Elese Coit

Here comes the New Year.  Ready to clear out?

Think of your internal clear-out as if you had been holding something in your hand all year long.  Open your hand and let it drop.

All that stuff that you've accomplished or failed to is really no more than ideas about you should be, and notions about what would make you happy.

You may notice that you are actually changing and dropping these ideas all the time.  Throughout the year you may have picked up a few items you no longer need ...

_As anyone knows who has moved house, it's truly amazing how quickly we fill the space around us!  Isn't it incredible how, after a major clear-out, within a few years we seem to have filled the bucket back up to the brim?  Isn't it mind-boggling how much you discover you own when you start getting rid of stuff?    

It's almost as if we are not quite fully aware of what we are doing.   

I'm not saying you don't need every single item that you have.  But I do remember what Jacob Glass used to say -- there's no vortex quite like an empty apartment!

Our internal world is a bit like this too, isn't it?  We go along picking up all kinds of ideas from the world around us, like lint. Then suddenly we find we are saying things we don't even believe or mean to say!   

The we sit up in surprise and think, "That's not me!  I'm not like that." And it's a bit of a shock, really.   

Many of the things we pick up are painful to us -- fears about what other people might do to us, harsh judgements, tendencies to worry about the state of the world.   Even the temptation to gossip or bland conversations about the weather; these are just habits we all share as accepted ways of relating to one another.  They are not the real you.

Of course, not all these ideas we pick up are harmful or burdensome.  Only the unquestioned ones!

How about our ideas of what success looks like for an example?  Many children are being pushed into performance testing and evaluation as early as 4 and 5, in order to be accepted into kindergarten. Kindergarten! This is a notion of success that we could do without. It is full of fear about the future, and it's already beginning to velcro itself to tiny minds -- leaving them little room to stretch and grow naturally.  What chance will kids have to be their creative selves if the playing field is already shrinking around them?  

Who have we all become as a result of carrying around some of these burdensome ideas?  Who do we long to be?  Can you feel that longing?

We have added some junk to our beautiful selves that doesn't need to be there: self-condemnation, self-harm, self-chastisement, you name it.  You know what it is. You should hear the things people say to themselves. Tuned in lately? What if you knew that all your internal thoughts were being broadcast on a loudspeaker for everyone to hear? 

These accepted concepts about how we should look, how much we should weigh, whether we make enough money, whether we are on a path to success, are weighing us down. 

Is it really any wonder that we find it hard to connect with others, to love fully and to feel free?

Will we get to the point where we no longer recognize ourselves?  

And if we recognize ourselves, what are we identifying with anyway -- it's all just a bunch of notions about how things should be.

How about, let's not. 

It's almost the end of the year, let's leave them behind in 2011.    

Here' to YOU.

_What have hummingbirds got to do with your life?  Lots, as it turns out!

I don't know how much you know about hummingbirds, but I was very ignorant about these beautiful creatures.  So feel free to laugh at me, but ...

For one, I thought hummingbirds were in constant motion.  They are not. They dip from flower to flower, and as I learned one day, they will actually perch on a branch, rest, and then while still sitting with their tails opening and closing like wee luminescent fans, they'll casually poke the nearest flower.

I also thought they were silent.  They are not. As they whirr and whizz around at  speed they chirp, trill, cry, call and sing in delighted tones.  They have different whistles and clucks and I've come to recognize them by their unique sounds as well as their colorings.  And they have other surprising behaviors, like rising up ten stories, hovering and then diving straight down at screaming velocity!

Two reasons why I'm on the hummingbird theme.

One is that in life, I'm often so ignorant of the tiny marvels all around. It's funny how easily we can be lulled into thinking that we know what life is all about.  Perhaps if you'd asked me about hummingbirds, I might have been fairly confident in my thinking that they are in constant motion.  Even though I really did not know that.

I come up against my own ignorance when I'm closely observing life around me.  If I am open to what is there, suddenly life seems to open to me.  It begins teaching me how things really are.  And then I have the opportunity to laugh and drop my illusions.

Often when we find ourselves at the crossroads of what we think we know and some brand new information, it can be tempting to stick with the road we know. Even if it really is not good for us and not leading us where we think.

