Once is an aberration. Twice is a coincident. Three times is a pattern.
One of the things I fill my time with is teaching people a tool set which can improve a persons quality of life both physically and emotionally. (I also spend a number of hours a week working one on one with folks who know these tools.)
Typically, for no charge, I will teach people this tool set. As I have gotten better with the tool set (and gain confidence in the tool set and my ability to teach it) I have had more opportunities to share what has help me so much.
An interesting patter has formed. There has been a group of people who I have taught, who have seen the benefit of it in their life, who have decided it is not for them.
At first I took this as so sort of failure on my part. “I must have done something to turn them off to this very powerful tool,” would be the thought that would run through my head.
My point of view changed while working with a friend. Someone in her live had been hurt in a very violent way. The loved one was hundreds of miles away. She was disappointed in herself for not being to stop it from happening, she was sad for the attack, she was scared that her loved one was not going to seek the attention she needed out of fear, she felt helpless from such a great distance, she worried it would happen again, just to name a few of the emotions hurricaning through her head.
We agreed that I would come over in a few days so we could do some work. When I got to her place we talked about everything in the world, except what I had come for. This continued for almost 45 minutes. Finally I said, “Do you want to do this or not?” This was not said in frustration or anger, but from a place of wondering if she really was comfortable doing this work with me.
She hymed and hawed as she tried not answer. So I asked, “Why are afraid to do the work?”
“Because it is going to hurt. I know how raw my emotions are right now. I feel like I have let my loved on down. I don’t want to wander into that pain.”
All of that was fair. I asked her how large was all the emotions she was feeling (the emotions around her loved one plus the emotions around her fear of having to get into the problem). With here hands she showed something about the size of a beach ball.
We did some work on her fear of what we might uncover and how much it was going to hurt to dive into the emotions of the circumstance.
I then asked her how much emotion was left (in all areas). She gestured to show something about 30% of the size of the original.
This was an interesting insight for me. More than half of the emotion she was carrying was worry about the emotion she was carrying. Most of her negative energy around the subject had little to do with the incident itself, but her response.
Later as I reflected on this, it brought to mind all of the people (and myself included) who did not do work in some area of our lives because we were afraid what we were going to uncover about ourselves.
It is almost as if the crap I know right now is better than the crap around the corner. Sure my life isn’t perfect right now, but I can manage the pain and disappoint I am facing now.
If I go looking to change my life, who know what I am going to stir up.
This is not an indictment for not wanting to look under the bed to see what is really under there. We all have the choice to face or not face any part of our lives. That is the beauty of free will. We choose who we want to be. There are outcomes and consequences to those choices. Because of our unwillingness to face the ideas about ourselves and the world that hold us back, our lives are not going to change. And for better or worse that is our prerogative.
I have just found in my own life, no matter how scary it is at the time, in the long run it is better to get out the flash light and face what is hiding under the bed.

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