You Can Be Free
"I don't owe these people"
Once upon a time, a client said something during a session that's been echoing back to me ever since.
She was discussing the transformation our work together has created for her and said something concise and potent that has never left me.
She said, “I know I can create space for myself and I DO. I don’t owe these people the things that I used to believe I owed them and they don’t need from me what I used to believe they needed.”
This incredible statement seems to elegantly sum up what I find challenging to describe about my work.
Imagine if a lifelong guiding principle of duty and obligation was suddenly dropped away—what would that new life feel like?
Imagine if connections with others stopped being hard or sacrificial or contorting—what relationships would be possible then?
Is that something it has occurred to you to want? Do you know how you’d react if you had it?
Real talk: I don't often help my clients create the results that they come to me saying they want.
Through our work together, entire systems of their beliefs and values shift, so that what they initially wanted can come to seem distant and irrelevant.
And yet... though they can't name it, I can feel that this state they arrive in is the thing my clients really want when they come to me. Perhaps the trouble is that there is no name for this, not one that anyone could take seriously, anyway.
Either it calls to you or it doesn't. For some of us it has beckoned our whole lives. Some place just around the corner, where we are free from obligation, free from criticism and condemnation by others and ourselves, free to feel the way we feel and for that to be as right as we know it is. Where we are potently loved for exactly who we are.
We have an indomitable voice that insists it is possible we might play rather than recover or solve or repair. Where we exist in peace.
Listen, and you may hear a small voice, one that sometimes gets too tired to speak, one that always eventually argues back against your discomfort and your mistreatment, the mean things you and others say about you, the impossible expectations that continually make you feel like a failure. One that says "it should be better than this, I don't deserve this, I want better."
You were taught so many lies about yourself, about how the world works, about what others need from you and what you can or should or must go without. Each one is a grain of sand in your shoes on the long hike of life, because your body knows the difference between a truth and a lie. You can feel some of these now, and feel the places that have numbed to others.
Your body can show you the truth, if you learn how to look. If you learn how to see your body in the truth of its wholeness and to follow its wisdom to the knowledge of what is right for you. If you allow the pain and the fact that you can bear it.
You can come to see that you don't owe what you think you owe, and they don't need what you think they need.
You can be free.