The Real Thing

Once again, the minute my eyes opened this morning (at 4) my mind was racing.  Thought work the past three days has been great, but perhaps it’s made me more sensitive to other painful thoughts.  It’s like I’m in a batting cage:  I hit one away and another comes.  So I tried to find the meta-thought – why have I been unable the past two days to turn off.  I keep checking e-mail and Facebook on my computer and on the phone. . . When I am confused by my feelings or behavior, I always simply ask myself, “What am I afraid of?”  In this case, what am I afraid will happen if I turn off?  “I am not enough” is the thought that bubbled up immediately in response to my question.  I think my husband’s absence has brought this thought to the fore:  not only am I creating a new business, I’m solo parenting right now.  But it’s a fundamental thought, too.  Here’s what happened:

I am not enough.

Is it true?  No.

How do I react when I believe it?  I become frantic.  I imagine what people would think of me if I didn’t respond to their inquiry or comment right away.  I scatter my energy over seven different things at once and don’t fully pay attention to anything.  I become tense.  I let the kids look after themselves, because they don’t complain.  Then I feel ungrounded and miserable.

Who would I be without the thought?  Present.  I would be a presence – radiating out and attracting – instead of an absence – needing to be needed and searching outside myself for approval, which energetically is like a black hole.  I would simply turn off the computer when the kids get home – no, I would turn it off before they get home.  I would leave the house, go outside, and walk to meet them at the corner, instead of waiting for them to come home, just so I can “squeeze in a few more tasks” before leaving my desk.  Because the kids deserve my total presence, not just the husk of a mom whose mind is elsewhere.  Actually, so do I.

Turnaround 1 (to the opposite):  I AM enough.

Proof:  Guy.  Elliot.  Nathan.  Mom.  Dad.  Jack.  Sandy.  To all these people (and one dog), I am perfect and irreplaceable.

Turnaround 2 (to the other):  Enough is me.

Proof:  Separateness is an illusion.  Oneness is the reality.  So there’s no way I could not be enough, when I am one with everything!

That felt very good, but there was more.  It kept going.  The next thought was, “I should know how to do this.”

I should know how to do this.

Is it true?  It feels true.

Can you be absolutely sure it’s true?  No.

How do I react when I believe it?  Immediately I see myself shrinking in my mind’s eye.  I become small and ineffective.  I scowl and become tense and angry with myself.  Then I push myself harder, past the point of diminishing returns, partly to punish myself.

Who would I be without the thought?  Curious.  Like a child learning something without any judgment of herself.  Laughing when I did something well, no matter how small, clapping for myself.

Turnaround:  I should NOT know how to do this.

Proof:  Of course I shouldn’t!  I haven’t done this before!  If I already knew how to do it, it would either be old hat for me — why would I continue doing the same old thing?  Or I would be repeating someone else’s work, and what’s the point of that when someone else has already done it?  No, I am creating something unique, as I go. Yes, I’ve been prepared for it, but the path is new.

Ah!  Relief!  Freedom!  That was it.  Free from those thoughts that conflict with reality – the reality of oneness, the reality that we’re here not to “get things done,” but to experience joy – in rushed fresh inspiration for the day.  Today I will be a presence.  Today I will let everything be new.

Into my head popped Juliet’s incandescent lines in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. 

The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.

Oh, Shakespeare!  You understood!  More than that, you remind me how falling in love effortlessly gives one the perspective I needed Thought Work to find today.

My challenge to you and to myself today is to be a lover.  Really see the people and the things in your life today.  As you experience them, remember how you fell in love.  Allow yourself to feel those feelings again, as if for the first time!  Notice what happens when you do.

Just crinkle them all up!

The reason I began this writing project at all, rather than staying in hiding and self-imposed captivity, is Thought Work.  Thought Work is the process I use to question and then dismantle the thoughts that keep me in my mental cage.  The result of Thought Work is one less bar, and in its place, a little more freedom, and room for inspiration.

