“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” – Rumi

I have mused that the last six months has seen a huge change in who I am spending time with and the conversations I am having. There is deep passion and fire here; a quickening.

This last week marks a transition; a shift. Something that has been present for me – pressure behind a dam – for I think my whole adult life – has just given way. I have been working on this for months. Against the backdrop of a start to a year that has – at best – had a tenuous grip on ‘normal’ for everyone I know.

Fasten your seatbelts – this is going to get weird before it starts making more sense – if it does.

A dear friend has journeyed through hell since the start of this year. Her moving through her experience, processing it, growing, expanding and continuing to create from it has been incredible to witness. Her process is incidental to my journey however impinges on it. Three weeks ago I made a choice one monday morning to be there to support her as fully as I could in the moment. My choice had impact. The change that she created over the next few days after that encounter was breathtaking. I am honoured to have been part of it.

I put myself to one side and – in one interpretation ‘put someone else’s oxygen mask on first’. This was the perfect choice in the moment – and it was also an automatic choice. An example of something I do unthinkingly. It was both a high, beautiful expression of who I am and wish to be in the world, and an ‘automatic’ way for me to be. Both. Nothing wrong – however an awareness to work with.

This is what I do. I perceive a need. I ‘tend towards’ dropping everything to fulfill it. All of my ‘stuff’ gets put on hold. I deem it ‘unimportant’ in the face of what is coming up. This is my big ‘winning strategy’; figure out what is the ‘right thing to do’ (external) and ‘do it’. It is not wrong. It can allow me to deeply express compassion and love. I have related to it as ‘who I am’. Sometimes it is absolutely perfect (see above). Sometimes it gets in the way of me unfolding in the world and fully giving my gift and being of service – without any reservation or burden on myself. One way of expressing it – putting myself in second place can never allow me to bring all of myself. If by arriving I am diminished – I am short-changing myself and the world.

This is where it starts to get twisty. Stick with me here. There is gold.

This might have gone unnoticed except that two weeks ago my coach called me out on this pattern. I really got pissed off that she did in the context of how I had just seen this as a beautiful expression of myself. Then I looked deeper. The awareness that has unfolded since then has been very uncomfortable.

Here is how it goes. I have a very sensitive – yet deeply buried ‘button’ around ‘not good enough’ and/or ‘unworthy’. If I generate a perception that I fit either of these labels then I can disappear into an intense, unreasonable emotional reaction of grief and despair. This is not new. My ex-wife even had a name for it; my ‘deep dark pit’. It was not a term of endearment. Once triggered; moving myself out of this reactivity has been deeply challenging. It is self-reinforcing. A cone-hole in the sand. Exhausting. Arguing myself into a choice outside of this through coaching or any other approach has been – to my and others’ dismay – seemingly impossible. In this space I have had little access love for myself. My creativity is stunted. There is a huge ‘need’ for connection that I both indulge and resist. I make this place ‘wrong’ and fight like crazy to get out of it against the collapsing sands. Running has helped. Workouts. Swimming hard. Punch-bag.

Sometimes it works; I get purchase on some momentary solid ground and have jumped free. Sometimes I exhaust myself in the attempt, crash and wake up out of the trance once I have no more energy to fight it.

From the outside – unless you are very perceptive – I do not think you would notice unless I told you what was going on. I have a really good mask. I am great at hiding this. Internally it sucks.

I have being ‘winning’ in life by avoiding this place at all costs. If I get run down – then I automatically do everything possible to be ‘worthy’ and ‘good enough’. Gauging how I am perceived by others and ‘doing right by them’ – I work hard to figure out what is ‘the right thing to do’ – and I do that. It has been a successful strategy. It has actually given me an amazing life. At the expense of fully realizing and bringing all of who I am. Within this; I have been avoiding being and expressing all of me.

I am up to so much right now that demands so much more of me that this strategy can no longer deliver. A life based on not going for ‘what I want’ where it seemingly conflicts with external needs limits me. It drowns out the quiet voice of my own guiding heart.

And so; two weeks ago when I got triggered – I decided to hang out in the reaction and not try and fix it. Not make it wrong – and see where it led. Everything else I had tried up until then had not changed this pattern – and my intuition was there was a deeper thread to follow.

On wednesday morning I started work with a therapist here in town who specializes in EMDR; a technique developed to work with deep trauma. I have a strong somatic and visual learning style; intuitively this approach fitted. Before our session I had parked the car, settled myself, meditated and had been in a flood of raw, wordless emotion.  I was ready.

In my internal process I had drawn back to encounters with a very young version of myself (see ‘beneath‘). Every encounter with this young self had been fraught – both the longing for connection and also full of mistrust and anger. During the session on wednesday I opened up to experiences of early childhood that pre-date anything I have accessed before. The part of me protecting me from this place gave way. With this access has come a deep love and connection for my young self – my whole self – that has until now been missing. I barely have the words. I close my eyes and breathe it in – and it is fully here. This is so new.

I am in process; I am sure of more to work through and deeper to go. My sense is that a thread that held together so much of who I see myself as and how I show up has been severed. I do not need it anymore. This is breakthrough. I might get a bit messy. I am okay with that. If the recent surge of creativity is anything to go by – this is an insanely good thing.

I get to share it. Any accident I chose to be a coach? A lightworker? That I choose to work with others past their shadows?

I do not know how old I was – I am guessing barely a year if that. I was only just walking; pulling myself up on the green papered walls;  dark brown furniture. There was an electric fire inset in the wall behind a bright metal grid. I felt the heat. I reached towards it with my hand through the grid. As my small fingers got close, an unseen force picked me up and threw me across the room. There was Anger. Loud words. I was picked up. Shaken. Shouted at. Unsafe. Lost. Wrong.

An aunt I never knew suffered terrible burns as a young child and died of pneumonia a few days after falling into a fire in her home. I cannot imagine the feelings my mother and grandmother held around that tragedy. I had reached for the fire. I had done ‘the worst possible thing’, a crazy thing, an ‘insane’ thing. A thing that no-one should ever do. It was not my experience, my grief, my anger, my shock. In that moment however I think I internalized it, locked it away and made it mine. Without ever knowing it. Until now.

Now I get to come home – I get to reach into the fire and work with it – for myself and others – as I was always destined to.