“My big challenges have been building confidence, finding courage and a sense of self…”
A Reader writes:
My life is at a crossroads, I’m in process, the transition its been tough. I’ve always known what brings me joy and growth, and what I am called to do. I’ve been sincere in steadily developing towards these, but have by no means brought them into my life complete. My big challenges have been building confidence, finding courage and a sense of self after taking too long to let go of something that stopped serving me long ago. The questions I am working with are: Who am I now? Where do I go from here?
Dear Reader:
“Who am I now?” “Where do I go from here?”
What great questions!
I speak with so many people these days who are in some kind of big transition, either one they chose or one that happened to them. It seems a lot of us are in that place.
In times like these, it feels so important to get in touch with what draws us forward. I love using Focusing for that.
Rather than trying to answer a question from the head, bring the question inside. Each question has so much more to it than just the words. At the body level, you can feel all those tendrils and threads of further meaning.
For example, “Who am I now?” is also “Who am I becoming?” and “What is the feeling quality of me right now?”
And the question “Where do I go from here?” invites us to get a sense of “forward,” which is something our body process is good at giving us.
Recently I was working with someone who told me, “There is no way forward.”
“Ah!” I said. “It feels like there is no way forward.”
“Yes… it is blocked,” she said. So I invited her to sit with the sense of something blocking the way forward… and this led to contact with a part of her that was protecting her by not allowing her to move. With inner company and empathy, this part began to soften and let go.
It’s so interesting to me how often we say “There is no way forward,” when what we really mean is, “I do sense the way forward, but it is blocked.”
