As we continue on our journeys through life’s ups and downs, at some point we’ll realise where our thoughts have stopped us in our tracks; sometimes it’s a writer’s block, sometimes procrastination or other ways of making excuses for doing what we know we ought to do but somehow don’t manage. We’ve usually learned to do this at an early age in life, as we perceive we might displease a primary caregiver by wanting our own way about something. As young people, we just want to get along and some behaviours carry over in to later years when we see that giving people what they want – at the expense of what we ourselves need – is just easier. The price for this can be quite high though.
The work of Irene Lyon has been informing me for some time about how we deal with resistance – that feeling of just not wanting to get that thing done that we know we should really do. She talks very knowledgeably about how to embrace resistance because this is really a part of our own body’s life force wanting to be acknowledged and recognised so that it can help us move forward.
More recently, I’ve come across the work of Shelly Lefkoe. In this interview, she’s talking to Alex Ferrari on his Youtube channel about quickly making the emotions we attach to some of our beliefs less powerful. If we change the emotion behind any action we’re more free to do what we know we want to do. She talks about eliminating limiting beliefs all together and this doesn’t take very much time at all.
The way I would couch the work of these ladies is, Irene Lyon’s work might be ongoing and require attention as a regular practice, like a tune up. With Shelly’s exercises, we can confront and adjust our beliefs as they come up.
The idea is that we have more and more of our own life force and feel freer in our lives. It’s likely that this is really what our primary caregivers may have also wished for us when we were younger, but just didn’t know how to allow.