• Skip to content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to footer

Stop Suffering About

Connect to your innate well-being.

  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Weight Loss
  • Contact
  • Free book!

change

Breaking the Habit of Fixing Ourselves

June 10, 2019 By Alexandra Amor

There’s a reason I refer to myself and those I work with as ‘self-help junkies’.

“breakingMaybe you can relate to this. We innocently got in the habit of thinking of ourselves as broken. As a result we diligently and perhaps even relentlessly work at ‘fixing’ ourselves. Reading books. Taking classes. Focusing on the things we think are wrong with us and trying to make them better. The old paradigm of psychology told us this was necessary and we took that to heart.

It can be hard to break that habit. I’m trying to do that now and I find my thoughts automatically turn to what I can work on re: myself. 

How do we let go of the habit of fixing ourselves?

I don’t have a definitive answer for that but I have a few clues and things I’ve been trying.

1. As often as I can, I try to remember that there is something greater at play within me than just me and my thoughts. When I remember this, I imagine I’m lying on my back in a gently flowing river. I am entirely supported by the river, and yet I don’t control its path in any way. I’m not in charge. The river is.

2. I try to listen to my body. If I need a nap, I take a nap. If I don’t feel like doing something I normally enjoy, I don’t do it. And conversely, if I feel like doing something I don’t normally do, I try it. 

3. I try to notice my thought-storms for what they are. They are not the truth about me. They are not the ultimate answer about my habits or my state of being. Thought is tempoarary. Always. Even when it affects my mood and makes me feel like crap, I try to remember that it will not last. And that in a few moments or hours I will feel different.

4. I remind myself about insight. If I’m not feeling particularly insightful at a given moment, I try to remember that insight changes everything. When we see differently, we do differently. We can’t bully ourselves into changing, though we have sure tried! We cannot force insight, but perhaps we can cultivate an environment where it has an easier time reaching us. I try to cultivate that environment by doing the things I’ve listed above as often as I can remember to. 

5. And finally, I give myself a break. If I’m not changing fast enough I remind myself that it’s not up to me. I’m doing my best by looking in the direction that the Three Principles point. 

If I could sum up this post in one word it would be: relax. Or: soften. 

I remember my mother reading me a picture book when I was really young. It was a fable about the sun and the wind. You’ve likely heard it as well. It goes like this:

windy day

The north wind challenges the sun to a competition to determine who is stronger. They see a man walking around a city and the wind says, “I bet I can get that man to take off his coat and you can’t.”

“You’re on,” says the sun.

The wind puffs up its cheeks and blows as hard as it can, intending to blow the man’s coat off his body. In the town square, where the man in walking, newspapers go flying, ladies hats are ripped from their heads, flags flap on their poles and are in danger of ripping away. 

The man in question leans into the wind on his walk and pulls his overcoat even more tightly around him.

The cold north wind blows even harder, sending people scurrying inside, away from its wrath. 

The man walks on, gripping his coat and while it flaps around its legs it doesn’t come off because of his tight grip.

Eventually the wind stops blowing. “That coat will not come off,” the wind says to the sun. “No amount of strength will get it to move. It’s impossible.”

sunny meeting room

The sun nods. “Perhaps you’re right.” And then the suns rays begin to warm the stones in the town square. Cats come out of hiding and lie in sunbeams. Flowers turn their heads toward the warmth. Ladies straighten their hair and put on their sunglasses. All is quiet and soft as the sun glows brightly in the sky.

The man who is the object of the wager between the sun and the wind, notices how warm he is getting as he walks. He unties the belt on his overcoat, and unbuttons the buttons. He shrugs his left arm out of the sleeve, and then the right. He pulls the coat off and folds it over one arm as he continues on his way.

Sometimes the best action we can take is no action at all. The more I understand about the Principles, the more I see that change comes when we simply look in the direction of the way we work, rather than when we try to force ourselves to change.

Are you able to step out of the habit of constantly trying to fix yourself? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

[Sunny meadow image courtesy Niklas Hamann and Unsplash. Windy image courtesy Josh Edgoose and Unsplash. Sunny meeting room image courtesy Bethany Legg and Unsplash.]

The Secret Sauce for Transformation with Vivienne Edgecombe

May 22, 2019 By Alexandra Amor

http://media.blubrry.com/stopsufferingabout/p/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ssapodcast/Ep11VivienneEdgecombe.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

“VivienneSo many of us have one or two things in our life that we believe are absolutely essential for our happiness and fulfillment. For Vivienne Edgecombe one of those things was having children, and when she realized that wasn’t going to happen, she suffered.

Fortunately for her, she discovered the 3 Principles and was able to understand that it is only ever our thinking about a particular subject that causes our suffering. It is possible to be happy, fulfilled, and perfectly content without the things we think are essential for those conditions.

[No personal intro from me this week, unfortunately, as I’m having computer problems and am limping along on an old computer while my current one is at the doctor.]

Show Notes

  • The imaginary futures we make up
  • How an insight about one area of life can affect all areas of our life
  • Getting into the hidden corners of our thoughts
  • The behaviors we exhibit when we’re caught up in insecure thinking
  • Why understanding the nature of thought is the ‘secret sauce’ when it comes to transformation
  • Unearthing the companion and kindness at our core once we are able to understand thought
  • The ripple effects out to families and beyond when we begin to grasp this understanding

Resources mentioned in this episode

Vivienne Edgecombe books

Vivienne’s Books:
Already Complete: Beyond the Myths of Childlessness

28 Days of Resilience: All You Need to Know About Your Innate Ability to Bounce Back

  • Jamie Smart

Vivienne Edgecombe is living a life she loves in the south of France with her husband, cat, dog, and three chickens, where she spends her time coaching and facilitating with individuals and organizations, walking in the mountains and writing when the mood takes her.

