Inner180

Dear One,

I really enjoyed getting to know you better during our session and I was thrilled to be able to coach you.  I have seen a lot of potential in you and I’m glad you want to look deeply inside yourself.  I do quite a lot of work around “How to Work with People in Crisis” with coaches, lawyers, and mental health professionals.  In a sense, this is what you are challenged to do with your partner.

The first principle of working with those who are in crisis is to remain calm yourself.  And I am not talking about the calm of the actress who is showing exterior calm while flipping out or at war inside.  Our energy fields will give us away.  (Remember the heart’s electrical charge is MEASURABLE, with today’s equipment, up to 10 feet away from us.)  Clamping down our feelings is exhausting, and compromises our intelligence and creativity and our authentic power.  This is confirmed by science, as well as by our spiritual leaders, and all of the great healers and leaders who have shared their secrets with us.

I am talking about honest, authentic calm, the deep calm that knows that we will be allright, no matter what happens.  It is a calm that comes from unconditional love, for absolute acceptance of reality, and from getting in touch with the sometimes painful but always liberating truth that we are responsible for our own experience. This is why the focus of our coaching session was directed at the real truth of what is going on inside of you, rather than around your partner’s behavior.

As coaches, as leaders, as parents, as those interacting with people in crisis, it is up to us to set the tone of our interactions, rather than being pulled into the other’s upset.  This is a big challenge, particularly with a partner because they know where our buttons are, and they often don’t hesitate to push them.  They will exhibit behavior with us that they will not do elsewhere, for example, at their workplace.  Which fuels further judgments, recriminations and inner war (“Why can’t s/he be civil with me if s/he can keep it together at work.  S/he is disrespectful, a jerk, too angry.”)  On and on goes the inner dance.

If you can stay in your core of peace with your partner, you can do it with anyone, I suspect.  But you must first see the value in getting really honest with yourself about all of this.  This is an exploration of the “why” you want to interact from your core of peace and to be an authentically calm presence.

For those of us who have lived most of our lives in a lot of noise and turmoil (inner and outer), this is a huge identity shift.  It is scary and our minds will rebel, often very creatively.   I remember thinking “without my drama, without my stories, without my nostrils flaring and coming back with a quick, sassy (i.e., nasty) remark” I will be flat, weak, boring, plain vanilla, no personality.  For me, that was just another lie I told myself to stay in a dance of war, of turmoil, of victimhood.  Although I was frequently miserable there, It was a very familiar place, and I was comfortable there.

I have, in large part, now ended my personal inner war.  When inner conflict arises, which it does, I do the very same inner work I ask of my clients.  I do not believe that I am now weak or boring or flat, and my experience is that no one else thinks so either.  In fact, my personal experience is that I am much stronger, more powerful, and even more interesting now. And, I have freed up enough energy to power a small city.

So, all of this is a lead up to an assignment for you.  Ask yourself why.  Why do you want to end this war, end this dance, end this strife with your partner?  Write down all the reasons that come to you.  Do this over the course of the next week or so.  Let the reasons come to you.  If you think of reasons not to end it, write those down separately.  If you resist this exercise, then list all the reasons why you are resisting.

Then look at those reasons with an open mind and a heart devoted to the largest truth of who you are and what you really want for yourself.  Ask which reasons are steeped in truth and which are not.  Ask which reasons feel like love and which do not.  And then ask yourself this question:  whose responsibility is it get this truth and this love into your life?

Let me know how it goes.

Much love,
Terry