Keep Growing: Don’t Look Back - Don’t Look Down

“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.” Gail Sheehy

A friend was asking me if I wanted to do some work with her on Family Constellations. The first thing I had to do was Google it, “What is that anyway?” I wondered.

Over the last few decades I have done a lot of personal and spiritual development work. At first it was about wanting to be the best me I could, so I did pretty much any kind of improvement work that crossed my path. I read books, watched videos, listened to countless audios and met with many successful people.

Then, as the years passed, I became more and more confused about who I actually am. It felt like I had been sliced in so many ways, I was no longer recognisable. At that point, my mission changed to uncover the authentic me and try to find out what, if anything, my calling or purpose is.

The work continued, this time it was more focused. As life moved along in its serendipitous way, I heard from more people who had been on the same journey, and the understanding of who I am and why I am here became clearer.

I won’t pretend I now have twenty-twenty vision on the whole topic, I don’t; it’s more like a broad understanding. At least when I look at my life now, it’s more transparent – the inside is reflected in many more ways on the outside.

For years, my mentor has intuitively guided me to not look back, nor down, to keep moving forwards. I hadn’t given that a lot of thought until the opportunity to do Family Constellations came up. My inner response was that I’ve done enough retrieval work for now.

Retrieval work is the work we do to figure out who we are and why we are here. It is about ‘retrieving’ a sense of authenticity and seeing through the habits, traits, values and beliefs that we have unwittingly adopted along our journey. It’s about sifting out the helpful from the unhelpful.

Family Constellations is fascinating, but it also feels like a warren of never ending interconnected burrows. The deeper you go into your family history the more ‘we are one’ becomes clear. Had it crossed my path a few years ago when I was in full-on retrieval mode, looking for any clues to the authentic me, I may have dived in.

It is also entirely possible that there may be a point in the future that it peaks my interest. We do, after all, grow in cycles. If we are evolving and learning, we spiral to learn something more; if we still haven’t learned what we need to, we go around the same track again – likely with a new stage setting in our play of life.

Understanding who we are has so many facets to it that you could literally get stuck there. So recognising when it’s helpful to do that kind of work, versus when it’s a distraction, is crucial.

That said, the opportunity to evolve is with us in each moment, without ever doing any kind of retrieval work. You can dissect yourself six ways to Sunday, or you can just figure out how you are feeling in each moment and go from there.

I know when I’m feeling good and when I’m not, as do you. I just need to look at the signposts that are there when I’m feeling bad to figure out what it is that would make me feel good again. This is where our growth occurs whether it is the result of awareness from retrieval work or not.

There may be many big screaming signs, like a career or relationship we’ve chosen, but it is just as likely to show up in the small nuances of life. For example, if I get a text from another parent asking if I could pick up their child from school, I have to watch my reaction – does that feel easy or hard?  

It may sound simple, but as someone - probably like you - who likes to be helpful, I have to pay attention to my response. There is one of my daughter’s friends we often pick up, generally it is easy as we are going past her house anyway. However, one day I couldn’t do it as I had already collected my kids earlier, then I felt guilty.

That is the reaction I have to watch for.

Loving acceptance of our own needs is a powerful part of living authentically. Whether you think you may have inherited some deep sense of regret from a forbearer, or carry a particular longing from a past life, or have repressed anger from your childhood, or are expressing a condition of the collective consciousness, what will always matter most is how you feel right now; that is the only thing you can change.

I understand now that is what my mentor has always been urging me to do.

I’m not advocating that we shouldn’t seek to understand ourselves or others, just that we shouldn’t get stuck there. Understanding why we think and feel the way we do can be interesting, enlightening and helpful, but it is not necessary for change. Change will only occur when we react differently.

When another friend asked whether I am trying too hard to change and learn life lessons, it made me pause. Learning happens in stages, first we become aware of what we didn’t know, then we have to learn and practise the new thing, before it eventually becomes an unconscious habit. 

It is a bit like looking back on learning to drive, it was clunky. There were some aspects of it that seemed really challenging, and I made heaps of mistakes, but eventually I got there. As I will if I focus on loving the real me and taking care of my needs.

Having moved beyond the threshold of discovering my authentic self into the process of living it, I admit that it is not always easy. My friend has witnessed the deep turmoil some everyday situations have brought about in my psyche as I attempt to navigate life more authentically, so I understand where her question comes from.

Trying to change and deal with things in a different way takes courage and practice. Yes, there are some issues that arise that I make a mountain out of a molehill of as I try on my new self; it is clunky, but what are the options? To go back to the trained reactions, the ones that want to ‘fit in’ while the inner me is screaming to be heard?

As we start to move forwards in life, adopting anything new is likely to be stressful at times. It requires consciously breaking a whole bunch of patterned responses we have been using to date.

For anyone who has ever done any kind of personality testing, regardless of the model, it usually looks at how we react under pressure. The best summation I’ve heard of these reactions are flight, fight, fold (inwards) and freeze.

My own accustomed responses have invariably involved me fighting against any sort of perceived injustice (there have been more crusades than I can recall), and spending endless agonising hours analyzing internally over who said what and what to do about it all.

My personality hasn’t suddenly changed in light of all my awareness, the journey to authenticity continues moment by moment, in the seeming trivialities of day to day life. Sure, I can see more clearly when I act in a less authentic way at times, but these trained responses are accustomed to taking the reins under stress.

Saying ‘yes’ to something we have become practiced at saying ‘no’ to (i.e our own needs) is stressful, and vice versa when saying ‘no’ to situations we’d previously have succumbed to in order to keep the peace, or be thought of nicely, or to fit in and not rock the boat.

Yet knowing every form of physical illness represents some aspect of our authenticity that we have repressed in some way, it seems so much worse to consciously continue the pattern.  

While it can add more pressure to change how we each react in a stressful situation that is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to change and growth. It is only with practise I can become comfortable and confident in my own skin, and it is only then I’m likely to treat the molehills as the little blips in the landscape they are, rather than as erupting volcanoes.

If you have spent a lot of time discovering who you are and why you are here, remember it is only when you put what you’ve learned into practise that life can start responding to you in a different way. Better to be clunky as the authentic you, than consciously aware of your deep unhappiness in the compromise of yourself.

Be you, your happiness and confidence in that will grow with practise. You will also change not only your world for the better, but your increased confidence and obvious joy will inspire those around you and that changes our whole world for the better.  

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