Her second book Already Complete: Beyond the Myths of Childlessness is the result of her having seen something fundamental about our ability to be happy fulfilled and to feel complete even when life doesn’t turn out how we expected.

You can find Vivienne at VivienneEdgecombe.com and also at InsideOutChange.co.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here. Below are the show highlights, resources we mention, and full transcript.

Continue reading…

Want Positive Change Without Effort?

May 6, 2019 By Alexandra Amor

changeOne of the things I hear so often from those coaches and authors I interview on the Stop Suffering About podcast is how hard they worked to create change in their lives before they came across the 3 Principles. I experienced the same thing. So why do the Principles offer anything different than all those other strategies and techniques we tried?

It’s because the way we learn in this new paradigm is completely different than any other way we’ve learned before.

When I first came to learn about the principles, I had a hard time putting down my note-pad and pen. I was so keen to learn and so eager for change so I turned to the tools I’d always used to learn: hard work, memorization, practice.

But right away, I heard teachers like Michael Neill and Barbara Patterson saying that it wasn’t necessary to take notes when listening to them and that I didn’t have to memorize anything. “Listen like a rock with ears”, I heard Michael say more than once.

WTF does that mean? 

We have been taught to learn one way: to stuff information down our throats like we’re trying to win a pie-eating contest. It can be hard to un-learn that habit when we encounter this insight-based understanding.

One of my favorite stories about this un-learning comes from when I was reading my first book about the Principles, Michael Neill’s The Inside Out Revolution. When I was about 2/3 of the way through, my friend who had introduced me to Michael’s work, asked me how I was enjoying the book.

“It’s good,” I said, with a slight note of puzzlement in my voice. “I’m enjoying it.” I paused while I sought out what I was really feeling and then landed on it. “My only concern is, he hasn’t told me what to DO yet.”

My friend chuckled. “He’s not going to,” she said. 

Well then, how will I learn? I thought to myself.

Weightlifting and Insight

Weights

As a fiction author, one of my favorite podcasts is one about story structure called Story Grid. One of the hosts of the show, Tim Grahl, is also a competitive weight-lifter. On one episode he shared a story about learning from his weight-lifting coach.

Tim had noticed that the coach tended to explain things in a variety of ways, coming at a problem from several angles. Tim was curious about this and asked him about it. The coach said this by way of explanation. “I’ve figured out that I just need to talk a lot, because different things I say are going to strike people in different ways. The way that you’ll come to understand what I mean is different than the way my next student will. But I never know what that thing is going to be.”

What the coach was describing was insight-based learning. 

He knew that each student was going to be struck by insight at a moment that the coach couldn’t predict. But if the students showed up and listened, both the coach and the student could rely 100% on insight showing up as well.

Cultivating Insight and Change

We all have access to wisdom and the intelligence behind life. What we don’t have is control over when wisdom and insight are going to strike us. But what we can do is simply expose ourselves to the conversations that are going on about this understanding, open ourselves up to that wisdom and intelligence, and wait for insight to arrive. Which it always, always does.

One way to get in the way of insight is to clench up about what we’re learning. To try to memorize and make lists of what we should remember. Relaxing into the conversation, listening like ‘a rock with ears’, can feel scary at first. Our need to control things can start screaming at us. “What if I forget? What if I can’t remember what you’ve said in a crucial moment?”

But paradoxically the more we relax and stop worrying about what we need to remember, the more we have access to the innate wisdom that is within each of us. 

Swimming

I like to think of the analogy of floating on my back in a body of water. When we’re first learning to do this, we tend to be anxious and tense (just me?) and not trust that the water will actually hold us up. But I remember that when I was 4 or 5 years old and learning this skill, as I practiced I noticed that the more I relaxed and softened my body, the easier floating on my back became. Eventually, it became automatic for me. If I wanted to float on my back, I was able to relax immediately, knowing the water would hold me up.

The same strategy applies when we’re learning about the 3 Principles. The more we relax, knowing that as spiritual beings having a human experience we are designed to receive insight and wisdom, the more that insight and wisdom is available to us.

Why This Matters

So, why does having insights matter? Why can’t we just memorize what we’re being told and leave it at that?

Memorized facts don’t have the same effect on us and are easily forgotten.  What worked to solve a problem for someone else might have zero impact for you.

The power behind insight is that your insights are going to be tremendously meaningful to you. They will make sense to you and shift your world so that everything has changed for the better.

Also, insight lasts forever. Once we see something in a different way, we can unsee it.

Here’s what I’ve learned since coming across the principles: Deep, meaningful change comes via insight.

When we want our lives to change for the better – whether that’s dropping a habit or addiction, or getting along better with our spouse, or being less troubled by anxiety – applying other people’s strategies and techniques isn’t all that helpful. Think of the number of times you’ve done that. How has it worked out for you? For me, I think of the number of times I’ve applied someone else’s advice to my eating habits (eat clean, count your points, eat raw, etc.) and how often that has worked.

Answer: Exactly zero times.

But when we look in the direction that the principles are pointing, we experience insights that mean everything to us, specifically.

And that changes everything.

We’ve all had insights, small and large. What are some of your favorites? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

[Trees image courtesy Aaron Burden and Unsplash. Weights image courtesy Cyril Saulnier and Unsplash. Woman swimming image courtesy Drew Dau and Unsplash. ]

Footer

Looking for something?

Get your free ebook and audiobook

SSA blog sidebar new book v2

Connect with Alexandra

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2021 · Author Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptReject Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Necessary
Always Enabled