a simple tool for quick course-correction Want an even quicker read? Go through and just read the bold. That tells the whole story. Pivoting is both a simple concept and a simple tool. It’s not even a process. It’s a quick mental adjustment you make and keep making to go from the unwanted to the wanted. Use it while in motion or being still. Use it while working, walking, cooking--whenever you’re capable of having a thought and being aware of that thought. Use it while waking or dropping off to sleep. Anytime, just for a moment. Yep, this is also from Abraham-Hicks. Pivoting has 3 steps. 1) You notice something that’s not to your liking. 2) You consider what WANTED thing corresponds to this UNWANTED thing. 3) You shift your focus to the WANTED. Examples: 1) You notice you’ve been getting sloppy with punctuality again. 2) You make a mental note that you prefer being a little early to be ready on time. 3) You feel great about that decision (instead of bad about the lapse) and you head out (or to the computer) early for the next appointment. 1) You notice you’re having an irritation response. 2) You pivot toward soothing what bothers you and toward accepting what is, as it is, here and now. 3) Right now, you breathe, relax the muscles that tensed up, tell yourself it’s really okay. 1) You notice you’ve been doing too much and things feel glutted. 2) You pivot toward doing less, finding pauses, making spaces. 3) You tell the story of increasing spaciousness and do every little thing you see to promote that—tidy up this corner of the cabinet, say no just to something between you & you (that shopping trip can actually wait, and today I stay home); say no to an invitation even if it has appeal—because it’s more appealing to do less right now. Notice from the above examples that what brings the UNWANTED into focus, and thus the call to PIVOT, is simply that SOMETHING FEELS BAD. When you become quickly responsive to the signals that something feels bad (these signals come from your own system—body, heart, head), then you pause with what you’re noticing and … PIVOT. What’s so radical—or more to the point, HELPFUL--about this? I recently heard this gem (during an Abraham Now program): “You can’t get around how you feel when you’re amplifying how you feel with sentences.” Ever notice you put A LOT of language—even just words in thought, not necessarily spoken—to what you feel? Noticing you’re exhausted, you declare exhausted. You review what’s been exhausting in your life. You give lots of weight to what you can’t control that exhausts you (so now you’re a victim of and stuck in exhausting circumstances). You put much focus on how bad it feels in your body. In short, you tell the story of EXHAUSTED. So when you have this PIVOT concept in view, noticing exhaustion, you pivot. You tell the story of rest and rejuvenation instead. And then it’s not so hard to get around how you feel. Your (chosen) focus is now on rest and rejuvenation, you choose your inner and outer narratives accordingly, and you also make choices accordingly. And that’s how you apply it as you go. So let’s go over those 3 ways to apply the pivot one more time:
1) You focus on whatever you’re pivoting toward (e.g., rest & rejuvenation). 2) You choose your inner and outer narratives accordingly. 3) You make ongoing choices to keep heading that way. As always, it helps to BRING IT TO NOW. Just right now, I can let go of something and go to bed earlier. Now, I can slow down a bit and do an easier version of the task. Right now, I can pause for 15 minutes and meditate or lie down and rest. You could make pivoting a way of life! You could swiftly learn to shift …
Have you ever had some of the most satisfying change come from some simply concept you simply applied? I invite you to try that out with PIVOTING. Love & blessings, Jaya
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just open the door, receive the delivery,then send it on its way I invite you to give this a moment of attention even if you don’t feel much resentment. Let’s get super subtle here and be free free free. If nothing else, check out the bullets below the pic and find one thing to keep in the fore to enhance your well-being (which includes aligned, not exhausting, service). Resentment has such a bad rap. It has its unfortunate place over with anger, where people relegate unwanted emotions—over in the bad zone. Who wants to be resentful? Yeah, please don’t sit around resenting. But resentment might show up briefly anytime, kind of like the delivery person, and when it does, there’s something to receive with a thank you. Beyond the scope of this writing are all the reasons you don’t want to shove resentment down into the cells of your being to accrue & fester there. That happens with denial and vilification, so instead, let’s just make resentment the nice delivery person, who’s in a hurry anyway to get on with the next delivery. Just open the door to briefly, get the goods, and get on with your day. Resentment as delivery person may put a wrinkle in something you’re doing right now, but you WANT the thing being delivered. That thing’s going to make your life easier or more pleasant somehow. Here are some typical message-deliveries resentment brings. And bee-tee-dubs, you might just consider whether one of these might be for you to keep cleaning up even if you’re not tuning in to any resentment:
