How much we let situations derail us has a proportional effect on how events will turn out. Our reactions and choices can prolong and complicate the challenges or accelerate our progress, opening us to unexpected gains.
When we feel pressured from an issue, we tend to fight against it, avoid it, shut down, or submit to people-pleasing in order to keep the peace. These are common reactions when we feel situations are out of our control.
As the pressure intensify, we lose ourselves by dwelling on the difficult people and impossible situations.
To reclaim ourselves, we need to remember being in control is a choice. Being in control is different from being controlling. The former is about standing in our sovereignty. The latter is about making things happen for us to feel okay.
In the culture that focuses on doing and accomplishing, we often let the doing drive us. My experience is: when we focus on cultivating the quality of our being, the impact of our actions is amplified and accelerated.
It is similar to effective communication. Research has shown that less than 10% of the communication is from our words, the rest is from our tone and body language. These last two factors are tied to the state of our being.
The quality of our being is often influenced by thoughts of having to work longer or fight harder to get what we want. When we keep pushing the river, it often leads to unintended consequences, such as chronic health conditions.
A Chinese idiom says: take a step back, and the sea will widen and the sky will open up.
As someone who used to strive for success by pushing forward, I have come to respect the wisdom from that idiom. This is especially true when I reflect on the intractable cases I have worked through in recent times.
A woman was very concerned about being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She felt overwhelmed by the treatment protocol and thought the disease blocked her creative writing that she loved.
In offering her transformative coaching, I helped her see that her condition was a catalyst for befriending aspects of her that she didn’t know before. Our focus was more about enlivening her being than going after the Alzheimer’s.
After a couple of sessions, she developed a solid feeling of living presence and her creative writing began to blossom in ways that had never been. Feeling liberated, she has a completely different relationship with the diagnosis.
Reclaiming ourselves is the key to expediting our healing and resolution of challenges.
In the last few months, I had to work with several institutions to resolve a few issues. The customer representatives kept telling me someone else was responsible for fixing the problems.
I tend to get frustrated when my expectations are not met. This means the Carmen who wants to push the river will take over. She started making more phone calls, asking tough questions and pushing harder.
As the adrenaline rush continued, an aspect of me saw the anxious Carmen overreacting. Suddenly I realized I was more driven to prove how incompetent or irresponsible they were than resolving the issues. It was shocking!
I stepped back, collected myself, and re-engaged when I was ready. It took months to resolve the first issue as I was trying to reclaim myself. As I refined the art of reclaiming, I was able to resolve a recent identity theft within a week!
I noticed that when I was collected, the customer representatives assigned to me were helpful and knowledgeable. Sometimes the situation resolved itself beyond logic.
How we hold ourselves and the energy we bring to each interaction has a tremendous impact on the outcome. We are designed to process emotions in 90 seconds. If we keep getting upset, we need better tools than band-aid solutions to handle the backlog.
Years ago, I heard that our experiences of the world are not random; they reflect aspects of our consciousness. I had misunderstood that to mean: bad things kept happening to me because I didn’t know how bad I was.
As I dive deep into personal transformation, I realize my reactivity was causing complications. I focused on handling situations one after the other, but I didn’t give myself time to see what all these situations were trying to show me.
That continued until things became unbearable, forcing me to reassess my approach. It was only then that I learned to be intentional about cultivating the quality of my being to affect situations instead of letting situations derail me.
The faster we react, the less intentional we live. The less intentional we live, the more overwhelmed we become. If reactivity is caused by having to juggle too many things, the antidote is to deliberately allocate time for spaciousness.
Spaciousness is about effortless ease without stimulations and activities. During that time, we don’t write a to-do list or check our phones. The idea is to practice being with ourselves without distractions.
When we disengage from the doing and thinking, we allow space for the wisdom to rise. We can connect the dots and gain insights. We cut through the noise and find ways to get 80 percent of the results with 20 percent of effort.
Reactivity causes us to run on the hamster wheel. The busyness creates the perception that a lot is happening. Seeing each issue as separate, we spend 80 percent of the effort and get 20 percent of the results.
Setting time aside for spaciousness is different from having fun or taking a vacation. Cultivating spaciousness improves the quality of our being. With practice, we notice time slows down for us and more gets accomplished.
During this solstice, may the light expand your perception of time so that you experience greater flow and ease in life.
With Love and Light,
I help clients regain vitality,
transcend limitations, and
own their divine presence.