The impediment is the teacher

Here’s something I believe after 25 years of this work. The thing standing in your way, if you dare to look straight at it, becomes your greatest teacher. I keep meeting my teachers. They come in many forms. Its what I don’t want to look at or feel, or the client that I dream about - those are my greatest teachers. Its the grief that cannot be partnered with because something else is going on. It’s not pretty. The work we do is filled with the clients who shift and move out of the lives where they were held captive. How are we held captive by the stories we carry and are never to be shared.

That impediment forces you to take yourself on. It’s reciprocity in motion. You shift, and everything in your orbit shifts with you. It is synchronistically aligned with what you are asking your client to do and see and take on.

It’s easier to stay in what you know than to move into what you don’t.

So you stay the course. Even when the course is running on a kind of protest and despair… You ignore the signs when the loss of self, the loss of the hero you yearned to be, is facing a true hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell described the initial stages of the journey that begins after an event or experience forever changes you. Grief and burnout forever change you. Grief takes space, it doesn’t ask you for it. While burnout settles in and makes itself at home.

I want to offer you a distinction that changes things. Most people set resolutions. A resolution is a wish with a deadline, and it dies by February. What I’m asking for is a promise. A promise to the self is an investment in your own integrity. It’s an act of truth and return.

I call the shape of it the PLANK:

P is the Promise you make to yourself. Take a break instead of breaking. The promise begins with “I Will” statements: I will Rebuild a connection. I will Move my body. I will Look honestly at the balance between my work and my life.

L is Listening and Launching that promise. When you listen and launch it begins the process that stops denial, cracks the numbness, and starts to restore the missing pieces. This is the time for you to imagine what a launch looks or feels like.

A is Act on it. The launch is on your mind, you know the steps you can take. One at a time begin to take the steps. This the time for you to feed your own hunger for once, instead of everyone else’s.

N is Navigating it. The navigation occurs after you have acted. What is the after math of the steps taken. What have you learned. How do you navigate new territory created by you? What if you are not responsible for an outcome. What if its not all on you? What i you are no longer fused to the role you have been in but rather you are curious about what you are creating. What is working and what isn’t? Here you get to call a stop. Renegotiate. Say no, and find the truer yes underneath it.

K is the Knowing and Believing Gap. You know what to do, you may not believe it will make a difference. This is the internal force wanting to keep you where you’ve been. You DO know what to do, and what is inside of you that doesn’t believe making a change or shift out of the fusion

The promise is the hardest thing a hero does, because it means admitting there’s something worth returning to.

I’m writing this out in full over the coming weeks: the PLANK, the tools that make it hold, and the way through. Subscribe so you don’t miss the rest.

Edy

If this stayed with you, It’s Grief goes further: grief as something you learn to dance with, not something you’re supposed to get over. Get it here.

And if you want a place to put your own words down, It’s Grief: Notes to Self is the journal that goes with it. Find it here.