I love to think in terms of the first whiff. If you get just the tiniest whiff of resentment, pause with it a moment. It’s got something for you. Don’t ignore it. Ask it nicely what it’s got for you. Ask what it’s pointing you to that’s going to support you to be
Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. Monday-night group-coaching drop-in sessions are going strong. Note a couple of tweaks in December schedule below. New and repeat people come to these Monday events all the time, so it could be you! You too are so welcome to join us on- or off-camera. This is BRIEF—not because it rhymes so nicely with RELIEF, but because—springtime. So take it in like a big clearing breath, then run play outside. (Addendum: Or in the time of Corona, carry on in the best way you see to LIVE YOUR LIFE.) You know that when the mind is chewing and belching in a rambling rumination, you can't be fully present to the brilliant buzz and birdsong (or to WHATEVER'S actually going on here and now). Let's cut through the illusions that keep rumination in place:
Try these 3 steps toward getting OUT of rumination:
One more metaphor to illustrate those 3 steps: To go with gum and hamsters, let's add a dog on a leash. Notice (witness) when it goes for the disgusting random foodstuff, interrupt it at once (no need to think anything through!), and redirect—head ANY other way. (Argh, canine, was that even ever edible? Argh, mind, aren't you so disgusted with this endless review of what needs no reviewing?) May your communing with all things spring unfold in glorious presence. Love & blessings, Jaya Here's another post I made on dissolving rumination with a good breath and a good question. Join me, if you will, in a new vision of love. As you read this to try it on, you might put many faces & kinds of relationships to the word BELOVED. I invite you to stretch yourself in love, stretch your ideas around love, stretch into new behaviors in love. I invite you to a love overhaul--a grand experiment, if you will. My aim, which I may grope toward gracelessly & will only achieve imperfectly, is to love as purely as I’m able at any given moment. I love myself at least enough to let love be pure perfection in the imperfect ways I give and receive it as I evolve. I love others by appreciating and accepting the gorgeously imperfect love with which they grace me. I am willing to grapple with, to keep meeting, what challenges me in the realms of love. Toward the beloved, I seek to be in a state of ongoing discovery (awe, curiosity, joy!), instead of holding to all I’ve decided so far about who they are (and worse, letting that become an accruing list of here-we-go-again grievances). My love gets to allow their becoming, and to acknowledge the journey that they’re on beyond me and sometimes (I am wowed by this privilege daily) with or near me. I allow the journey of the beloved to follow its own timeline, not the one I would draw up—as if I had such drafting skills!—and not the one my impatience or discomfort would demand. When I require others to make me comfortable or to pander to my fears or to fix what’s unhealed inside me, I have stepped out of love. I accept this. I must and I will step out of love; others must and they will, too. It’s madness to expect anything else. I aim to witness with no judgment when either of us slips off-track—or to witness the judgment of self or other, and start there, soothe that first. I aim to simply call myself back to love. My ongoing intention is swift course-correction back to love. I am in love with this very intention! Maybe I don’t instantly feel love in such course-correcting moments. I know there’s no problem. Sometimes simply reversing the direction of my focus is all that’s needed to get me back to love (and eventually the feelings always follow): I shift the focus away from changing, correcting, instructing the beloved (even with the innocent motive to help them get me!) and bring the focus inward instead, toward soothing and perhaps better understanding myself. (The conversations with the other can follow, from a more grounded and kinder place.) If something in my interactions with the beloved pushes a button or rubs up against a raw, unhealed place inside me, I am not shocked or dismayed; I do not believe something has gone wrong. I do seek to soothe myself. I do deconstruct the old, wrong decisions I made about myself or about love or about the way life works. I will bring love to myself first. I will love the beloved so much that I will take care of myself first, so great is my clarity that my well-being is no one else’s job and that my purest love comes from a place of self-love, of wholeness within myself. (I also allow my self-love and wholeness to be works in progress, dynamic entities or energies that wax and wane.) I understand that it happens, in love connections of all kinds, in both directions, that buttons are pushed, core wounds are triggered, pain arises. It is not the job of love to prevent this. It is not a failure of love when this occurs. In fact, it’s the opposite at play: the job of love is to expose what needs to heal, so the hand of