My whole life I have resisted owning my gifts, my beauty and the fullness of my heart. A wise man who knew this about me asked, “Why do you resist such great stuff?”
My answer is that I resist what is unfamiliar and being happy, feeling full and exhilarated every morning when I wake is still pretty unfamiliar, but it’s a lot more fun and satisfying than where I’ve spent most of my life.
Then the wise man said, “I encourage you to see if you can make sense of how you’ve resisted yourself because so many people resist their health, their beauty, their capabilities…What does it take to really embrace your wonderful qualities?”
So far I’ve come up with several answers. The first is, don’t quit.
When I first went to a Live Conscious retreat I had a fierce determination to make a better life for myself. But this was not the first time I had that powerful determination. My profound desire to be happy and to be free of the limiting beliefs and stories I had about myself has been with me for most of my life. What made this time different was the Live Conscious work and Jake and Hannah.
I’ve been through many cycles of trying to find a way out of my own self imposed hell—of course, I didn’t know it was self imposed until recently—but I wanted out for as long as I can remember. And every time I failed, every time I found myself stuck back in my own self-loathing, it was like adding gasoline to an already raging fire.
So, don’t quit is my first answer. No matter what, don’t quit.
The second answer is about Jake and Hannah. I remember my first session with Jake clearly, not the details so much, but I remember how I felt—I felt seen. I remember he didn’t waste any time on bullshit about where I grew up, what my folks did for a living, or how I felt about my mom. He went right to heart of my conflict and that’s where we began. I immediately rose to his expectation—he was with me to help me free myself and he spent no time encouraging or validating my self-pity or my stories. He saw my determination, my brilliance, my gifts and my heart and from that first meeting he expected me to succeed, nay, to surpass my own expectations.
With his kind and incisive direction we began finding the lost and shattered parts of myself that I had dismissed, hidden and shunned for most of my life and with his help I began to gather myself together and heal. Hannah also played a profound role in my healing by treating me homeopathically—her remedies had a transformative effect on my nervous system and I was able to immediately access a state of calm and peace, previously unavailable to me. And equally important she loved me and modeled for me how to be a kind and loving woman.
In the early months of my work with them, I soared. I made remarkable progress because for the first time in my life I had healthy models of how to parent myself and I was reconnecting with myself in deep and meaningful ways. But then, once I started to feel stable, I began to resist. I could spend the next eighty pages writing a long story about why I began to resist, but instead, I’ll tell you what happened every time I resisted—nothing. Jake and Hannah stood still, continued to love me, continued to hold high expectations of me and simply waited for me to get over my tantrums. What I wanted was for them to throw me away, to turn their backs on me, so I could retreat back into my cave of being a self-loathing victim. But they didn’t. And each time I resisted, I really suffered myself. The contrast between my life when I resist and believe my old stories, compared to how I feel when I am embracing the light in me is remarkable. I’m talking a moonless night and the brightest longest day. Eventually, I couldn’t stand my own prison, so I gave up.
I know that earlier I said, “don’t quit,” but there is one thing I needed to quit. I quit resisting.
The one thing I never did was give up on me; I did however, give up resisting me. In a relatively short period of time I have moved from misery to freedom and now I have the opportunity to work with people who are in similar situations. I am beyond fortunate, beyond grateful; I am thrilled to be able to pass this work on to others who are suffering themselves and living in their inner prisons. I can’t give them the determination I have, but I can witness them, I can love them and I can share with them what I have done in hopes that they will light their own fires and continue to feed the flames. It is this fire that will light the future and it is this fire that will eventually free us all—need a match?
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