"I sabotage my own moves toward success"
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Maggie writes: "Although I am keen to be successful in my writing and my work, I often sabotage my own moves toward success.
"I realize that for me, success implies exposure, expectations, and also the threat of failing and causing disappointment, and ultimately rejection. Rejection is something I experienced painfully during my teenage years, and there is a part of me that seems to be intent on that never happening again. Indeed, this part of me seems to have developed very clever ways of leading me away from the effort and discipline that might lead to success. So clever, that I often don't realize what has happened until I find myself once again depleted in energy and in mental torment about some issue…"
Dear Maggie,
It sounds like you already know a lot about this issue for you. Be careful… everything you know could be right, and it could still be getting in the way of approaching the issue with fresh senses.
I really appreciate the way you say, "A part of me seems to be intent on [rejection, the pain of rejection] never happening again." Calling it a "part" or "something in you" is more likely, in my experience, to enable you to bring it Presence with compassion and interested curiosity.
(That's the trouble, by the way, with "knowing" too much about our issue — that can interfere with being genuinely curious.)
I'd suggest starting your Focusing process with a sense of what you want: to complete and publish your next article, perhaps. Let your body get the feel of your own wanting for that, the satisfaction, the sense of connection with others… whatever it is for you.
As you do that, you might already notice "something in you" that comes in to constrict or negate that wanting. A heaviness perhaps, or a sense of withdrawal… it could be anything, and of course we're open to anything.
If you don't notice anything like that yet, then I'd recommend inviting it: "I'd like to get in touch with something in me that doesn't want me to write this and publish it." (Or whatever the words are for you.) And then wait… and be open to whatever comes to awareness, especially as a bodily felt experience.
Open to sensing how it is… from its point of view
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As you stay in direct contact with what you are sensing, be careful about assuming you already know what it is or what it feels. As I'm sure you know, those assumptions could get in the way of sensing it directly.
It often helps to start with the physical, describing what it feels like in the body. "Like a heavy weight on my chest" or "like a shriveled weakness on my left side." Stay with the sensation and offer it the description, and let the description change or develop and you keep sensing what's there.
The next step might be to sense its emotion, like "it's scared," or "it's worried." Moving from felt physical descriptions to felt emotional descriptions is a great way to stay grounded, not get carried into analysis or guesses.
If at each stage you check with IT, you're staying connected, and ready to go to the next stage… which might be to sense what it's not wanting to have happen to you. Your guess is that it's not wanting you to be rejected, and to feel the pain of rejection again like it happened in your teenage years. And that might well be true… but the way the process happens, that you listen to IT and let IT show you or tell you, and then let it know you hear it… that makes all the difference.
Respectful listening in a direct relational contact has quite different results from making guesses from afar… even if the guesses are true!