for you. Are you, in fact, exhausted? What if you just experienced your anger or sorrow?
Relationships
There’s a general feeling that there’s a right way to do relationships, and that to make a relationship “work,” you’re supposed to work at it. And to support that, there are many, many books on communication, on understanding people’s styles, on responding to partners who may have very different styles — books that teach techniques and phrasing and ways to make a conversation safe.
The trap lies in believing that if you follow these books’ suggestions, you’ll succeed. It’s a trap, because relationships between people don’t adhere to techniques and scripts. Yes, those suggestions have value: they give you a different perspective for looking at a situation. But when they become a way of doing it right, they’ll probably fail.
Why? Simply enough, because as soon as you focus on the technique instead of on what’s true for you and on hearing what’s true for the other person, you’ve lost contact with reality.
What if you spoke from your heart, spoke what’s really true for you? Yes, it’s frightening to be so vulnerable — and it’s also deeply powerful. My clients consistently report that speaking from what’s true for them creates connections and responses that they never dreamed possible.
Encountering Yourself
Your relationship with yourself is where all those self-help books try to give you a way to do it right. A friend calls those books “shelf-help books,” because they always sound great, and then end up on a shelf collecting dust.
What drives you to read those books, and try what they suggest? My clients come to me because of a deep sense that there’s something more than they’re experiencing in their day-to-day life. There’s a calling that they’ve heard all their lives, and they can’t ignore it any more.
They, like you, are individuals. You’re unique in your passions, your frustrations, your heart. Your encounter with yourself is also individual: what you’ve experienced, what speaks through you, what creates resistance — it’s all individual.
So throw out the rule-book and really listen.
What do you hear?
The fear is worse than the reality
As one of my clients commented, the monster under the bed turns out to be dust-bunnies when you turn and look.
Start small: let go of doing it right in just one safe area of your life before you tackle the bigger things. Tear up your to-do list for the weekend, and see what happens. See what it’s like to speak from your heart about love, joy, and gratitude in easier, non-confrontational situations before you tackle disagreements.
You can't go wrong, because there's no way to do it right.
“Perfectionism is simply putting a limit on your future. When you have an idea of perfect in your mind, you open the door to constantly comparing what you have now with what you want. That type of self criticism is significantly deterring.” John Eliot, PhD, American author, consultant, and professor, from Reverse Psychology for Success
“This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfection.” Saint Augustine, 354-430, philosopher, theologian, and Catholic Bishop of what is today Hippo, in Algeria.
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