Revisionary!

I had the most awesome session with a wonderful client of mine!  We were addressing her question of “Why am I so resistant to doing my inner work?”  She noted she had a negative visceral reaction whenever I mentioned doing guided imagery or Breathwork and that she tended to avoid doing her deeper work even though she knew how much better she felt when she did it.

I asked her to go within to check on where she thought doing the work was going to take her.  She stated she just didn’t want to do it “because it’s going to be work” and would dig up stuff she didn’t want to feel.  Her comment was, “Why do I have to keep doing this?  This should be fixed by now” with the implication being that somehow she was broken.

“Paradigm Shift!”, I shouted!  It was time for an overhaul in how she viewed this process in which we were engaging.  I asked her to see herself smashing the old musty, fusty pieces of belief around “It’s going to be work”, kicking the pieces to the side, and stepping into her process from a fresh place.  She then spontaneously started framing up the process as paralleling her process when she writes.  She tapped the enjoyment she felt in doing revisions, seeking just the right combination of words to convey her thoughts.  She imagined the fun she had when helping others revise things they’d written. 

She commented on how interesting it was to her that, despite being a wordsmith, this paradigm shift was coming to her in images.  Images of the fun she had in this process; meeting the ongoing revisions of her life.  That life truly IS a revisionary process.

A major implication of this paradigm shift was noting that it’s not that something is wrong with her, she’s not broken.  She’s just not yet to her “final revision”; there’s always room for changes and growth.  I suggested that this process was also likely asymptotic – we keep improving and approaching perfection, but we never fully arrive there because we are human and, by definition, we are flawed beings. AND that is one fundamental reason we are so freaking awesome!  It’s precisely because of our flaws and quirks and such that we are so darned interesting, don’t you think?

So now both this client and I are sallying forth on our respective life paths, excited to apply the aha’s of this revisionary paradigm shift to our lives.  I imagine being willing to let go of the idea that revising ourselves has to be W.O.R.K. and reframing it as a fun and interesting process will go a long way toward opening up the willingness to dive deep into those life revisions and emerge energized and triumphant. Maybe you’ll find the correlation between the process of writing revisions and life helpful for you, too.