I’m really dragging this week and it’s no surprise. Last week was filled with this ideal set of circumstances, many honoring one of my core desired feelings of spaciousness with time:
- Relaxed time to play with some loved ones
- One on one time with several friends
- A few days with the grandkids
- Plenty of cash in the bank
- Steady progress on refining the book
- Our youngest started high school and reconnected with friends after being a hermit for the summer
If you’ve read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, you can sense where I’m going with this. It’s about upper limits, expanding beyond your comfort zone and living in your zone of genius. The premise is that we all have a limit on how much goodness we can tolerate in our lives. Like a thermostat, when we tip beyond that comfort zone, we activate habits, choices, even body symptoms that will bring us back down to the safe zone where we know we can function.
It sounds strange to think that we wouldn’t want to allow as much abundance, connection and richness into our lives as possible. But on a subconscious level, core beliefs invented by the ego keep us safe and prevent us from harm. It’s a great survival mechanism, but it’s not helpful when your eye is on thriving.
With things going so well last week, even though I’ve been aware of my upper limits and triggering them, on Sunday I developed a muscle spasm in my back. Quickly, my euphoria of ‘can things really be this good’ turned into shallow breathing, naps and heat packs in an attempt to release it.
I realized that I’m fabulous in times of crisis, but when things are going well it takes time for me to figure out what to do with myself.
And then it occurred to me that some part of me is still addicted to struggle.
The part of me connected to lines of programming code that are no longer required because I’m passing through another level of awakening. These lines originated with a hardy line of ancestors who needed to prepare themselves and their offspring to survive a life of being the underdog, the victim, the lowest of the lows, to pass under the radar screen, to not be too successful and to hold back so that nobody else felt bad in their presence. These lines of code are revealing themselves to me now so that they can be deleted. I thank them for serving our family so well and for getting me to this point and I release them into the great unknown.
I’m opening up to allow myself more space, abundance, and connection in life. I am a willing student and eager experimenter.
And amazingly, just like that, I felt my back spasm relax as I was typing this to you. Sometimes the truth just wants to be set free.*
Can you relate? Are you addicted to struggle? Have you been in the past? (Let’s chat about that over on the FB page)
From my grateful heart to yours,
Christi
P.S. *After I shut my computer down and shared my back spasm revelation with my husband, it came back again to the point of immobility. 🙂 I’m learning so much about being tender with myself and what it feels like to relax and allow. Life is such a great teacher and I’m its constant student. So grateful we’re creating a community where we don’t have to have it all figured out, we don’t have to be selfie picture perfect, we get to be real and keep experimenting to see what works and share that learning with each other. xo
P.P.S. I just published a moving You First interview with Judith Morgan, the Small Business Oracle. She talks about her own challenges with learning to live as a priority in her own life and offers up so many nuggets of wisdom that I couldn’t keep up with my notes. Have a listen, won’t you?