Processing The Process

Thankfully, the house move will be done and dusted by the end of the week and life will resume some kind of normalcy. However, at the moment I’m still in the process and therefore still processing the experience. Discussing it with a friend this afternoon, we agreed that even when change is what you want, it’s still an emotional experience. Letting go can be tough and the simple act of rummaging through long-held items stirs up complex emotions. As the coach and author, Cheryl Richardson, says “When we say goodbye, we never say goodbye to one person, one event or one thing. We say goodbye to many experiences – the lessons learned, the challenges won and lost, the unfulfilled promises or the unexpected joys. This takes time, patience and a willingness to sift through and experience all our feelings.”

She also advocates fully embracing the ending to create a new beginning, acknowledging the good times as well as the difficult ones. Where we often have trouble is being willing to let ourselves surrender to the sadness that change evokes. Cheryl notes “Sadness simply means that we’re experiencing the loss of something that held significance in our lives. It’s earned the right to pull at our hearts. If you allow yourself to go through it instead of working hard to go around it, you’ll save yourself a whole lot of energy. You can’t feel joy without cultivating the strength to feel pain.”

Take a look at this Oprah clip about the world’s largest garage sale to see just how far one woman took her clutter and the emotions that were stirred up in letting it go. Makes me look like a rank amateur in the pack rat stakes!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADGQOxqLKiI

Until normal service is resumed next week – when I have come out of my removal-related coma – take a look at what’s ready to change in your life and acknowledge the complex emotions surrounding it. Even when it’s a positive step, there may still be some feelings of loss around it. Allow yourself to acknowledge your feelings fully so that you can move free and unencumbered into the next phase of your life. When we pay attention to even our most uncomfortable feelings, we don’t necessarily increase them – paradoxically, once they’re acknowledged they tend to subside.

Break through your own resistance to difficult emotions like grief, sadness and loss. If you feel into them deeply you’ll break through to the hope and inspiration that lies beyond them. Remember, the only way out is through. Avoid nothing and watch how easily the shadows can be dispelled. There’s nothing to fear when you know that all feelings are temporary and that uncomfortable ones rise up for the express purpose of being released. Notice them, feel them and move on, trusting that your willingness to look within will be well-rewarded. Allow yourself to walk through the shadows to find your own lightness of being.

For the Coach Fabulous archives, go to www.coachfabulous.blogspot.com and for the I Am Fabulous archives, go to www.fabcentral.blogspot.com. You can email me at coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 25 Aug 08)

Resistance Is Futile



Mostly I have no idea of what I’m going to write until I sit down at the keyboard and see what pops up, but occasionally a thread of a story will make itself known to me in vague ways in the run-up to a new I Am Fab becoming due. I’d love to be going into that a bit more right now, but unfortunately I’ve been running into my old nemesis – resistance. It’s any writer’s worst nightmare (and regular companion).

Resistance is a funny thing. It doesn’t matter how much you enjoy something, you can still develop resistance to it. Writers suffer from it a lot, because we know we have to dig deep for creative inspiration and sometimes our minds just don’t want to play ball. That’s when we surf the net, phone friends, do silly tests online or basically utilise any avoidance tactic known to man, rather than just sit down and do it.

Just to be clear, though, today’s resistance comes to you courtesy of that other form of resistance – trying to do something you don’t really enjoy. Before sitting down to a comfy laptop to meander through some juicy topics with you all, I had to knuckle down to a writing job that, for me, feels worse than root canal. On the surface, it’s a nice enough job writing a corporate website, but something in my soul just doesn’t want to pay attention to anything so divergent from where my own interests lie.

So you have an insight into the lengths I will go to in order to avoid doing work I don’t like, here’s a flavour (by no means exhaustive) of what I managed to fit in before I finally forced myself to concentrate and just do it:

Meditate, phone a friend, clear out my email inbox, make a cup of tea for the cleaner, meet a friend for coffee, do a stretch class, have lunch, clear text inbox on mobile phone, chat to another friend, put out garbage, nominate people as ‘most likely to …’ on Facebook, make a casserole, do laundry, check email again, look up old music producer friend on Google, give wardrobe advice to friend abroad, eat casserole that’s been cooking for 4 hours and do even more stupid time-wasting stuff on Facebook. Oh, and then I actually did some work.

Normally, such a high level of resistance can only really take hold if you're working for yourself. The downside of managing your own time means you can really make a pig's ear of it and you're the only one that suffers for it. The client still gets the work done even if you have to do it late at night because you've goofed about all day. If you're in an office, there's no such luxury of torturing yourself with industrial strength resistance, although plenty of displacement activities do look like work – it's just that they're probably not the actual work you were supposed to be doing. Then there's the not-so-small matter of being distracted by others.

Now, it may look like some of the time other people were distracting me, but in reality I was absolutely enabling the distraction. As Steven Pressfield, who’s written the defining book on creativity called The War Of Art, puts it, resistance is internal. He writes “Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. ‘Peripheral opponents’, as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.”

It may be the inner saboteur, but sometimes resistance shows us what’s right for us and what’s not. Today’s little battle with it has clearly pointed out that I need to focus more on work that I enjoy, because it’s too darned hard to do the stuff that I don’t like! As a friend noted in one of today’s many chats, “wouldn’t it be so much easier just to be motivated by money?”. Amen to that. If that were the motivator for me I’d be pumping the stuff out in record time, but unfortunately I need to feel inspired by the content of what I’m doing, not just the paycheck. Bummer!

