Embrace the magic of everyday life.
Connect. Reflect. Put into Effect.
Greetings fellow thinkers and feelers.
This blog is dedicated to the art and practice of being alive. It is dedicated to the ancient heart in every human being – that beats ever so steadily waiting to be invited to reveal its mystery and wisdom. It is dedicated to the gentle and profound magic that is hidden in plain sight, and that once recognized, will make you forever changed. Forever aware. Forever free.
It is a sacred wisdom – but a simple one. In fact, it is the awareness that the sacred and the simple can be one in the same.
Allow me to explain, but first let me take a few steps back and introduce myself.
I’m a Licensed Clinical Psychologist working in private practice and also at a college wellness center. For 17 years (10 of these post doctorate) I have worked with clients suffering from the most mild and passing episodes of sadness and doubt to the most crushing and severe throes of acute mental illness. What I have learned is that regardless of “diagnosis,” be it difficulty adjusting to new circumstances or chronic schizophrenia, the experience of emotional anguish and the absolute pain of isolation and disconnection are strangers to no one. No one. We all know it. Don’t we? We know what anxiety is, right? Sure. Sadness? Of course. Confusion and self-doubt? Luckily yes, that too, because that’s how we grow. We know these because we’ve been there. Maybe in short fleeting bursts. Perhaps in endless seeming oceans of time. Either way, we all know these pains. What a hideous irony that within the human experience, one thing that we all share is the feeling of disconnection and isolation.
The purpose and goal of Comprehensive Freedom Psychotherapy (a modality I am developing) is to tap into truth (personal truth, objective truth – because it’s truth, it doesn’t really matter what word you put in front of it) so that each individual who experiences it may release him/herself from the faulty notions of limitations and external expectations. Like most therapies the primary goal is to increase awareness of choices. Too often we feel stuck and powerless because we do not realize we are in fact choosing the circumstances that we state we want to change. The difference is that the route to this liberation is not through thought process and emotional process only. It is through the combined process of mental, emotional, spiritual and physical process. Understanding, knowing, feeling, being. It is the process of breaking your heart open so that you may see that – in truth – it is unbroken. Unbreakable. It is learning that the most authentic strength and power are born in vulnerability. To be open and unbroken is therefore to be truly alive, awake and connected. It is the place where fear retreats and love settles in, so that you may feel utterly and gloriously free, safe and energized. Connected.
So how does this work? Well – I chose to write a blog and not an article, so I believe there is much to say about this.
The simplest way for me to introduce the idea is to invite you to try an exercise that highlights your power over your own experience and that clarifies where choices have created the perceptions that you have likely, until now, thought were unchangeable or at least nearly so.
You can do this absolutely anywhere. Start by taking a deep calming breath. Be aware of your surroundings. Where are you? What do you see? Who’s there with you? Or are you alone? Maybe notice if there is a feeling you can easily identify. Now decide to see the color yellow in your space. Notice how you pull that color into awareness. Maybe lights or yellow flowers, or the lemons in water glasses will pop more sharply into focus and stand out, so that like a color filter feature on a photo app, your mind will find and highlight the yellow. Do you notice a change in how you feel? Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. You’ll get there. Now decide to see the color red. Watch the same thing happen. Notice the effect it has on you. Try blue. The color itself doesn’t matter – only the intention.
When I had an office in Manhattan I would frequently make the suggestion that my patients try something similar while on the subway, and here we can take it to another level and begin to “do the work.”
Now, rather than focusing on a particular color, the task was to decide to see the people around them. To, for example, choose to see the ugliness in their fellow subway riders. And then the beauty. And to take note of how the exact same people, oblivious to this silent process, began to shift in their view. With different lenses did these others seem to become more likable or approachable? Less? See the happiness. See the sadness. What you will notice when you try and practice this, is how easy it is to change what you see. How easy it is to identify potentials and hidden truths and pull them into view.
Now imagine what can happen when you decide to see potentials in yourself. What have you previously been focusing on and expecting to see, and how has this shaped your reality? How can you make this different?
Well folks, in a nutshell that’s the magic of everyday life. Your magic. And it’s only the beginning.