So. Yesterday we talked about wanting. We talked about allowing desire, acknowledging it, honoring it, letting it guide you, and enjoying the results of following it.
Today we talk about loving that process. It might sound sparkly and beautiful to follow your dreams, but quite often this is a GNARLY PROCESS. It certainly was for me (and sometimes still is). Really, truly following your dreams is painful, it is identity-shattering, it is full of self-doubt and guilt and all of the other emotions that come to the surface when we do the brave thing and finally decide to step into the life we want to be living.
Why do these scary emotions come up when we’re just trying to live our hashtag best life? Because we’ve accumulated lots and lots of beliefs during our lifetimes about how it’s selfish to want more/better, how it’s a bad thing to be selfish, how we should just be grateful for what we have and never want/ask for more, etc. These beliefs start kicking and screaming the moment we begin to question them and live in opposition to them. That’s why it’s so scary to really make a go of building a life we love. You feel me?
What you’ll need most during this process is COMPASSION. Most importantly for yourself. One of my favorite books, Soften, by Erin Elizabeth Wehrenberg, taught me how to be gentle with myself in a way that was very scary for me at first. This book (and my coaching work with Erin) taught me that self-healing demands that I become a safe place for myself, that I become my best advocate, my most loving supporter. As I walked further down the path of rewriting all of my negative beliefs, this self-support helped me through. I was able to love and accept myself during moments of extreme self doubt, and I was able to love and accept the process I had chosen to take myself through during moments of intense pain and frustration.
Once we’ve done the work around identifying what we want, we get to go about pursuing it. This will require us to behave differently than we always have, and think differently than we always have. This process will require that we question all of the beliefs we have about what is okay and not, what is allowed and not, what we have permission to do, and what is acceptable to do.
Logistically, this looks like writing down all of the beliefs we have about something, examining those beliefs and their effects in our lives, and then deciding what we want to believe instead if those effects are not ones we want to be creating.
The most important part of this process (besides loving yourself the whole way through of course) is follow-through. You need to keep your word to yourself. If you examine your beliefs, identify the ones you want to change, and then forget about all of this five minutes later, your life will not change. You will continue to create a life based on old beliefs that you’ve already decided aren’t serving you anymore. You need to remind yourself over and over and over again of the new beliefs you’ve intentionally created for yourself, and you need to live in accordance with these new beliefs. Again, this will likely be a painful and tedious process, so it is important that whatever negative emotions you feel during this process, you ALLOW them instead of resisting them, and you find sufficiency and gratitude in that alone. This allowing of emotions will enable you to observe your development and therefore appreciate and eventually love this difficult process. You’ll love it not only for the result you know it will produce in your life in the future, but also for the journey you’re on right now in each moment. You’ll know that whatever pain you’re experiencing is serving an incredibly important purpose.