You’re about to read Chapter 17. Want to start this story from the beginning? Go here.
This morning I woke up with a whimper.
Perhaps I was dreaming something sad; I don’t remember.
I just know that today has felt tender.
I really (wish I didn’t) miss Paul
It’s not even that I miss Paul in particular, although I do.
It’s that he accurately represents so much of what I desire. And in his absence, there is emptiness.
Not that my life isn’t full. But there is a void where there could be companionship.
It’s like there is an open position at my place of business: My best employee took a sudden leave of absence and I haven’t yet hired a replacement.
Of course that’s an imperfect metaphor, because Paul was not an employee. (If he was, I could bring in a temp!)
No, Paul was my friend and my lover and I loved being with him.
I love being by myself, too, but not all the time.
And times like this, when it’d just be nice to touch another face, I really do miss him a lot.
And then I remember that it was his choice for us to be apart, and I feel pathetic for missing someone who decided to leave.
Now’s a good time to transform
I just deleted a whole other section I’d written about how specifically sad I am today, and why.
Because, really, that’s just a bunch of beliefs I don’t have to choose.
Instead, I would rather transform.
Enter: Lesson 17!
Lesson 17 was long and spoke a lot of truth and THANK GOD the homework assignment did not involve journaling.
The text continued in the vein of Lesson 15 and Lesson 16: As kids, we developed a bunch of beliefs about ourselves and the world. Which were often wrong.
And although those beliefs “became the foundation upon which be built our entire identities, they were actually just the constructs of a child trying to make sense of a senseless world.”
Cool cool cool cool cool.
So, all we have to do is, like, uncover those beliefs and then proclaim the opposite, right?
Nope.
See, this is where it’s easy to get tripped up on the idea of affirmations.
Because affirmations can be of tremendous benefit, but they work best when they’re…well, true.
And if the original beliefs about ourselves are false, then an opposite proclamation is simply swatting at a falsehood.
Or as Katherine puts it, “we can’t fix that which was never broken to begin with.”
In other words, the real work is to understand the truth of who we are, beyond the identities our beliefs have constructed.
“In short, in order to allow love into our lives, we often must shed our old ways of defining who we are.”
I love how Katherine lays it out in this lesson.
“Let me break it to you gently,” she says. “Your parents, siblings, teachers, neighbors, and peers were very often quite off the mark in their assessment of you….That is no excuse, however, for you to then continue to shoulder the burden of their inadequacies.”
Preach it, Katherine!
As I’ve alluded to before, origin stories are good to know, but true change comes from…well, changing.
Or as Katherine says, “we can lament for years about the ways our fathers neglected us, but until we stop neglecting ourselves it won’t make one bit of difference.”
Kindness causes change and transforms identities
I also appreciate that Katherine doesn’t encourage us to get rid of our false beliefs.
That’s not a realistic goal, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not someone I would trust.
Instead, she recommends kindness and conversation.
YES and YES.
I have been successfully employing this method for years. It works.
Case in point, part of why I deleted the earlier section about my sadness is because I decided to talk to it instead.
Identifying as a lonely and pathetic person was not improving my day, so a gentle conversation was in order.
“Hey there, I can see you’re feeling low,” I told my sadness. “And I totally understand that you desire companionship. That makes so much sense.”
Just that much alone helped start a shift. A few tears dripped.
“So, sure, it’s okay to feel sad,” I continued. “But the truth is that you are so lovable and loved, and that companionship you desire? It’s already on the way. And I would love to experience more joy today.”
(Then, to jump start that joy, I made some hot cocoa and listened to Alessia Cara sing “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana.)
I’m not saying it’s a one-time technique. I know the voices will be back.
But I do not have to believe what they say, and the more kindly I treat them, the less hold they have over me.
Lesson 17 in practice
After all the journaling of the past few days, it was a relief to be assigned some art.
Katherine invited us to create two figures:
“The first embodies and represents an erroneous belief that has been haunting your life,” and the second “is a representation of your true self—a figure that represents you as larger and more powerful than the erroneous belief that you just created.”
The instructions were to use drawing paper and markers or modeling clay, but I didn’t feel like drawing and I didn’t have clay.
What I did have, was some appealingly textured paper.
The erroneous belief I chose to embody was that no one will ever want all of me, all of the way.
(Ugh, what a crap belief. I’m sure it’s not true, but it is surely pervasive!)
I took a strip of crinkly packing paper, crumpled it like the garbage that belief actually is, and twisted it into the approximate shape of a small, hunched-over human.
I added some light smears of charcoal to the paper, too, because that belief is anything but clean.
Then I focused on the truth.
I took a thick square of golden, glittery wrapping paper and folded it the same way I made fortune-tellers as a kid—press each corner in toward the center, flip it over, fold the corners in again, pinch along the creases just so, and suddenly something flat becomes something full.
I ended up with a flower of a fortune teller, plenty large enough to cradle the first, fearful figure I’d crafted.
It was a comforting transformation to see.
Love > fear,
Christina
Want to know what happens next? Proceed to Chapter 18.
Missed what happened before? Go back to Chapter 16, or start from the beginning.
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