Oh it sounds so soft and fluffy doesn’t it! We’re so conditioned to the idea that change needs to be all about the roar and the battle and the ‘look how mad I am, I really mean this’ approach to making a difference. And there is another way.
The Way Conflict Normally Goes
At our kids school there was some industrial action over pensions — finances are a pretty sure fire way to get egoic minds fired up and going to battle.
It was fascinating to watch the temperatures rise amongst parents, stirred into action by the emotive language of the union in their communications with us. Even more fascinating that, even though many of the parents didn’t even agree with the union’s position, it still got them going. The WhatsApp group awash with ways to boycott or ‘get back at’ — a desperation to ease the discomfort felt, and all that alongside saying ‘we don’t want this to affect the kids or their education’.
Fascinating to watch the conflicting positions playing out. And the calls to action…with no action being taken.
Until…someone with calm influence suggested sharing their views directly with the decision-makers. Whether individually or collectively didn’t matter. ‘Just let them know what you’re in support of, or not.’
And the tension eased. And the group went quiet again.
It seems to me that this has been the normal way of making change happen for…who knows! Millenia?…Here’s how it goes…
‘This feels bad — it must be their fault — do something to hurt them back — then it will feel better.’
It reminds me of our early days as kids in the playground or at home with siblings — the immediate retaliation when it looks like ‘you’ve hurt me’. But is that really what’s going on? Are they really hurting you? Keep reading to see what makes sense to you.
Because, and who knows, but is something shifting around change? Is there a move towards healthy change? Is it possible to consider change in the way the cartoon shows it? Infused with love. Could we potentially be in a world where we realise that getting all fired up, and hot and bothered doesn’t actually lead to whole-isitc or nourishing solutions? That in doing this we only continue to hurt ourselves.
It starts with you at an individual level — it has to.
You create the world you get, so inner conflict here leads to conflict out there. And inner peace here, leads to peace out there.
At this point the mind might jump in with its judgements — oh yeah, peace, love and happiness man! It’s all about hugging trees and ‘just being’ man.
And no. That’s a story.
This inner peace has a strength and a power. The people I work with consistently use those words when they notice this in themselves. This isn’t a passive, ‘oh yeah, whatever man, it’s all cool’ space (although it can also be that when it’s the perfect time for that!). It’s a space of incredible influence and an enabler of change — peaceful change, loving change. With solutions that consider the sustainable whole, not the greed of egoic needs that childishly say ‘I want this no matter what’.
In The Greatest Secret Rhonda points directly to this confusion about believing we need to be angry in order to make something change:
“the bad feelings you feel around that subject are causing you harm and are not helping what you care about. Welcome the sensations and feelings that the subject may evoke in you. Welcome your disapproval, welcome the feelings of unfairness and injustice. Keep welcoming until there is no sensation or feeling left when you think of the subject. You might think that you don’t want to stop feeling the pain about a subject, because you think then you’ll stop caring about it. But this is a story the mind is telling you, and the very opposite is true. Your strong resistance to a subject energises it, adding a lot of energy and power that makes it bigger. So when tou release your negative feelings around it, you are releasing all the energy you have focused on it, and you are disempowering the circumstance surrounding the subject. Without the negative emotion, your love and compassion, which will naturally arise in place of the negative emotions, have automatic power, and they can make a huge difference in the world.” Rhonda Byrne
You’ve Already Seen This
If you’re a parent, this might be familiar. Think of when you’ve gone head to head with your kid, compared to when there’s been a genuine understanding of them.
Or at work, when a relationship conflict was held at loggerheads until somone, somehow, let go of their bad feelings — even just for a moment — and that break in the thought-clouds was enough to create a clear, compassionate solution.
And look to your own experience — this really is where it all begins. Look at the battles within yourself and how, the instant all that battling-of-thought stops; change happens.
Your normal state is to believe thoughts as truths
But it’s not your natural state. That’s why you get so confused by mid life with the multiple options of ‘should do this’ competing against a ‘shouldn’t do that’ and all of them being believed as true.
The ‘battle with myself’ that you talk about, when you want to make a change happen in your life and yet it just doesn’t move anywhere. Entirely because this ‘self’ with which you’re in battle is a thought-that’s-being-believed, and it’s fighting another thought-that’s-being-believed; all of it holding the whole thing in stasis. Falsely fixed.
The tension of that is terrible. And — contrary to what we’ve been taught — the tension is not telling you to go into battle more (although it’s attractive as a temporary ease of the tension; totally been there — sorry kids!).
The tension is telling you that you’re not designed for such fixed-ness and stasis. That you’re not designed to believe thoughts as definites (they’re never definites btw).
The tension is merely inviting you to realise you’re feeling the whizzing around of fighting thoughts — you’re not feeling how terrible you are at change or how terrible the situation is. It’s inviting you to welcome, to not resist, the feeling of it all.
This is the beginning of that one little dude at the start of the cartoon, with his love, inviting the others over. The slightest space within us, allowing the tension to be there, is the beginning of love seeping through the confusion of fear and frustration.
And bit by bit — or even suddenly — there’s a wash of love within you, and change is unstoppable.
Peaceful, compassionate, whole-istic, sustainable change.
Anyone want more of that?
With love, Helen
On Friday 15th Oct at 12.30pm UK I’m hosting an interactive call in my membership community on this very topic of Loving Change. Join for less than £7. And, if you can’t make it live, the recording will be posted in there afterwards.
I coach and guide smart, passionate, curious people who care about improving the lives of those around them. Often coaches and leaders, they’ve worked hard all their lives to be the ‘best’ them and it doesn’t seem to have delivered the happiness, security or freedom they expected. Now they’re wondering what else is available. I guide you back, prior to stories, to remember the real you because that’s what you, me and the whole world really wants! Find out more here.