Well, the upside is that resistance has helped me clarify what I need to avoid in future. However, it doesn’t always work that way. We often resist what we most need to do, so the art lies in being able to interpret your feelings around what it is that you’re resisting. If it’s just fear or not wanting to apply yourself, that’s probably common or garden resistance, the ten-a-penny kind we get when we just can’t be asked to do something. If it’s Olympic standard resistance like today’s effort, then you need to be asking yourself if you’re avoiding it because you genuinely don’t like it or you’re just daunted by the size of the task.

Steven Pressfield’s rule of thumb is that “the more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.” He goes on to say, “Like a magnetised needle floating on a surface of oil, resistance will unfailingly point to true north – meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass, We can navigate by resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.”

This week, take a look at what you’re resisting in life and put it to the test. Are you resisting a soul’s desire or simply having trouble dealing with something that’s not really for you? Are you afraid to take the leap to bring something into manifestation? Are you avoiding facing up to a relationship issue? Is there something that needs to be said at work? Pay attention to what you’re resisting – it’s trying to tell you something.

Maybe next week I’ll get around to telling you the fabulous story that was floating around in my brain in between all those avoidance strategies …

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. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 29 Oct 07)

Acceptance & Resourcefulness

Well, it’s week one of knee rehab – don’t you love the sound of that … it’s as though it’s been badly-behaved and I’ve had to send it off for a bit of correction, which isn’t far wrong, really – and I’m hobbling about with some skill now. While I enjoyed a few short moments of lounging about the house, clad in a velvet dressing gown, zoned out on daytime TV and fully loaded on painkillers, I just can’t hack that as a lifestyle choice. So I’ve been out and about challenging the local pensioners to a race by the river on crutches. Sadly, some of them appear to be winning – that’s so not good for the self-esteem!

In the drug-induced haze of the early days post-surgery, I swear I had a vision of angels – real, life-sized ones bearing cake and flowers. They may not have wings, but my friends sure know what matters most at times of crisis and cake is always the answer du jour for whatever ails you. Doesn’t matter if it’s pain or pleasure – any major trauma or achievement can be soothed or celebrated with the healing powers of cake. Of course if that doesn’t do the trick, there’s always champagne … possibly a tad too risky a cocktail with the industrial-strength painkillers, but it does give me a little something to look forward to when the bandages come off.

Before I went under the knife I was getting a bit skittish about the whole thing. It’s not that long since I’d had to have some corrective surgery on a broken ankle and I remembered all too clearly just how painful and tough it was to haul myself around on crutches. Until it’s happened to you, you have no idea how exhausting it is or just how much it limits your capacity to take care of yourself and manage the day-to-day stuff we all take for granted. For someone who loves their independence as much as I do, it’s the ultimate frustration. So, I wasgetting pretty antsy about the whole deal and more than a little stressed, until I decided to just go into total acceptance and choose to see it differently.

I couldn’t change what I was up against, but I could change how I was planning to deal with it. Instead of being miserable about being stuck at home, I opted to view it as a long-overdue opportunity for some real rest and a level of peacefulness that’s been missing in my life for a while. I also decided to dedicate the time to doing some deeper spiritual work and meditation, for more clarity and focus. This may sound terribly Pollyanna-ish, but instead of being something I was dreading, this time of enforced rest became something I was looking forward to and, as a result, I’ve actually enjoyed it. OK, the pain wasn’t a walk in the park, but I’ve had some beautiful, peaceful days and an opportunity for reflection that hasn’t been available to me for quite some time.

That leads me to a piece of inspiration from an I Am Fabulous reader, who wrote in response to the call for communal wisdom last week. She said, “Live life to the full as if each day is your last. Enjoy all that is around you. Take time to sit and stare about you. At the sky, at the trees, at the people who are close to you. Stop and listen to what people say to you. Smile even when you don't really feel like it.”

Given that I’m moving at a pace that snails would find leisurely, I’m certainly getting an opportunity to stop and smell the roses. When you can’t run around like a mad thing, you begin to appreciate what’s around you, all that you miss when you dash from one thing to another. I live only a few paces from the river, but I hardly ever go down to the bottom of the garden to see it. This week, I’ve watched the tide rise and fall, seen rowers gather for a regatta, and simply just stared at the sunlight on the water for ages. Sometimes that’s just the best meditation there is.

I’m sure that an extra benefit has come out of my willingness to just accept this period of rest, because my knee seems to be healing incredibly quickly and at this rate I’ll be bounding about in no time. Hopefully I’ll take this renewed sense of peacefulness with me as I head back into a busy life again. What this whole experience has really reminded me of, most deeply, is that attitude is everything. If you’re faced with the unchangeable, then you still have the power to change the way you choose to deal with it. It can be an easy ride or you can make it tough going – it’s all about how you’re willing to approach it.

So where in your life is there something you’ve been resisting? Is there a circumstance that you can’t change, but that you’re willing to see differently? Can you turn what looks like an inconvenience into an opportunity to try a new approach? At a bare minimum, can you just accept the way things are and stop wishing they were different?

This week pay attention to how you’re approaching what comes up – are you seeing things as problems or opportunities? Get creative and see how you might put a completely new spin on things. If it looks like things aren’t going your way, how could you see a benefit or a new chance in the way things have shaped up? This is about being both accepting and resourceful. Acceptance doesn’t mean just putting up with disappointment, it means taking the cards you’re dealt and making them serve a positive purpose.

Finally, a huge thank-you to all of you who’ve sent in words of wisdom - they’ll be appearing here in the weeks to come. In the meantime, get out there and do some artful acceptance and some radical resourcefulness … who knows where that might lead?

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 20 Nov 06)