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
Be Who You Are
What would it be like to allow yourself to be exactly who you are?
Whatever is going on for you, whether you’re overwhelmed or at peace, just be there, without trying to change it in any way.
Whatever you feel right now, whether it’s frustration and anger or joy and freedom, just be there with it.
Whoever you are, even if you feel that you should be different (cuter, smarter, thinner, more popular, more spiritual), just be as you are.
That probably goes against what you’ve been taught. Self-improvement, after all, lies in striving to become better, to reach your goals, to improve.
But that assumes there’s something wrong with what’s right here, right now — with who you already are. And when you believe there’s something wrong with who you are, then you set yourself up to struggle. You set yourself up to fail in endless comparisons with other people.
Which, of course, is like the apple feeling as if it fails in comparison with an orange. (Can you imagine the apple’s internal critic? “I should be more like an orange — it’s such a pretty color — and so easy to squeeze — and it ripens in winter, when there aren’t all those other fruits to compete with — and no one ever tries to cover an orange in caramel, or make pies out of it, it gets to just be itself!”)
It’s a longstanding pattern for most people. One client recognized that in hanging out with groups where she doesn’t fit in, she’s been recreating her long-ago high-school experience. “They appear to be the popular crowd,” she wrote to me. “I’ve been feeling as if I have to be one of them if I’m going to succeed, if my business is going to succeed. But the thing is, I’m not like them, and trying to be like them makes me feel phony and inadequate.”
Not surprisingly, along with this realization came a glimmer of understanding that her clients and friends love her for who she really is. So now she’s exploring what it means to BE all of herself — to let her personality out to play in its fullest expression.
I invite you to stand back and take a look at who you really are. Introduce yourself to this person, and get to know his or her joys and quirks, dreams and passions. Rejoice in your own human-ness.
Here are a few ideas to start.
Turn towards yourself
In trying to change and be more like others, you turn away from yourself.
Turn towards yourself.
What have you taken for granted about yourself? What do you do so easily that you don’t even notice? What makes you smile when you’re alone? Deep down, who are you, really — not who do you want to be, or who do you wish you were, but who are you, right here, right now?
Write about it, openly, from heart to hand, without editing or censoring your words. Getting it out of your head will help you see what’s happening.
Notice the contrast
Notice the contrast between how you feel when you’re trying to change into someone else, and how you feel when you’re simply being yourself. That difference in feeling is your clearest guide to where you are in any moment.
Relax!
Trying to be, do, or have is an endless, exhausting struggle.
Relaxing into who you naturally are tends to bring with it things you thought you could only have by being someone else. My client striving to be one of the popular crowd already was popular, in her own way and within her own group.
Observe the contrast
In the middle of a task, do you find yourself thinking that someone you know and admire would be doing it differently — and that her way would somehow be “better”?
That’s one of the ways in which you try to change yourself from what you are into something you’re not.
Listen for the voices of criticism and doubt in your thoughts. In comparing yourself to someone else, ask yourself if it’s really true that her way is better for you.
My business partner and I have very different styles. Sometimes they clash, but more often they create what one of our group-program participants calls “a brilliant counterpoint to each other.” We’d be in a mess if either of us decided we ought to be more like the other one!
Get physical
Trying to understand what’s happening, trying to figure out how to make yourself better, tends to be a very mental exercise.
I tell my clients all the time: Stop! Get out of your mind!
One of the best ways to STOP is to move. Take a walk, ride your bicycle, work in the garden — whatever it is that calls to you, get out and move.
Changing your physical perspective helps change your internal perspective. And when you take your perspective away from your mind and the thoughts tumbling around in there — what remains?
This is freedom
When you allow yourself to be who you are, you stop chaining yourself to ideas of how you “should” be different. As my client noticed, those ideas will drag you around like a dog on a leash, propelling you into situations that aren’t and never will be right for you.
Letting go of the chain is freedom — freedom to be fully yourself, fully alive, and fully where you are. It’s freedom to open to possibilities and opportunities that you’d otherwise be blind to.
It’s freedom to simply be — at peace and at home with whatever is happening.
“When I reach the next world, God will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ Instead, he will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” Rabbi Zusya, one of the early Hassidic rabbis.
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