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
There Isn’t an On-Off Switch
October 19 2010
Machines and lights have on-off switches.
You don’t.
Even the deepest, most powerful personal insight will seldom — if ever — act as a switch to instantly change your habitual feelings or behavior patterns.
This can be frustrating and even painful when you’ve begun to see and feel the potential of a different perspective within your life. And when you’ve experienced the beginnings of change but the old patterns keep re-asserting themselves, it’s easy to feel like you’re stuck.
As one client put it, “It’s infuriating when I know better, but I can’t seem to move from my old ways of thinking and feeling — or out of the painful behavior patterns that arise from them. It’s like some sort of cruel joke when I’ve felt the opening within myself, felt the peace and freedom, and then it seems to close down again.”
As I explained to her, and to other clients in similar situations, it’s a process. The deeper and more conditioned the behavior patterns are, the more gentle attention, love, and compassion they need in order to unwind.
And most of those behavior patterns arise from core beliefs and experiences that were first established within you years and even decades ago. It’s natural to want them to unravel with the flip of a switch. But real, lasting healing simply doesn’t happen that fast.
Here are a few ideas to help you through your own unwinding process.
What’s the larger context?
Contraction is a closing down around a tight, uncomfortable knot of thought and feeling. As one client put it, “I can feel the walls closing in on me like a bad horror movie. Everything gets smaller and smaller, my perspective becomes narrower and narrower — and the struggle gets more and more intense.”
But as I asked her, what is it in you that’s experiencing, feeling, and seeing the contraction?
The contraction occurs within a larger context. When you begin to glimpse that larger context, there’s more room to relax and find peace and spaciousness — even in the midst of the contraction.
Addicted to insight
Insights into yourself, especially powerful ones, can be fun and intriguing. It’s rewarding to feel as if you’re discovering new things about yourself.
But when insights become the only goal, it’s a dead end. It may feel like progress, but the constant search for another insight is actually an endless loop.
If you find yourself always looking for the next insight, stop. Allow yourself to be exactly where you are, without hunting for more meaning or deeper understanding.
What’s available to you right here, right now, in this moment?
It’s ok to feel what you feel
The unwinding of conditioned behavior, thought, and feeling often brings up a host of apparently illogical emotions.
These feelings usually have no obvious reason for their presence, no connection with what may be happening in your day-to-day life. As such, they may feel overwhelming, weird, or even, as one client said, “ridiculously childish and embarrassing.”
Let yourself feel what you feel. In many cases, these feelings have been with you for a long time — but haven’t been seen and met within the larger context of who you are now.
What would happen if you met your experience as it is, being with yourself as you would be with a friend in a similar situation?
Shake up your routines
My business partner came home from a weekend retreat with a new understanding of habit, ritual, and routine.
“It’s no wonder,” she told me, “that my meditation practice had become stuck and uninteresting. I’d let it become a routine habit instead of a meaningful ritual. I’ve started shaking it up, meditating in different places and at different times, and there’s new life in it for me.”
Habitual routines like brushing your teeth every night are useful. But when the meaningful acts in your life become routine, they may also become lifeless.
As you shake up and revitalize your life’s behavioral routines, you’re likely to find that your internal routines of thought and feeling will shift and change in response.
It’s a spiral
Many of my clients tell me they sometimes feel like they’re endlessly revisiting old patterns of thought and feeling.
But when we explore what’s actually happening, they realize that though it may seem like the same old pattern, it’s being seen and experienced at different and deeper levels.
Whatever your situation is, it’s useful to notice what’s different now from your past experience. Notice also what’s different about how you’re responding in this moment.
Noticing these incremental shifts helps you perceive how your life is changing, not simply repeating itself.
It may seem more gradual than you’d prefer. When things feel difficult, it’s natural to wish for an on-off switch to miraculously create change. But in the end, it’s the process of change that holds the real value — and the real beauty.
It might sound cliche, but the journey truly is more important than the destination.
“Let what comes, come. Let what goes, go. Find out what remains.” Sri Ramana Maharshi, 1879-1950, Hindu sage and spiritual teacher
Note: I wrote more about the question of insight in May of 2008; you can find the article, “The Insight Trap,” here: The Insight Trap
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