love will brush against every available bruise without meaning to, without trying. When it’s my button pushed or my pain prodded, I well know the tendency to make that about the wrongs of the other: what they do wrong, how they don’t show up for me, the maddening way they phrase it, the way they’ve done this before and have failed to hear what I said about the impact on me. I aim to make it about me instead, my greater self-understanding, my healing and evolution, my expansion into greater love. I aim to hear in my own mind and speech anything that resembles: Correct yourself faster for me, see what you can’t yet see because I insist that you see it for me, do the impossible to please me and make me feel loved, be who you are not—so I can relax. I know how to course-correct. I can come back to I release you to your life; I release myself to mine. I can and will come back to love, even if all that means at first is feeling the pain, soothing myself, loving the beloved for a moment from afar, as best I can, coming close again with nothing understood or just a fragment of wavering light to tender. I will sing with Iris Dement, Just because I’m hurting, that don’t mean that you’ve done something wrong. I am willing to apply that going in both directions. People hurt on planet Earth. People hurt in human relationships. Sometimes I hurt in mine; sometimes the beloved hurts in relationship to me. Still, I’m willing to love. I love myself so much that I’m willing to let the beloved be mad at me or disappointed in me --and I won't use that as an excuse to believe there’s something wrong with me. In those moments, I go after my pain to soothe it--I do not go after the beloved to see who they want me to be now. I go after love to embody it. I don't go after the beloved when I’m unclear with myself. I will not abandon myself. I will not think I’m bad or wrong when their pain is called forth, when their buttons have been pushed (as they must be; as they will be). I am willing to hear them talk when they’re ready and to listen carefully, to listen with love. This does not mean that I rush to fix their reactions—never mind seek to prevent them! I allow the beloved to be in their process. I invite them back to connection, to communication, and to love in right timing. I may get that timing wrong. I’m willing. I am willing to listen to the beloved and I am willing to look at myself, but I am not willing to automatically think that I’m wrong just because another thinks I am. I will always feel compassion when my phrasing or timing—or whatever—came in the wrong package for them and brought up their pain. I am sincerely sorry when my reactivity or wrong interpretation or personality tendencies got played out in a way that was hurtful to the beloved, and I want to make it right however I may be able to do so. But I will not grovel. I cannot be sorry that their stuff comes up with me: it must, it will, and I trust they’re equipped to meet it; I trust we’re both equipped to find love again together. I will not be sorry when my stuff comes up with them: it must, it will, and I trust I’m equipped to meet it; I trust we’re both equipped to find love again together. Love & blessings, Jaya (Practice during the holidays, REV IT UP DURING A PANDEMIC, carry on year-round!)
Could it be true that NOTHING IS INHERENTLY STRESSFUL? Whoa, what? The thing is, if something MUST be stressful, then stress is the only thing possible once you’re in that something. If the holidays are stressful, then, stress. If work this time of year is stressful, then, stress. If, however, that same something is not inherently stressful, then … what else is possible? It’s been almost 15 years since I encountered that idea through Byron Katie. This writing is not about Katie or her inquiry process, but hey, I love to give credit where credit is due. Um, and I used to be ridiculously quick to declare stress, overwhelm, exhaustion, and ultimately how very depressing it all was. I’m still stunned that I live with so much ease, that I have for more than a decade. It’s kind of amazing that I’ve made a motto of There’s no problem. Here’s what I did: I launched an experiment to test the idea that nothing is inherently stressful. I wasn’t convinced of this no-inherent-stress thing. I’m still not. (The experiment is ongoing.) My visual imagination can conjure up scenarios that would seem to me inherently stressful (how about a war zone, or my kid in ICU?). But it takes much less for most people to agree to obvious, automatic, absolutely warranted stress: moving, for starters, or divorcing. Or getting together with family of origin (or your partner’s!) over the holidays. I’ve stopped considering such things stressful. In fact, declaring stress seems to me a deplorable waste of my life force, which I’d rather use to be present to any situation I find myself in and get myself through it with as much grace (clarity, humor, kindness) as possible. So I invite you to your own experiment. And (at the distinct risk of repeating myself), if you’re going to bother experimenting at all, make it a grand experiment! Here are some things you might try in order to play with the possibility that nothing must be categorically stressful. Really (really) try them on. Keep coming back to them. Keep practicing. Leave no scenario or individual out of the reckoning. When you think, No really, this, STRESSFUL, ask yourself, What if nothing-inherently-stressful could work here too? It’s a great way to open to new lenses to look through. There’s nothing to lose and plenty to gain. If the experiment makes a fool of you, you’ll be a more open-minded, more present, less stressed-out fool. Not half-bad, right? Start with this basic premise:
