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

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When Life Hands You Land Mines

November 15 2011

Life is filled with surprises, detours, and unexpected departures from the direction you might have thought your journey was going to follow.

And your path of personal discovery, your process of recognizing and living from what’s true for you, is just as non-linear.

Yet even when you recognize that you’re not going to follow a straight line, it can be disconcerting and painful when the ground shifts suddenly out from under you. It’s not much fun when you feel as if you’re making real progress, and something happens that triggers your deepest, most painful conditioning.

As one client said to me, when you’re triggered into falling back into those old patterns of struggle, it can feel as if all your apparent progress was illusory. But — as I responded to her — it’s important to notice that the triggering of contraction does not diminish the breakthroughs you’ve experienced.

Instead, this triggered contraction — no matter how painful — is a potentially powerful opportunity to meet that old, deep conditioning, to discover new clarity, and to release into greater freedom and spaciousness.

So what seems like a land mine isn’t just a detour on the journey. It’s actually a signpost — a pointer showing you the powerful holding patterns that still need your continued attention.

From within the contraction, it might feel difficult to know what “continued attention” actually means. Here are some suggestions.

Allow perspective

When you’ve bumped into a trigger — especially if it’s a particularly potent trigger — it can feel like you’ve been pulled right back into the depths of struggle. As my client put it, “There I was, finally feeling like I was experiencing the spaciousness I’d longed for all my life, and wham, suddenly it seemed like I was right back where I’d started from.”

Allow yourself to step back and find some perspective on what’s happened.

From the perspective of spaciousness, the actual moment of triggering is far more obvious than you might think. Even though the spaciousness may not seem accessible to you, look back at what happened. Allow yourself to see how the experience unfolded.

It’s not about changing the experience in any way — you can’t change what’s happened, and as you know, suppressing or resisting how you feel doesn’t get you anywhere but deeper into contraction.

It’s about perspective: seeing clearly what just happened.

“Once I was past the shock of the transition from spaciousness and freedom into contraction and struggle,” my client said, “I could see much more clearly than ever before what had happened. I could see the trigger — a fairly minor event, in actuality — and I could see how it hooked into all my old beliefs and behavior patterns around love, belonging, and my ability to have what I want. As painful as it was, the clarity of that was tremendous.”

What’s perceiving?

Gaining this perspective, as my client noticed, is powerful. It’s a window into patterns of experience that may have been with you for most of your life. Simply having new clarity about what has happened is a big step towards allowing those patterns to unravel and release.

Yet there’s an even bigger opportunity in this moment.

Ask yourself what is it that sees with perspective and clarity?

“It’s like there’s one view outwards, seeing what just happened,” my client said when I asked her this question, “and then there’s another view inward ... except it’s not really a view, is it? It’s more of a feeling, or a sense of something — I don’t know how to describe it!”

It is hard to describe. In this turning around to see what’s seeing, you begin to realize that you can’t. It’s like a cat chasing its tail, or your hand trying to grasp itself. What’s experiencing this perspective, what’s seeing the path of your triggering, can’t see itself.

But it can experience itself. It can become aware of itself. And in that discovery, the trigger and contraction are no longer all of your experience. The contraction may still feel painful, but as the perspective continues to shift, so does the struggle.

What’s present?

As you open to what’s perceiving your experience, you may also find a deeper capacity to meet that experience with compassion, understanding, and even love.

And as you discover this larger perspective, you’ll find that your experience begins to have greater freedom to move — and that you may have greater freedom to move as well.

“When I’m locked into the small space of contraction, I freeze,” my client said. “But when I can step back, when I see that there’s something larger that’s perceiving what is happening, then I find a whole new capacity to be with myself — and to act in different ways. Even though the contraction is still there, I’m not stuck in the old behavior patterns. I can see alternatives that would not have been possible for me before. And I can choose those alternatives.”

She paused. “It’s scary sometimes,” she admitted, “because it’s so different from how I always thought things had to be for me. But it’s also incredibly liberating!”

When the ground is rocked out from underneath you, it’s your opportunity to find new ground — new places to stand that give you new perspectives on your life and new directions for your journey.

So yes — the land mines that life hands you can indeed be liberating!

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist, critic, and essayist.

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