Lesson 7 – Healing can only happen at the source
One of the saddest and most frustrating (for the client and myself) experiences I come across in coaching and life generally is peoples continual desire to attract and collect friends and acquaintances in an attempt to feel valued and valuable. It is my experience that we choose this “strategy” as a catharsis for past experiences, covering up the underlying healing thats actually required. More specifically we do it to disprove the self-imposed damage created from the disconnection/ betrayal/rejection/scorn/isolation etc created through experiences with others.
For example…
When an infant feels, for the first time, the pain of a parent’s scorn or when a child feels the rejection for the first time by a supposed school friend. When an adolescent feels the betrayal of their first love, they then spend the rest of their lives seeking “approval or acceptance” from others in an attempt to soothe the pain from the past.
What they are really saying to everyone they meet is something like this “I’m OK, aren’t I?” . When that person says, in some way, “yes, you are OK”, it is time to move onto the next person to ask “I’m OK, aren’t I?” And on and on it goes. The addiction for this drug of approval can be insatiable – why? My experience says this – we cannot find in another the healing we need to do on ourselves. Yet, we keep doing it. Know what I mean?
Do you know anyone like this? Might even be you?
When this becomes evident to a soul – they have a choice. Keep doing the same thing, feeding the addiction while never being satiated OR do something powerful and truly healing. But like any addiction, it is easy to justify the behaviour. So ya gotta want to do it – the gain has to be worth it or the pain has to be great enough (see Lesson 5 on motivation).
When the choice is made to want it bad enough, the following two areas will need to be addressed:
- Letting go of the energy around the experience and the blame of another. Yes, you may seriously have been damaged, abused, rejected, betrayed, isolated etc. But I ask you, how does it feel when you bring these experiences up and use them as excuses for all your failings in life? I would imagine not exactly wonderful. The best you can do here is to find a way to express in some way the real anger, sadness and deeply seated negative emotions that live inside you and feed the monster that keeps you small. More than likely, it won’t be going back to the source of the pain (the experience and the person who perpetrated the injustice, as what would this prove anyway), But more importantly and more powerfully…
- Reconnect back to the source of your true power – your best self – I refer to it as your Born and Unique Genius. This is where you choose to be great in the world. No more excuses, no more justifications, no more blame. It is up to you. And it is so healing, so powerful to let go of the suffering and heal it from the place where it all started.
Get it?
The Oxford Dictionary of Historical Principles defines genius as “the tutorly God or attendant spirit allocated to each person at their birth to oversee their destiny”. WOW. Then what happens, as Buckminster Fuller so powerfully states, “We are all born genius’s, it is the process of living that de-genius’s us”. So combining the two, when we are born, we are allocated a supporter (like our own cheer squad or personal motivator) to walk the journey with us, but life’s challenging experience take us away from this supporter and we become disillusioned and can give up on fulfilling our destiny.
There comes a time for all of us when we say, enough is enough (at least that is my fantasy), and we choose to seek a better path – our most purposeful path. It can only become real when we desist from seeking our best from others approval and acceptance and realising that the real solution lays in acknowledging that we are the solution to our own problem.
Are you ready to reconnect back?
Live true until next time.
Pete
