As a guide to this website, a rather simple path of change may help bring the means of transformation into focus:
Awareness —> Emotional Release —> Insight —> Integration
Contemplative Practices provide a container for the process of transformation. They invite you into the quiet and offer ways to calm the ego mind. Practices present the opportunity to experience awareness and insight, to release old emotions and allow for integration of the new you.
Stuck Places invites you into self-awareness. When you find yourself in a situation you don’t like, tempted to blame someone or something else, choose to look within. When thoughts come up or you do something that brings shame, look within. Awareness is a necessary first step that means letting go of old patterns of looking outside for either blame or rescue.
Emotional Entanglements speaks to your ego mind from a scientific and logical perspective. Information allows the mind to go loose, releasing the need to figure something out or protect. This provides greater access to the thoughts and behaviours you are transforming. Emotional Release suggests the why and how of dissolving the glue, the emotional piece of stuck places.
It is important to understand that transformation is not a linear process as suggested in the diagram above. The areas contributing to transformation are there, but your journey may bring them to you in a different order. The process is more of a spiral staircase as in the header image. Each step leads to a new awareness or a higher perspective or an emotional release which then integrates and continues into the next step and the next. You might revisit the same thought or behaviour often as you circle ever upward, opening the flow of joy in every moment.
Also, it is unlikely that any area of change will happen all at once. As much as you might like the idea of ‘RIGHT NOW’, change happens gradually. Most of our old thoughts, beliefs and behaviours have been in place for years. Anticipate and celebrate gradual changes in yourself. The good news is that as you focus on one area of change, you are creating a strong new neural pathway of change that will be in place as you begin to focus on shifting other old thoughts, attitudes and behaviours.
Header Image courtesy of pixabay/spiral-jplenio