Many of you, I know, are already familiar with Thought Work from any number of sources.  In case you aren’t, the idea behind it is that, most of the time, our circumstances don’t cause us pain.  Our thoughts about our circumstances cause us pain.  My teacher, Dr. Martha Beck, has a great explanation of this in her latest (wonderful!) book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World.  She says if you can explain your problem to a wordless creature – say, your hamster or your pre-verbal child – it’s a real problem.  If you can’t, it’s a story – a string of thoughts – that your mind is spinning and you’re believing.  This is not to say you’re not in pain, quite the contrary.  It is to show us that changing our circumstances is seldom needed to end our pain.  Rather, changing our thoughts is usually more powerful.

There are many methods for doing Thought Work, but my favorite is The Work of Byron Katie, also called Inquiry.  In The Work, you identify a thought that’s causing you pain and then ask four questions about it:  Is it true?  Can you be absolutely certain it’s true?  How do you react when you believe the thought?  Who would you be without the thought?  Once you’ve done that process – and it must be experienced to be understood – you then turn the thought around to its opposites, to see if those might be just as true or truer.  The process is simple and absolutely transformational.  I’ll demonstrate The Work I did this morning below, but go ahead and watch the master, Katie, at www.thework.com.  Watch videos, download worksheets, it’s all there.

To find a thought that causes you pain, ask yourself simply, “What sucks right now?”  The minute I opened my eyes yesterday morning, my mind began spinning with Things That Needed To Be Done.  Before my feet had touched the floor Monday morning, I already felt behind!  I have a practice, though, that I have done every morning for about five years that grounds me.  It’s the one I encouraged you to do yesterday:  ten minutes of deep breathing.  At the end of this ten minutes I usually drift into some kind of meditation – I can’t say I’m “good” at it, but I keep doing it, because I notice when I don’t.  I feel like I might float away on days I skip it, so I usually don’t.

At the end of my breathing, I remembered Martha’s book, in which she describes techniques for falling into wordlessness – a break from thought – which I needed.  One of the techniques is Thought Work, so I asked myself, “What sucks right now?”  The answer:  “I have too much to do.”  I did The Work on that thought.  This is how it went:

I have too much to do.

Is it true?  Yes.

Can I be absolutely certain it’s true?  No.

How do I react when I believe it?  I feel heavy and frantic.  I feel small, no match for the towering piles of What Must Be Done.  I have no idea where to start, so I do nothing.  It feels terrible, futile, lonely, cold.

Who would I be without the thought?  I would be the still presence inside the storm.  Curious.  Open.  Sensitive to The Thing That Wants To Be Done.  I can feel where Flow is strongest and I can jump into it!  I feel powerful!

Turnaround:  I do not have too much to do.

How might that be true?  I’m not doing a thing right now, and I’m okay.  If I never do another thing, the world will continue and I’ll be fine.  In fact, I’ll still love and be loved, what else is the point?  Eckhardt Tolle sat on a park bench for two years and did nothing and look at him now!

Free from the thought, “I have too much to do,” I felt light and free.  And when I sat down at my desk, the Thing That Wanted To Be Done was writing.  So I looked at my cache of ideas for blog posts and found the dolphin.  I had stopped writing the post because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, I didn’t know what it meant.  But when I looked at it yesterday, I knew.  Not only did I know what it wanted to be, but it inspired me.

All that freedom and inspiration from doing The Work on one little thought!

My challenge for you today is to ask yourself, “What sucks right now?”  If you’re unused to noticing your thoughts, just noticing is enough for now.  If you’re used to noticing, go ahead and do The Work on your thought.  Then notice what inspiration spills in once you’re free from the thought.

 2012 February 7

They're a lot like us.

We recently visited an aquarium in Tokyo.  A smiling dolphin is the mascot of the place, and the twice-daily dolphin shows are the highlight of a visit there.  As space is at such a premium in Tokyo, the tanks are small — by American standards, or (it must be said) in comparison to the ocean from which all the creatures had been taken.  Before the show we watched a pair of dolphins swim round and round a tank the size of my living room.  Their eyes were closed as they swam, and it made me wonder if they swam that way in nature, or if they did that to avoid the dozens of eyes that watched them on the other side of the glass.  Were they imagining that they were really swimming in the sea?  Maybe it was relaxing to swim that way.  I don’t know.

