As excited as I am about the impending arrival of the official start of spring, and despite the fact that my husband’s birthday is next week, March is my least favorite month of the year. There I said it. (Sorry honey. Except for your birthday.)
At this point I’m ready for short sleeves and bare ankles and it’s really still coat season here in Rhode Island, where I live. Also, it’s just not very pretty out right now. The snow has melted. The ground is muddy. The grass is brown. The trees are bare.
First world problems, I realize. But this time of year reminds me of something I talk about with my clients a lot, which is how sometimes, when you go about the important and loving work of raising your awareness—of your state of mind, your feelings, your life—sometimes what happens is that you look around and realize that you don’t like what you see. Kind of like the time when, suspecting that I was carrying more weight than my careful fluffing of my shirt and sucking in of my gut for photos might attest, I did yoga in my underwear in front of a full-length mirror.
That was not a fun exercise! Ha. But it was liberating. I didn’t have to try and hide from myself any more. I saw that I was in fact carrying around a motorcycle-sized spare tire around my middle. And I realized that any minor diet or exercise change I’d been trying to implement on my own wasn’t working. That’s when I consulted a naturopath and hired a trainer. Meaning, that moment in front of the mirror is when I started losing weight, even thought it took a couple of years to truly come off and stay off.
Let’s say there’s something that you’re trying to change, like feeling more confident before you give a talk, or more connected to and understood by your spouse, or less raw about a past trauma, or simply more present in your life. Awareness is your first tool here, because you have to really see where you are right now to find the motivation and the insight you need to get where you want to go.
Awareness has a ton of power on its own. After all, it’s a well established scientific principle that the simple act of observing an interaction changes the outcome of that interaction, even without applying any other inputs. So, sometimes, simply becoming aware of a habit is powerful enough to do most of the heavy lifting of changing that habit.
And then sometimes, raising your awareness gets you to see that, in fact, there’s something going on in your life that is truly sucky. In that instance, raising your awareness can feel like an exercise in increasing your suffering, and not reducing it. That’s what your ego will try to tell you, anyway. Why are we paying attention to this when it’s all so mucked up? It would be so much easier to keep ignoring this! Let’s just go back to being in denial, shall we?
But here’s the thing. The truth will always, ALWAYS, get you to a place that feels good. Maybe not right away. But soon. Because truth and love are inseparable. (Click to Tweet!)
So if you are experiencing something that you are being brave enough to look at and see in a clear-eyed way, and is not feeling good in this moment, I am here to tell you to KEEP WITNESSING. Stay with it. You are well on your way to feeling the love. It is already there. There may just be a couple more pieces that have to fall away for you to be able to discern it.
And if there’s something you’re noticing in your life that you aren’t enjoying, and are wondering what to do with this increased awareness, I can help. Reach out to me to book a sample coaching session and together, let’s see what else is ready to be seen. The first coaching session is always on me. If we talk and decide to work together, great. If we talk and you feel you’ve gotten everything you need, thank you very much, well, that’s great too. =)
