Gardening For The Soul

There’s this theory that you should never cry at work and if that’s true, then I am truly screwed!  I have cried because I feel joyful, frustrated, angry, scared about my breast cancer, feeling that I was treated unfairly – at the time, all good reasons.  Sometimes I managed to make it to the restroom, sometimes it was public, sometimes it was a fully fledged outburst that required a checking of the mostly waterproof mascara and sometimes just a little trickle down the cheek.  And this week, I did it again.  Crying is too strong a word.  I had a moment where I felt so incredibly connected to the group of people I was working with, so liberated by the insight they afforded me , that I was moved to tears, in a very public way, in front of 3 other people most of whom are more senior than me.  It was an amazing, amazing experience and I am getting choked up again just writing about it.

The story.  After someone else dropped out (yeah someone else), I was invited to attend a program at work called Transformational Thinking.  It is run by a guy called David Rock who is the co-founder of a company called the NeuroLeadership Institute.   The idea is that within Corporations, we spend an inordinate amount of time telling each other what to do and on the flip side, an inordinate amount of time ignoring that advice and defending our own positions.  This keeps us and our organizations stuck.  However, David’s research has shown that the brain can solve it’s own problems if the conditions are created for the insights or ‘ah-ha’ moments, where the light bulbs go on and we know exactly what we need to do.  These moments are way more meaningful because WE had them – nobody else pointed them out to us.

He had us start to practice with a simple question:  “I’d like to be more (pick your attribute from a list), but I am struggling with how to do that”.  From that, the other members of our group were to deploy his approach in helping the coachee have an insight, hopefully!  I chose ‘tough’ – I’d like to be more tough but don’t know how.  Why tough?  Because I feel that I let other’s opinions of me matter so much, as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  So here we are, going through the questions and then I get a clarifying mirror to one of my responses, “So you want to be more thick skinned”?  And suddenly all the walls came tumbling down.  No, I don’t want to be more thick skinned.  I want to be on the velvet cushion with everyone else, I want to be in the messy world of life with everyone else, I want to be experiencing it all.  But what I want, most of all, what I crave above everything else, is to be oh so gentle with myself whilst I am doing it.  To make mistakes and not dump all over myself, to say something and not feel shame that afterwards I might’ve got it ‘wrong’, to be completely who I am and be absolutely OK with that.  To be kind to and careful with myself, to not judge myself as less than in any way at any time.

And why was this an ephiphany?  Most of you who know me know that I have been working on self-compassion for quite some time.   I think it is because I have held it that I need to be tougher in order to not let things bother me so much and yet, after this, I feel as if I have been looking through the telescope from the wrong end.  I don’t need to be tougher, I need to be more compassionate.  I want to let down the barriers, not build them up.  I want to be free to just be me. 

Why is it that the same things keep coming up?  Why is it that we think we have it licked and lo and behold, once more we see it reflecting back at us?  Can we ever just get past the things that we believe are our anchors, seemingly dragging us down?  Maybe yes and maybe no.  But this I do know:  each time we have another insight, we strengthen our depth of knowledge and allow ourselves to feel into the space.  Each time, for me,  it seems less like I am groping around in the dark but instead, shedding light on my journey to liberation.