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
Claiming Your Whole Self
November 1 2011
A few weeks ago, I listened as a client described her experience. “When I look at my garden, all I see is how much there is to do,” she told me. “People say how beautiful it is, but I can’t see it. All I see is work that’s not done!”
“That’s a pretty amazing projection,” I said.
There was a long pause. Finally, I heard her say, very quietly, “Oh. So it is.”
Her personal process had gotten mired in feelings of wanting to fix herself — wanting to be where she thought she should be on her journey instead of where she actually was. In struggling with these feelings of needing to do something about herself, she projected them outward. Thus, she saw her garden as just more work, instead of being able to perceive the beauty that was there.
How you view the world — how you experience the people, situations, and places you encounter — is a direct reflection of what’s happening inside you. Whatever it is you see “out there,” turn and look inside — because that's where your “out there” experience originates.
In my client’s case, she felt like she had a lot of work to do inside, so she saw a lot of work to do outside. In fact, she emailed me a few days later to say, “I’ve noticed that everything seems like a to-do list right now. Even things that I normally enjoy doing are feeling like an obligation instead of being fun.”
What does it mean to notice your projections, recognize them for what they are, and relax around them so they can release? Here are some suggestions.
Notice the cost
By observing the cost of your projections — how they make your life dramatic and painful — you can begin to see different perspectives. If you don’t recognize your projections, however, they’ll tend to stay stuck, continuing to distort your experience.
That same client wrote again to say, “This afternoon, I took time to meditate outside, sitting in the garden. And when the meditation was over and I opened my eyes, I was astonished — what I saw was miraculously beautiful to me. All the things there are to do — the pruning, mowing, planting — all of that was still there. But it didn’t change the perfection that I could see, any more than the perfection was a denial of what there is to do. Both were present, and both were absolutely okay. It was breathtaking.”
Where is your attention?
As long as you’re focusing on your external experience — on the projection itself — you’re stuck.
If my client had continued to put her attention on all the things she felt needed to be done, she’d have stayed stuck in her feelings of overwhelming obligation and resentment about having so much work.
Instead, by helping her see and acknowledge her projection, I invited her to turn her attention inside. In asking herself what was really important, she stopped fighting with her feeling of being in the “wrong place” internally — and discovered that she was already where she wanted to be.
It may sound impossible, but it really can be that simple.
Claim all your projections
A little later still, I received another email from my client.
“I just noticed something amazing,” she wrote. “The beauty that I saw in my garden? That’s a projection as well. That beauty is within me, just as the struggle and overwhelm were.”
Yes.
When we talk about projections, we often talk about the negative aspects — how my client projected her feeling of internal work onto her garden, or how you might project anger onto a friend, for instance.
Yet as my client observed, the other side of the coin is just as valid. The beauty we see in nature, the strength we see in someone we love, the compassion we receive when we accept help — all of that is inside you as well.
So when you notice your projections, notice all of them. Claim all of them, not just the ones you experience as painful.
The beauty you see also belongs to what you really are.
“I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" Louise Bogan (1897-1970), American poet who was apppointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress
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