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
Mind the Gap
April 5 2011
As we work together, many of my clients begin to notice that there’s a gap — often quite a large gap — between how they feel and their actual circumstances.
One client was bluntly explicit when she declared, “There seems to be no relationship between my feelings and my objective understanding of what’s happening in this situation!”
That objective understanding included a long list of things that were going very well, from exciting new professional opportunities to bursts of personal creativity. Yet her internal experience was filled with anxiety, fear, and sadness.
“I can’t reconcile the two,” she told me, with some frustration. “There’s no reason for me to be feeling like this.”
Another client’s feelings of inadequacy and “wrongness” were triggered by a stranger’s unexpectedly hostile response to something she said. As I pointed out to her — and as she agreed — his defensiveness had nothing to do with her. Yet even as she clearly saw the gap between reality and her feelings, she found herself in the midst of a painful struggle.
Afterwards, she said, “I’m honestly grateful that it happened. It was a crystal-clear example of the incredibly high cost I pay for believing that I’m somehow at fault for other people’s ‘stuff’!”
As she noted, it takes time and attention to begin perceiving the gap. “I never would have seen the discrepancy before. In the past, I’d have found it perfectly reasonable to feel upset, guilty, and deeply wrong — even over a stranger’s obviously disproportionate reaction to what I’d said. I’d also have stayed stuck there for far longer. Now that I can see what’s happening, I’m able to allow it to move through much more quickly than before.”
Becoming aware of the gap is important — and profound. It leads to a deep experience of the cost of your conditioned beliefs about who you are, how you relate to other people, and the changing circumstances of your life.
As you begin to notice the gap, you begin the process of healing it. As it closes, your emotional experience becomes a response to what’s actually happening, instead of being a resurgence of old, conditioned behavior patterns created by long-ago situations.
Here are some suggestions for noticing the gap in your own life.
Explore your triggers
The gap between internal experience and external reality is triggered by different things for different people.
One client sees it in her professional life: she’s filled with uncertainty and insecurity even as she becomes more successful.
Another client finds it in personal relationships: she experiences deep feelings of guilt and responsibility over the behavior of others.
As you explore your feelings and become more aware of them, you’ll notice that you also become more aware of how they are — or aren’t — aligned with your actual situation.
What triggers the gap between experience and reality for you?
Allow it to be
As my frustrated client noted, there’s often an immediate impulse to try to make the gap go away.
But as I’ve said many times in these articles, you can’t change your experience through an act of will. You can’t change how you feel by “deciding” to feel differently.
Instead, allow the gap to be present and allow yourself to truly feel what you feel. Then notice the thoughts and beliefs that are under the feelings.
“Even though I knew he was way out of line,” my client said, “I could still hear all the old beliefs telling me that it had to be my fault — that no one would react that way if I hadn’t done something to deserve it. Logically, I knew it wasn’t true. Emotionally, it was very true. Yet in allowing myself to be fully aware of and present with the disconnect, it simply began to unravel by itself.”
What thought patterns and belief structures are present for you — and can you allow them to be there?
And keep allowing it to be!
As my client observed, experiencing the gap without trying to change anything is what’s most important in allowing the gap to begin to close.
“The experience of seeing the gap so clearly, and at the same time feeling the pain of it so deeply, was powerful for me,” she said. “It’s very different from the conceptual understanding that his reaction was his ‘stuff,’ and that there was no reason for me to feel responsible. The conceptual knowledge only created frustration — I’d just get angry with myself. But feeling it — that was a whole different thing, and created real shifts for me.”
What happens when you allow yourself to feel what you feel while simultaneously experiencing the discrepancy between your feelings and reality?
Notice incremental shifts
Your conditioned responses are on autopilot — they’re programmed in. Yet even the deepest conditioning can unwind, as my clients have discovered.
Awareness of the gap creates incremental shifts in your experience, without any need for you to try to change anything.
Relax into awareness. Allow awareness to do its work. And don’t overlook the ways in which shifts are happening for you.
“Sometimes I get impatient,” a client said. “But then you remind me how I used to struggle with things for weeks, whereas now I’m allowing reactions to move through me in a few hours. And as painful as the experience still is, it’s tempered by my understanding of what’s happening, and my growing capacity to be with it, to allow it to be as it is.”
The words she uses are telling: for instance, “struggle” versus “allow.” She’s gradually coming to realize — at the being level, instead of just the conceptual level — that the more she relaxes, the more she’s in flow with whatever is happening in her life.
“All of the struggle to get out of it and free of it just creates more of it.” Adyashanti, American spiritual teacher and author, from his December 2010 retreat.
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