Empowerment is Yours
Peaceful change is actually evolution.
It is a series of small choices and practices, and the cultivation of a peaceful relationship to making the choices I make and being in the practices I am in.
This type of change takes time. This is one invaluable service I offer to my clients—I help them make friends with the time it takes, and really ground the understanding that it will take not only that time but also certain results that they're disposed to interpret as failures.
This is a well-worn path to shame that makes the process suck even when you're doing it "right," unless you have someone to help you understand its rightness. (Even then, a lot of the rightness you’re understanding is the rightness of the suck.)
I'm here to remind my clients again and again, patiently, lovingly, that making a million pieces of crap is the way to becoming a great artisan. I hold the frame of what it looks like to celebrate their actions and outcomes when they are imperfect in their infancy. This is a template they can implement for themselves once they have experienced it from me enough.
Again, that takes time. It is an evolution, an ever-deepening relationship, a practice of practices, a devotion to devotion.
The best work you can do with me is in the long-haul. 6 or 12 or 36 months or More (my longest-running client continues to choose More).
This is an investment like replacing the roof on your house (and it costs like the roof, bet your ass).
Like the roof, you can wait till it's leaking real bad and then that new roof will seem like a marvel and a miracle. It will be something others are willing to pitch in for, if they see you in dire straits, and you'll find the resources wherever you have to, because otherwise the investment of your whole house is in danger.
Like the roof, you can replace it when it starts to wear, as you planned and budgeted for, and experience ongoing ease in the unfolding of you. Many of my clients come to me from here, possibly because I do not often market to pain and emergency. They say "therapy is still good, but another part of me is hungry for something else, and I feel it awaken when I read what you write."
and
Like the roof, it might feel like something you don't have the house for, like something you've been distantly cheated of, not even directly, like the opportunity to make that kind of investment in your long-term health isn't even there for you to refuse or delay. This is a damaging lie, and I don't say that to convince you to invest in me or any other teacher. If you are in this place, you are underneath life, and it's the worst kind of pain.
Where the other questions are ones of trust—whether the resource can be acquired, this last one is a question of faith—whether the resource exists at all. Not how to get empowered or how to be more empowered, but whether empowerment exists for you at all.
It does.
It does even for you.
Even for ones so marginalized as you.
Even for ones so deprived.
Even for ones so traumatized and abandoned and betrayed.
Even for ones so judged and criticized and outcast such as you.
Empowerment is yours to claim for yourself. Others may have taken it from you, it happens all the time, but NO ONE can give it back. You have to take it back, but you can't take back what you don't believe exists.
Believing in that might take time, so for now, I invite that you believe in your own inevitable evolution, invest your attention in the spark of you that always keeps going, that's always changing and tweaking, and admire its failures from there.
Even if it's getting everything wrong, it never stops. It never has. It never will.