I was ambivalent about being there at all.  I had recently watched the movie, “The Cove,” about a cove here in Japan into which fishermen drive pods of dolphins.  They put metal pipes down into the sea beyond the cove and beat the pipes.  This metal cacophony would confuse any sea creature, but it is torture for the dolphin, who navigates its world through sonar.  The confused and frightened dolphins swim as fast as they can away from the noise only to end up trapped in the cove.  The fishermen then capture the ones who seem fit for sale to aquariums – they can fetch $100,000 per dolphin – and the rest they kill and sell as “whale meat,” which Japanese people began eating after WWII.  Japanese people would not knowingly eat dolphin for the same reasons Americans wouldn’t.  Dolphin flesh is saturated with mercury, so it is toxic to the body.  But the thought of eating a dolphin. . . well, it’s toxic to the soul, as well.

I learned from the movie that aquarium dolphins often die soon after they are captured.  Those who live develop ulcers and have short life spans compared to wild dolphins.

The activist behind “The Cove” is actually the man who trained Flipper.  He says he realized the harm he was perpetuating by keeping dolphins in captivity when the main dolphin who played Flipper, whom he called Kathy, whom he loved like a child, swam into his arms and stopped breathing.  Unlike us, dolphins are conscious breathers; they choose when – and if, apparently – to breathe.  He says Kathy “committed suicide” by choosing not to breathe.  Since that moment he has made it his life’s work to free captive dolphins everywhere.  Once he learned of the source of captured dolphins, this Cove, he has risked his life again and again to expose it.

And there I was, choosing to support an aquarium that drives the market for captured dolphins because I wanted to entertain my children for the day.

I’m a life coach, and I identified with this activist and dolphin liberator, because it’s my life’s work to liberate mothers from captivity – not physical captivity but the captivity of self-defeating thoughts.  Most of us swim in our own invisible tank, the glass walls made of self-criticism and our culture’s impossible expectations of women, but especially of mothers.  We swim round and round with our eyes closed – telling ourselves it’s enough, telling ourselves it’s safe here, maybe opening our eyes to watch go by the world on the other side, maybe wondering if the spectators think we look fat from behind.  Like the captive dolphins, many of us develop stress-related illness – I am not a doctor but I have read enough Christiane Northrup and Deepak Chopra to know how mental and emotional distress causes physical illness.  We also forget to breathe – not the little, shallow breaths that just get the job done, but deep belly breaths that come naturally to babies and animals, and which communicate to our bodies that we are fine.

My cognitive dissonance – identifying with this activist and liberator and then working against him anyway by supporting the market for captured dolphins – has made me wonder how I work against myself, keep myself in captivity while exhorting my clients to be free.

Inspired by my Martha Beck Certified Life Coach colleagues, weight loss coach Betsy Salzer (http://www.denverpost.com/fitness/ci_19691671) and executive coach Susan Foster (http://susancfoster.com/30-days-of-positivity-it-begins-day-1), I’m setting myself a public challenge:  to write and publish a blog post every day about the ways in which I walk-the-walk of liberation.  The reason I’m doing this is that it’s what I’m most afraid of.  On the glass walls of my captivity are written thoughts like this:  “Sure, I can write, but publish?  What if people don’t like it?  What if no one reads it? People will think I’m self-absorbed to be writing about my own experiences.  Who am I to be adding my voice to an already crowded blogosphere?”  I actually could go on, but you get the point!

Join me?

I’m challenging myself.  I’d like to challenge you, too.  Kathy, the dolphin, ended her life by choosing not to breathe anymore.  My challenge to you today is to affirm your commitment to living by breathing deeply.  Spend ten minutes sitting comfortably, feet on the ground, and breathe in all the way down to your toes.  Inhale through your nose to a count of ten and exhale out your nose to a count of ten.  Fill your lungs then keep pulling air in, allowing your diaphragm to expand deeply into your belly, until your entire torso feels full of breath.  Allow the muscles of your face to relax, relax your jaw, your shoulders, then your pelvic floor.  Notice how it feels in your body to breathe so deeply and to relax so profoundly.

