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
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Embodiment
You know how sometimes you understand something? You nod, you think, yes, I understand.
And then a little while later, for whatever reason, whoa. You really get it. You grok it. You understand it at more than just the mental or verbal level.
You’ve embodied your understanding.
I see this reaction all the time from clients and others whom I talk with about many of the same ideas that I write about here. They nod their heads, they write me emails saying yes, I understand. And then later — days, weeks, months later — OH. Now I GET it!
I’ve been thinking about this, and about whether there are ways to help people short-cut the delay factor, to find your own embodiment of deeply important, deeply meaningful ways of being, that much sooner. Part of me wonders if it’s possible to speed up the process. Nonetheless, here are some of the thoughts and ideas that I, and my clients who’ve helped me see this more clearly, have had.
It’s about you
In one of my closing articles last year, I wrote about understanding what’s most important. (If you missed it, you can find it here.) One of my clients read that article, and had one of those “aha” moments that I love to see.
She’d heard me talk about my most important thing — freedom — and agreed. “Yeah,” she wrote to me afterwards, “Freedom sounded good. I want freedom — who doesn’t? I understood — I still understand — what you mean. It’s freedom from all those voices, the shoulds and external judgments and all that. Who doesn’t want freedom? But then I started really thinking about it. And for me, it isn’t freedom at all. It’s truth.”
No surprise to me, really. I’ve always said to her, the truth will set you free. But more importantly, as soon as she recognized what her most important thing really is, she started experiencing profound shifts. And they were nonverbal. She’s normally highly articulate, but she became almost speechless trying to talk about it.
That’s embodiment.
It’s about not settling
Before, she’d settled for what seemed like a good, attractive idea. Freedom: as she said, who doesn’t want freedom?
As long as it remained conceptual, what she thought was a “really great idea,” then she wasn’t embodying it. And it would never deeply move her, never grab her, never take her into all those places she didn’t even know she wanted to go, but which her deepest self yearned for.
If you’ve adopted an idea from someone else, don’t discard it. It could be that it’s yours as well. But at the same time, don’t accept it just because it sounds good, because you agree intellectually and logically, or because you want the other person’s approval. Is there a magnetic pull, a compulsion? Can you feel it, without thinking about it?
It’s about patience
As I said in the beginning, I’m not at all sure it’s possible to short-cut this process. My clients tend to groan when I say it, but there really are no end runs, in this or in anything else.
If there’s anything you can do, it’s to be constantly aware — aware of what’s happening inside yourself. What really is most true for you?
Don’t get distracted by “true” in that question. For me, what’s most true is freedom. My discovery process included climbing to the top of a remote hill and speaking that truth to the world, over and over again, until I found the language that resonated deep inside me.
For the client I’ve described here, what’s most essential is truth. And she said to me recently, “I can’t verbalize it. If I try to put it into words, into a verbal intention instead of a visceral truth, I’ll lose it — it will become meaningless, a flat, lifeless, mental statement. I have to live it, not say it.”
What’s true for you? Ask the question gently, without expectation, but with great curiosity. Be patient, don’t settle, and listen to yourself. Allow the answer to arise naturally within you.
And then get out of the way, because big things will happen for you.
“When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely — the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears — when you give your whole attention to it.” Krishnamurti, 1895-1986, Indian speaker, author, and philosopher
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