So with a basic acceptance that life does what it does and people do what they do (oh, and you’ll have to keep coming around to accept that again and again, now and now and now), and that you’re in charge of you—not of other human beings and all of life--then you can get present to any situation (whatever its comfort level) and go about the business of creating the greatest possible ease in the context of reality. From there, go into and/or be in any tricky situation with a mindset of not-inherently-stressful. Remind yourself:
Go in expecting to keep bumping up against your old beliefs of STRESS!—as they’re likely to kick in as quickly as you feel discomfort. This will serve you much better than imagining that an open mind going in will translate to freedom from old stories. Oh, no no no. So if you don’t need it to mean that, now you get to simply keep your eyes open and show up for what’s actually happening. (That’s a whole chapter in my book, Scooch! You’re already doing much better in the ease department if you’re willing to show up for what’s actually happening, not what you wanted to have happen or thought should happen.) Stay in witness mode while you’re in the potentially (not inherently) stressful situation. I love to remind people to reach for the compassionate, dispassionate witness once you’re consciously witnessing. That is, witness with compassionate eyes that will look upon the scene (and you in it) with loving kindness; witness with dispassionate eyes that can hold a neutral gaze no matter what’s going on, that won’t get sucked into any story. The compassionate, dispassionate witness does not judge! And know that the witness is a part of you, sitting right next to the scared kid, the teen who wants them all to fuck off, the escape artist who’s eyeing the emptying wine bottle. It’s fine: witness all of it, judge none of it (which means, drop out of judgments as you notice them, and get okay with their lingering presence if they won’t just march on command). Let me point you to a couple of free resources. In November, I sent out recipes for going through the holidays with ease, and there are some great strategies there. (Use the headings to read what’s relevant to you. They’re all given near the top as well as throughout the text.) I’ve also created a 3-page pdf that lays out a clear formula with clear examples for staying firm (boundaried!) in difficult conversations. (It’s great to use with manipulative people or convincers.) I’ve also got an audio program with written and audio supports that’s chock-full of super-helpful, clear, applicable mindsets, tools, tactics, with stories and examples. I taped it this December with so-called holiday stress in mind, and I’ve gotten fantastic (and sweetly grateful) feedback from takers. Check out the (Before they drive you crazy) Take the Wheel Program, which puts you in charge of your well-being in any situation, no matter how others are behaving ($55). (This means you can’t be a victim of what they do or don’t do, or of any circumstances, or of some concept of inherent stress!) This program, by the way, will help you apply the concepts in this writing and take them further. Finally, to work in an ongoing way with this simple idea of nothing-inherently-stressful, you can learn to witness and monitor your feeling states and thoughts and use the information they give to point yourself consciously to self-care in the moment. You’ll also get swifter at course-correcting from upsetting thoughts to ones that feel more peaceful and empowering, and from your own powerless reactions that you disapprove of to quick shifts back on-track. Monitoring your feeling states as you go, you’ll also catch thoughts more quickly and stay out of what creates spiraling momentum you can’t get out of! All of this is laid out in my $33 Expansion program, along with lots on resistance and making your way with the greatest ease along a path of least resistance, one available step at a time. For the record, these offerings are part of a current intention to offer affordable programs full of hefty, deep, nuanced content (sprinkled with humor and, um, occasional profanity) for those looking for solid, low-cost support that doesn’t require a one-on-one coaching process. You can listen to them at home, in spurts, in your right timing. (I always welcome interactions with real people—I'm happy to get your questions by email. The expansion program includes a custom-made audio for you, which I create and send along once you send me the optional homework.) I’m excited about this new programming, and the feedback that keeps coming in tells me it’s on-point. I invite you to these great offerings to support you now (in the stress season) and anytime. Love and blessings, Jaya |
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