Change Is In The Air

Change is not easy for most of us. Letting go of a thought or an idea or of something or someone in our lives challenges us. This is true even if and when we know they or it no longer serve us. We are creatures of habit. What we hold onto is connected with our early need to belong. This holds true even on a macro level as we see with our government and our political beliefs and we see playing out in the world. Yet what we see playing out in a big way always begins with us individually; with our internal work with ourselves.

We hold onto that which served us at one time in our lives. That time period has great meaning to our inner world even if that was in the past. Our inner world knows time very differently than our outer world; the world of defenses and masks we developed to help us to survive in our world. 

I remember a conversation I had with a group of friends at Passover this year. We were talking about forgiveness. How do we forgive when someone killed a family member or when we witnessed chemical warfare perpetrated against us or when we remember the Holocaust and our own personal holocausts? How do we let go of the hurts that were perpetrated against us or that we perceived and experienced? That is where real change happens, through letting go of hurts.

This reminds me of a long lasting conversation I used to have with my father. He didn't believe in forgiveness. He used to say that energy doesn't get lost and that you can't let go of something that happened, as it, in fact, did happen. I used to argue that forgiveness is about the transformation of energy, not a letting go of or losing energy. My father, although he helped many people in his work and was very wise in many ways, never was able to let go of and move forward from what he believed was hurts he received at the hands of his parents. He saw his father as being jealous of him and therefore as having had little to do with him. He saw his mother as a liar and as a mother who didn't protect him from abuse by a sitter and accused her of never seeing who he was or liking him as a person. Whatever the truths are regarding him and his parents we may never know. The truth most likely lies somewhere in the middle of everyone's experience. The important thing here is that he never forgave them. He was never able to transform his anger and hurt to acceptance, or to some kind of resolution with them, much less to love them in some way. If we as people aren't able to find acceptance with our parents, if nothing else, and we hold onto our abuses and hurts, how can we ever move forward in life to forgive others their trespasses? 

Is it easy to find some kind of peace and acceptance or forgiveness with those that hurt us or tortured us or took advantage of us in some way? No, it is a very hard thing for us to do and takes very much internal work on our parts. If we don't, however, we hold onto the pain forever and it robs us of a part of ourselves and our own health and vitality. It keeps us from changing our own internal dialogues and we become set and rigid in our beliefs and stunts our growth. We then own the very possibility of perpetrating similar hurts upon others. Think a minute about who hurt you and how that felt and how you reacted to the hurts. How has it been for you in holding onto them? Has it felt good or has it robbed you of something vital?

Change is in the air and all we have to do is move into it.

Shift Your Story/Shift Your Life:

On my website, www.bodypresencing.com, there is an interview I conducted with Katy Hutchison in which her husband was killed and left her with two young twins. It is a very inspiring true story of how she overcame the trauma and even made friends with and business partners with her husband's perpetrator. Click on Media, and scroll down to listen. I hope it inspires you as it did me.

My soothing words of wisdom for the week is about saying no in the moment and regretting the decision later: