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
Allow Experience to Be
September 21 2010
Many people feel it’s natural and even sensible to try to manipulate or change their experience — especially if what’s happening isn’t what they want, or if what they’re feeling in this moment seems difficult or unpleasant.
It’s such a common impulse that many self-help books, much of popular thought, and even some professionals (coaches, counselors, or therapists) suggest different ways to manipulate your experience. And when you’re seeking personal growth, it seems completely logical that you would attempt to mold your experience to align more closely with who you believe you want to (or should) be.
So you might try to “put on a happy face” even when you’re sad or angry. Or you might try to “rewind and delete” the flash of frustration or annoyance you feel when someone doesn’t say or do what you wanted.
More often than not, these attempts to manipulate experience simply create frustration and struggle. Even when they appear to help you shift or transcend whatever’s happening in the short term, the longer-term effects tend to be painful.
Why? Because ultimately, this attempt to manipulate your experience turns you away from yourself. You turn away from what you really feel, and deny what’s really happening for you. And in turning away from yourself, you also deny yourself the opportunity to meet your feelings, to allow them to move through you, and to allow old, repetitive patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion to release themselves.
And not incidentally, when the apparently “bad” feelings resurface despite attempts to manipulate them, many people feel as if they’ve somehow failed — failed to become better people, failed to be who they thought they were supposed to be.
When you’re used to trying to change your experience, allowing it instead to simply be as it is can seem overwhelming — and might appear like giving up. In actuality, though, the process of allowing yourself to feel what you feel, being with your experience exactly as it is, can be surprisingly spacious and free.
“It’s like taking the plastic wrap off my life!” said one client. “Everything suddenly becomes three-dimensional. Or like the The Wizard of Oz, when it goes from black and white to color. When I stop trying to change my experience and just let it be, I’m in my life instead of outside it — and there’s a wonderful aliveness to everything.”
Here are some ideas to help you discover what it’s like to simply experience what’s happening — instead of struggling to change it.
Notice the labels
The attempt to manipulate can be a movement away from, or a movement towards.
When you label your experience as “good” or “bad,” you create an immediate impulse to hang onto (move towards) what feels “good” and get rid of (move away from) the experiences you call “bad.”
But whether you call your experiences “good” or “bad,” they’re always changing, impermanent, and constantly moving.
Notice the labels you apply (and you may use many variations on “good” or “bad”). What happens when you engage with your experience directly, instead of through the filter of good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant, desireable/undesireable, should/shouldn’t?
Let yourself see
For many people, the habit of manipulating experience is so ingrained that it can be hard for them to see what they’re doing.
One client told me, “It seems like there are a thousand ways I try to change my experience to be ‘better.’ Whether it’s trying not to feel annoyed with someone,or inflicting guilt on myself when I skip a workout — it all seems so reasonable, until I really look at it. And then I see how much pain I cause myself, and how much more honest and compassionate it is for me to simply be with what’s happening for me.”
Observe yourself — and you’ll start discovering your favorite ways of manipulating your experience.
Like my client, you’ll also start to see how these attempts to feel or be better actually have the exact opposite effect!
Embrace experience
The attempt to manipulate your experience is a battle — a battle between what’s actually happening, and your thoughts about it.
Let yourself see how you do battle with your experience — and let yourself feel what happens when you embrace it instead.
As a client commented, “I sometimes find myself filtering my behavior through an idealization of what a ‘good’ or ‘evolved’ person would be like. But no one is really like that. When I stop judging myself for what I’m doing, and I stop trying to change how I’m thinking, something amazing happens — I suddenly stop judging everyone, including myself, and discover feelings of compassion and love instead.”
Allow your experience to be what it is. After all, in any given moment, it already is what it is — you can’t change it, it’s already here. Embrace it instead of holding it at arm’s length.
You may be surprised at how much more vibrant everything becomes for you.
“But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?” Lois McMaster Bujold, 1949-, American author of science fiction and fantasy; from Barrayar, 1991
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