The Light At The End Of The Tunnel
Epiphanies can strike you anywhere, anytime. My latest one slowly crept up on me until I finally gave it voice over a cappuccino with a friend. We were talking about her new job, in an industry she’d wanted to get into for ages, and I wondered why she wasn’t being more enthusiastic about it. It turns out she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. After a pretty dire stretch in the employment stakes with the bosses from hell, she couldn’t quite believe things could work out, so she was holding back on feeling good about the new job in case it suddenly went sour.

It was easy for me to identify that one, because I’ve come to realise that I’ve been doing the same kind of thing. Let me just say that this year has been more than a challenge on a number of different fronts, so keeping all the plates spinning has become quite an art. While I’ve been lurching from mini-crisis to major crisis and back again, it’s become almost second nature to assume that another problem is on its way. That kind of thinking has allowed a deep mental groove to be carved in my mind, where my first thought is not necessarily an expectation of a positive outcome.

It’s an easy enough habit to slip into, particularly if things haven’t been going quite your way, because there’s already much more of a tendency for us to have low expectations anyway. It’s deeply ingrained in our society through the pervasive belief that we can avoid disappointment by having low expectations. Oddly enough, however low we might set the bar, it’s entirely possible that we could still be disappointed, so that one’s not much help, is it? We can’t protect ourselves from difficulties in life, no matter how hard we try to insure against them.

Spirituality isn’t a protection against the vagaries of life, but it is a way of finding meaning and purpose in even the most troubled times. Yet, even when we’ve found a degree of comfort or purpose in our travails, we can still find ourselves overcome with battle fatigue. That’s when our expectations remain lowered and even when good things happen, we can barely allow ourselves to dare to believe that life might become joyful and easy again.

When I was having a coffee with my friend, I was talking about the realisation that I need to adjust my assumptions to accept that the light at the end of the tunnel is not necessarily an oncoming train. It’s a mental leap, but it’s a credible one. What doesn’t work is trying to throw new, vastly expanded thoughts over the top of ingrained, habitual ways of thinking. That’s one of the reasons why affirmations so rarely work. To really change your mind about something, you have to find it believable.

Then, when you’ve shifted gears, you can up the ante. No matter what area of your life you want to work on, you need to start with a credible belief and then work up to the more expanded vision that you have for that area. Holding a strong vision is like an overarching structure, but the building blocks are the beliefs themselves. That’s where the emotional self can run amok and undermine you, if it doesn’t find the new beliefs credible. For lasting change, you need to challenge your own ingrained patterns step-by-step until the emotional self becomes as expansive as the vision you were holding for yourself.

One of the ways to delve into the beliefs that you’re holding is to ask yourself some incisive questions, taking a look at the assumptions you’ve made that are contributing to your experience. The first stage would be to look at what you don’t want in your life and to ask yourself what you might have assumed that would stop you from having what you want? When you’re clear on the assumption you’re holding, then you can turn that into a positive statement and ask yourself the question that will really begin to challenge your assumptions and start to make your new belief a possibility for you.

For example, if the issue was a problematic or volatile relationship, then you’d start looking for assumptions that might draw that to you, such as ‘relationships are always difficult’, ‘love doesn’t last’, or ‘people always let you down’. When you find the assumption that most resonates with you – in this example the one about lasting love – you could then start to shift your awareness by asking yourself , ‘If I knew for sure that I could have a lasting relationship, what would I do differently?’.

You’ll find more examples of this kind of questioning in the book, Time To Think by Nancy Kline, and some of her articles at www.timetothink.com. The real power inherent in this process is that you’re working with your own assumptions and your own words to express them, so you’re on a fast-track for dealing with your emotional self in a way that affirmations created by others simply cannot do. Also, it doesn’t ask you to make a massive leap of faith, but to simply open your mind to new possibilities.

This week, pick a nagging issue that you just can’t seem to get to the bottom of and start to look for what you might be assuming about yourself, life or other people in order for this to be true for you. To get the process started, try saying to yourself ‘in order to have this problem in my life, I must have assumed …’ or ‘for a person to be experiencing this, they must be thinking …’. Look for generalisations in your thought processes, like ‘life is …’ or ‘people are …’, because that’s usually where you’ll find an unchallenged assumption lurking about in your brain.

When you’ve found the basic assumption you feel is most appropriate for the issue, build a positive question from it, such as ‘if I knew that I could …, how would my life change/what would I do differently/what would be my next step?’ and keep opening up to new answers to that question.

In the Grail story of the Fisher King, it wasn’t an act of bravery or magic that could solve the problem and heal the ailing King and his kingdom – it was a question. Let the power of a really good question open your mind and make a difference in your life this week.


Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2006 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 11 Dec 06)