What do you notice?

2012 February 6

Day One: new baby, new mum

Allison’s HypnoBirthing training allowed me to feel confident and sure of myself about the birth of my child. I’m not sure if I could have done anything to prepare myself better for the roller coaster ride of the first few months of motherhood, but the New Mums coaching sessions I receive from Allison are a vital part of surviving and thriving through them!

First, it is very comforting to know that every week, you are able to pour your heart out to someone who isn’t going to judge you about your worries, your frustrations, your middle-of-the-night inspired “I’m a bad mother” moments.

After Allison listens to your outpouring, you both question some of the thoughts you’ve expressed, imagining how you’d feel without them and analyzing if the opposite of the thoughts could also be true. I find this work challenging actually, but I love it, and the process always leaves me feeling physically and mentally lighter.

I love practical solutions, and I’ve been able to go away after each session equipped with another tool to help me at first cope, then grow and thrive as a new mum.

Chrissy, teacher and mum to Ella

Tokyo

Ella, 5 months

I really wanted a natural birth because of my desire to move around and use any position I liked during birth, and because of my belief that a birth without any medical interventions is best for baby and mother. Giving birth at Aqua Birth house, using HypnoBirthing techniques allowed me to achieve this dream!

On Monday the 5th of September, I had to visit the doctor affiliated with Aqua Birth house as I had reached week 41 of my pregnancy with no sign of baby. You can only give birth at the birth center between 37 and 42 weeks and if there are no complications. The doctor said my cervix was soft and I was 1.5cm dilated and that I’d have to come in to his clinic to be induced with Pitocin the following Monday if baby hadn’t appeared by then.

Perhaps Ella didn’t like the sound of induction, perhaps it was down to all the combined efforts of natural induction I tried that evening- lots of pineapple, acupressure points and clary sage oil, or perhaps this day was my real due date after all! Whatever it was, I was woken up by my first surge (contraction) at around 11pm. I immediately used the HypnoBirthing breathing and vizualisation techniques I knew so well. I can’t express how much they help! They allow you to work with your body through each surge and I can honestly say I quite enjoyed most of the surges- the ones towards the end were a bit more intense!

The surges came every half an hour throughout the night, waking me up each time but I slept in-between. By the morning, they were about 15 minutes apart but not regular. My mother-in-law and husband were at home with me but I liked keeping the surges secret for the moment! I went ahead with a normal day with stretching and a good breakfast. By midday it was obvious the surges were the real thing as they were getting more intense and closer together. My mum-in-law massaged my back throughout each one, and my husband chose a rom-com for me to watch for distraction! I was too distracted to watch it though, and I remember doing some much needed vacuuming and dusting instead (very last minute nesting!). The surges continued to intensify and I spent most of the afternoon in the bath listening to the HypnoBirthing relaxation tracks. By 6pm, it was obvious I should think about getting to the birth center as the surges were getting close to 6 minutes apart. I hadn’t eaten yet, and I have to say: prepare something quick and easy before! I hadn’t, and my husband’s efforts were unfortunately not quick or tasty enough and I didn’t manage to eat much as my surges were quickly getting closer together. I recommend using a contraction app on your smart phone by the way- easiest way to time them. By 7pm the surges were coming regularly at 5 minutes apart and we left in a taxi for the birth center.

When I arrived at the birth center, my surges were monitored and the midwife found that they had become weaker and irregular. I was 4cm dilated. She said that I could either return home or stay over and hope that they resumed in the morning. My husband tells me that I became quite annoyed by the suggestion I had to wait and that I insisted I was going to have the baby that evening and I’d walk up and down the stairs to get the surges going again.

The next few hours really are a blur, but the surges certainly returned and by 11 pm I was already 10cm dilated and wanting to push. The time between 8 and 11 was spent in the tatami room upstairs and then in the delivery room downstairs, changing positions between all-fours and on my side, with lots of cushions in-between my legs. I listened to the birth affirmations section of the HypnoBirthing CD most of the time and used lavender oil. I felt very calm and relaxed.

