“Teachers open the door, you enter by yourself”
It takes little reflection to realize how true that Chinese proverb is! All the courses, workshops and books we are attracted to can be part of the pieces that help us, but only if we apply the knowledge.
Change begins by noticing the pieces of your life you are unhappy with. It’s linked to habitual thoughts that leave you depressed, how you think you look, a job you don’t enjoy or doesn’t pay enough, it may be a relationship or a lack of one. The list is endless. While we tend to think any form of unhappiness is just the circumstances that happen to us, if you endure it for years and continue feeling the same dissatisfaction…it comes back to you, how you feel about yourself and how you react to either change or ignore those circumstances. In other words, it’s linked to your perspective.
Anything that takes us beyond our usual routine and expression may help us expand. Changing your life is a composite of acquiring information on how to do better or something diffferent and finding ways to gradually change the habits you have. While neither a practitioner nor a friend can offer a solution, they may help us increase our awareness and options. It has been accurately said that we cannot do better until we know how to. This was true for our parents and our grandparents, but the advantage today is availability of more information and the means to help us make it happen.
It helps to view chaos or dissatisfaction as an agent that serves as a catalyst, encouraging us to find a better way. Part of expanding our awareness entails accepting responsibility for our attitudes and habits. This allows us to work at dissolving our distorted perceptions to replace them with healthier ones. If we hold resentments because life seemed unfair at times, or someone close to us seemed uncaring, there are many therapies available to provide a means for dealing with whatever causes you discontent. These include polarity therapy, homeopathy, hypnotherapy, NLP, or psychotherapy, to name but a few options that may be the right place for you to start.
Talking emotions out with an objective practitioner will often bring new awareness, and awareness must come first. Some therapies may serve to access and release the energetic charge associated with an unpleasant experience without detailed discussion, whereas others use discussion to help you see where unresolved emotion is still active and how to release it. Awareness of the emotion and acknowledging our perceptions, true or false, is the first component. Choosing an approach or combined method will depend on the strength of the experience you wish to dissolve and the therapy that attracts you. It is important to decide what that change is worth.
When we feel out of touch, ungrounded or spacey, bodywork may provide the first step to bring our body-mind unit into focus. After a session, we usually notice the difference of being centered versus feeling scattered. Bodywork can be the initial step to get in touch with ‘the inner you’, expanding awareness and leading to healthier decisions. Many therapies effect the body-mind unit and may lead you to other therapies as you process emotions and reactions. Our emotions can be locked in our tissues and cells to express as chronic pains that are not released with physical bodywork alone. Bernie Siegel, MD, has authored a number of best-selling books on this subject.
Body-mind therapies, deep-breathing exercises, meditation or affirmation exercises are a few examples that provide access to locked emotional patterns. Sound therapies all work through resonance, an expanding field linked to everything from our cells and organs to our energy patterns. Participating in creative sound activities such as choir practice, use of tuning forks, mantras, playing a piano, a drum or other instrument, provides creative, nurturing activities recognized to also loosen rigid patterns both physically and emotionally, through resonance.
Our belief system is key in all aspects of our health and change. While we may feel resistance to things like affirmations and visualization boards, once you are active in these new things it is surprising to notice the value you may find in them. This is because we are chipping away at our old belief system that judges the worth of something different. To change something intangible like our thought process, our self-worth or belief system, it is necessary to translate the changes into a physical-mental process you can relate to. And that is part of the value in the therapist you choose.
Investing in yourself should not be considered pampering! It is a way to expand your consciousness and make higher choices for yourself that will reflect into all aspects of your life.
No one has all the answers, but in the famous words of Socrates:
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
~ Socrates (appx 469 B.C. to 399 B.C.)
Said at his trial for heresy, where he was on trial for encouraging his students to challenge the accepted beliefs of the time and think for themselves.
Are we there yet?
