How Do We Change?

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

-Mahatma Ghandi

June is a month where we can watch, see and feel spring turn into summer. We can literally take part in the awesome change of the seasons. We can feel the warmth of the sun, we can see the vital full blossoming of summer flowers and trees, and we can go out and use all our senses to leisurely enjoy our outside world.

As the seasons shift, change is vital and visual. What does it take for nature and for us to make real changes? It usually takes a period of chaos and pain. Heavy rains, spring storms and inner shifts can even shift the foundation of the earth and our foundation.

I have been working with a woman, using the tools of Family Constellation work and my Body Presencing formula to help her make some shifts that have been pressing in her life. She senses time is of the essence and she wanted to move forward yet, she feels stuck. 

I use the tools of figurines and footsteps, in working with her, to help to create the visual image(s) and feeling(s) necessary to have a deep understanding. Her issue had to do with feeling undeserving or that she will sabotage herself. She also felt great urgency; like she has to do something right now. We put out footsteps to represent her sense of urgency and for what she is aspiring to or towards. Aspiring where she is going was very clear and integrated. I told her that her urgency, which she represented with larger footsteps, felt a lot like addiction. She agreed. She put her own small footsteps on the urgency. After working with these feelings and images for awhile, I asked again what her urgency was about. She said it is her personal time now, and she needs to take her time. Before, her life had been about other people’s time, be it her mother or her father, or when she was married, her husband. Now she is a single mother and doesn’t feel she can wait anymore. Yet, her daughter needs her; thus the sense of urgency. She told me she was closer to her father growing up and distant from her mother but she is closer to her mother now. Her mother had wanted her daughter to be a go between between herself and her husband. This woman had obliged. In doing so, she gave up her needs and her childhood and things became about them and not about her. 

It became very clear; she was still angry with her mother. She needed her time and for things to be about her, as all children need. This anger and separation from her own feelings towards her mother is the urgency because she has her own daughter who needs the same things she did when she was little. No wonder she was stuck. The movement here is for her to work with her little feelings with her own mom.

It is so true that the devil is in the details. These little unresolved feelings can niggle at us in such a way that they undermine our own soul’s movements and cause us to be unable to move forward. The profound shift here was in recognizing a truth in her and in her life and then being able to go to where some seed or young healing needs to occur.

Small Lifestyle Changes that Promote Big Results:

So, where are you stuck in your life? In what ways and places would you like to see change occur? Do you love your career, or are you stuck in a career or job that doesn’t suit you? Do you have many friends, or are you lonely and wish for more connection? Are all your relationships satisfying, or do you wish for more closeness or appropriate ones? How is your health, and where could there be some improvement?

These and more are some of the questions you might want to ask yourself. I love writing out or drawing out ideas, situations, etc. So, take out a piece of paper and pen. In the first column write out where you are stuck in your life and what you would like to see occur. In other words, write out an outcome that you would like for yourself. In the second column, write out what actions you could take for that outcome. Take your time with this and look at it for a week. Each day as you look at your columns, make any additions or changes that seem right. Don’t censor any of your ideas on either column.

Lastly, after a week, ask yourself the question: As I see myself taking these actions, what emotions or feelings come up inside of me? For example, as I see myself changing my eating habits, what emotions do I feel; scared, anxious, doubt, excitement, etc.?

These feelings that come up are the keys to your change because they hold within them the conscious and unconscious reasons we stay the same. Through them, the Family Constellation work and the Body Presencing work, we have tools to work through these feelings so we can move our lives forward and experience full, whole and vital lives.

To read more about this work, go to my website, www.bodypresencing.com and click on Body Presencing and Family Constellations.