My primary midwife called a second midwife and my bath was run. I got in the bath, which felt extremely relaxing. I got too relaxed it seems as my surges weakened. The midwives suggested that I would get too tired to push if I remained in the water. Perhaps this is where I could have been more insistent about my wish to give birth gently in water by bearing down rather than by pushing but the offer that it would be faster and less tiring if I squatted tempted me, so I got out of the bath and went to the birth stool. I remember noticing that it was 11:45PM on the 6th at this point and I thought it would be cool if I could birth my baby by midnight! It wasn’t to be the 3 easy pushes I had hoped for. Ella was posterior so it was a bit more difficult to get her down the birth canal, but there’s no backing out so you just go for it!

I felt her head and she was still in her sac, my waters hadn’t broken even at this stage. At 12:39pm the midwives started telling me to put my hands down to catch her but I almost missed her as I thought they were still telling me to point my chin down as they’d been telling me the whole time. Luckily I got their meaning and, along with my husband who reached round me, we caught our baby girl. We brought her up onto my chest and we lay back onto the bed. The cord was left connected for a good 3 minutes while Ella was on my chest. She found my breast soon after and suckled. The midwives left her there for about half an hour before taking her to be weighed and measured. She came back quickly and my husband, Ella and I were left alone for about an hour. We were helped up to our tatami room and spent the rest of the night sleeping all together on the futon. I fully recommend the birth center if you speak a little Japanese. Feel free to mail me if you are considering a HypnoBirthing or drug-free birth center birth! chrissybodington@gmail.com

Luciana

Working with Allison is like a ray of sunshine in my life!

- Luciana, dance teacher and new mother, Italy

Amy and her boys

During my lifecoaching sessions with Allison I was able to learn skills that allow me to step back from a situation and assess the way I truly feel, open my eyes to new possibilities, and move forward with compassion towards myself and others.  I have been able to cultivate an understanding of my own response to situations and realize that my intuition is a vital tool in making beneficial decisions.  Allison has a calm and reassuring demeanor.  I truly appreciated and thrived under her non-judgmental and gentle style of coaching.  Thank you, Allison!

Amy, homeschooling mother of two, Dallas

Michelle

I have never been one to seek out help to work through the challenges that I face with work and family, but the opportunity to work with Allison came at a time when I felt that I could benefit from an outside point of view –  I was ready to take a chance to make some changes.  I find working with Allison refreshing…she is bright and insightful and is able to make observations about aspects of my life that I had never considered.  She puts me to work each time we meet, assigning me a manageable, but meaningful task designed to help me to get “unstuck” with a problem.   The thing that amazes me the most with our time together is that Allison asks a question or make a comment that sticks in my mind with me until the next time we meet. She has the ability to ask essential questions that have enabled me to overcome some difficult hurdles.  I look forward to our every meeting and can’t imagine why I waited so long to find a life coach.

Michelle, University professor and mother of two, NH

Stacie and her boys

I cannot thank Allison enough for leading me through a life transition and getting me back on the right track.  It is amazing how much our weekly sessions make a difference and bring a clear focus to my life.

During my transition, Allison very carefully led me through my thoughts, examined them, and helped to renew a sense of confidence in myself that was needed to move forward and trust myself.    I can honestly say that what I imagined a perfect day to look like is happening.  I have a better sense of balance and peace in my life, a fantastic new job and more time with my family.    I have a great amount of gratitude for where I am at.  I recall during a recent meeting noticing how grateful I was for where I was, the quality of the people I was with, the diversity and the opportunity for learning and new experiences.

Thank you again for being a fantastic coach to help guide me on my journey.

Much gratitude,

Stacie, Phoenix, AZ

Rabbia

I have been married four beautiful years and am still learning the art of a healthy marriage.  Coaching sessions with Allison were a refreshing experience in the way that I could open up without being judged and gain a positive personal perspective.  They provided me with helpful step by step questions and tools and to rethink my approach to certain situations.   Not only do I feel more confidant but stronger for the new adventures that are coming our way.  Allison, thank you for everything.

– Rabbia, Yokota Air Base, Japan