This week my coaching practice has been filled with ordinary human beings having an extraordinarily difficult time with the fact that they think. It fills my heart to speak with them and point them back to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the nature of our experience and how they are making so much shit up about themselves they are becoming ill, physically hurting themselves and become frozen with fear.
Time and time again it’s the same story no matter what the external symptoms may appear to present themselves as e.g bulimia, anorexia, self-harming, anxiety, not feeling the principles only intellectually understanding them.
Give yourself a shake ….and a break
You are a human being. We all live in the feeling of our thinking. We think thoughts and we get all caught up in believing what we have just thought about but it doesn’t make it real.
One of my clients this week self-harms. She has spent years speaking with psychologists, psychiatrists, CBT specialists you name it she has done it. We had a beautiful conversation where I pointed her to the nature of her experience and how she creates her reality from the inside out and for a whole week she didn’t even think to self-harm. She became buoyant, resilient, self-effacing about her experiences at college and her mother said it was the best mental state she had ever seen her in.
Then BOOM… a lecture at college about self-harming and suicide prevention, a few funny comments from her friends and a sleepless night where she only got 3 hours of sleep lowered her state of mind and clouded her capacity to see truth to such an extent that she got completely lost in the content of her thinking and cut herself again to feel better. This time she ended up in hospital as she had used a craft knife which cut into her skin much deeper than she expected it to and it scared the hell out of her. She immediately felt remorse.
I talked with her that same evening after she returned from the hospital as we had a coaching session already in the diary. Our conversation was gentle and loving without any blame, judgment or opinion over what had just happened, just the facts.
To me, this was a thinking problem, not a behaviour problem or a mental health problem. I told her that :
- She was not broken
- She did not need fixed
- That we all get lost in the content of our thinking from time to time
- She was ok
- The best thing about the past is that it is over
- When I am tired I am more likely to believe the thoughts passing through my mind but I know I don’t need to act on them as do you
- All thought is neutral until we add our awareness to it
- She is and always has been mentally healthy and just got caught up in believing her thoughts
- Every moment is a fresh opportunity to see something new
- To be gentle with herself when she gets caught up in her thinking as it will soon pass and there is always a lesson within it for her to see something new.
After a half-hour, I closed off our call. She was becoming tired and it felt best to stop there. I wrote her a little email just to remind her of where her experience of life was coming from and recommended she watch a webinar that I had taken part in for 3PGC where I discuss the principles in everyday language with a little bit of sass and a whole lot of humour.
You can watch it too here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_N9CvULa70
Her mother informed me they watched the recording and laughed together recognizing themselves in my stories. Her daughter fell asleep in the middle of it into a beautiful deep sleep until morning. Her mind had quietened down giving her space to rest, recuperate and rest her operating system.
This young woman is just like you and me. She got caught up in believing the stories she was creating and in a low state of mind, it seemed to make more sense to her to take action that unfortunately harmed her. Nowadays I only listen to the thoughts that are kind and gentle when I am in a low state of mind. I know only too well the consequences of following the others.
By the time you read this on Sunday, I will be having my third session with this beautiful human being and I am looking forward to hearing what is fresh and new for her and having the opportunity to continually point her back to her true nature and the origin of her experience always.
Until next time
Take care, be naughty and let life live through you,
All my love,
Jacquie Forde RGN RM
