In a quest to improve my life and make positive changes, I have spent the better part of the last twelve years reading self-help books, doing spiritual development courses, getting in touch with my inner this, that, or the other and after all this time, I’ve reached a revelatory conclusion, but not one I was seeking; I am beginning to realize that so little of this change is down to me.
The irony is that I started this journey to empower myself; however, after having worked so hard to make positive changes in my life and having seen such few results, I find myself feeling less empowered than ever.
In fact, there are moments when I feel as though none of it is down to me. In the mind-body-spirit world of 'you can change your life', words like 'chance' and 'fate' are almost dirty words. However, I am beginning to accept that they have a big part to play after all.
Many of us have a tremendous hunger for positive changes, for a better and happier life, but for all our efforts to change our negative and limiting beliefs into expansive and positive ones, we find ourselves back where we started or not even moving, over and over again. But this doesn't make us failures.
It’s so easy to pick up a book or go to a seminar that promises you the change you seek. You follow everything to the letter but after days, weeks, and months of using your newly acquired tools, whatever they may be, you find you haven’t moved much, if at all. And it makes you feel worse than when you started, powerless and frustrated.
Maybe peole are divided into two categories. It reminds me a bit of the two geological theories that split Earth historians: on one hand you have those who think that Earth’s changes came about in cyclical cataclysms, and on the other hand you have those who believe that Earth was shaped and formed by millions of years of really slow erosion and trickling and rushing of streams and rivers, and continental drift.
Maybe some of us will follow a certain path and get profound changes and progress relatively quickly, while the rest of us will change very slowly, if at all, one minute step at a time. For those of us who feel they fall into the latter, less desirable category, it is important to assess the situation and acknowledge it in order to ever be able to move on.
So for us ‘slow-changers’, it is important to accept that the paths we have tried have simply not worked but that it doesn’t make us failures. Maybe by doing this we open ourselves to new and effective solutions and perhaps then we can find the change we desire.
It is important that we stop measuring ourselves by the standards and expectations set by the courses, books, and other self-help tools that we have used. In doing so, we stop feeling like complete failures every time we don’t achieve a specific result, while remaining open to being humble and accepting that we are not magicians; maybe we will gain perspective on what we call fate or chance, maybe we won't. We just have to accept that some events will befall us no matter how much we change our limiting beliefs. After all, maybe acceptance is the most empowering tool of all.