I do believe it can be strange to us, and even difficult, to remain open to life. Although it is natural for all human beings, it isn't normal practice to let life reveal its secrets to us. We are rather more used to reaching first for what we think we know.  We seem to become more open to learning only after we've come to the edge, exhausted, of what we know.

And this brings me to my second point about hummingbirds and life.  Just like the hummingbird is quiet sometimes, so we need to be.

Everything we need to know about how to live life is available to us. One of the reasons we get lost and take the wrong fork in the road repeatedly is because we have not stopped long enough to listen.  We are too rarely informed from the inside.  We haven't listened to ourselves. I'm not talking about following every emotional upheaval wherever it takes you, I'm talking about honoring our inner guidance.

Many times you've made a mistake and later known that something inside was telling you to do differently.  You probably swapped that inner information for logical reasoning.  Your logical mind didn't have the right answer.  But you knew that afterwards.

This happens -- not because the logical mind is always wrong; it is just more interested in keeping you glued together than anything else.  It wants the version of you that you have now to be preserved; this above all other things.  Your logical thinking is at its' most dangerous not when it doesn't know, but when it thinks it knows. 

As a result, we can easily become great big rigid intolerable know-it-alls.

To have a porous attitude to life is to know one thing: that you don't know everything.  At least not as far as the facts go. And most certainly not as far as concerns the inner lives of other people.  But you can know yourself.

To do that, you need the delightful attitudes of listening, quietness and openness.

The one thing that we all know is exactly what it feels like when we are living as our true selves, living and being who we are. 

I'd suggest that when we are quiet enough to hear our own direction in life and we follow it, we automatically feel open to learning, to understanding others, to loving others. 

To listen closely to your inner world is to hear Life speaking to you.

We are all connected to this same Life, this Spirit or Formless Intelligence, so the result of tuning in is always to feel closer to our real self and to feel closer to others.

Many people talk about the importance of 'being yourself'. It's quite a big self-help industry, isn't it, this whole thing of learning to be yourself.  But don't you think that's more than just a little odd, the fact that you have learn to be you?

Yet I can't count the number of times a client has said to me that they are hoping to learn to be more authentic, more 'themselves'. It sounds on the surface as if that makes sense too.  Yet given the number of personalities we all can display, I sometimes wonder which 'authentic' we'd chose from! 

Who is your authentic self?

Where will you go looking for you?

How will you know when you've found you?

Does all this mean that in a lifetime of searching I might miss myself, pass myself by and somehow never experience what it's like to be me?  It sure seems that way. 

So before we run off to find ourselves, what is this me I am seeking?

A friend and mentor I love dearly and have the great privilege to work closely with at Supercoach Academy is Michael Neill.  Michael shared this distinction in this years' class called "Natural vs Normal."  It's an important one.  I'm going to give my version of what I see Michael might be pointing to and why it's so important in the context of being oneself.

'Normal' is what you might call the familiar way in which our human system operates.  In the normal way of things, it's 'normal' to argue when you are upset.  It is also 'normal' to get upset if someone calls your Dad a loser or cuts you off in traffic. It's normal to be worried and stressed out. It's normal to have concern for your children.

I'm not suggesting normal is bad.  I'm just saying it's, well, normal.  Normal is the conglomeration of things that we really take for granted because so many of us agree that it's just the way it is. Normal is what we take for granted.  Which means it is also invisible to us.  More on this in just a moment. 

By contrast, 'natural' is the state we find ourselves in when we are not all wound up.  It's what happens (yes, naturally) when we are not triggered or speeding around. It is less a state you evoke, a more a state that is just there when nothing else is getting in the way.  I'm struck that the saying 'the natural order of things' is one of those sayings we think refers to mother nature alone, and yet it too suggests a state of being (not a way of being) that is utterly effortless, so completely in tune with life itself as to be almost unnoticeable. It's funny how we think of nature and humans as somehow different.  Surely we too, have a natural order. One that really can't get messed up.  

In other words, when we are not lost in our worried thoughts the natural state of a human being is just that: A human. Being.

Our natural state is a human with all the capacities pre-loaded -- to love, feel connected, to sense what's best for us.  And those simply are as natural as it gets. 

I think the problem with going out there looking to find ourselves is that we are always looking to the world and our experience of what's normal rather than the delicious feeling of what's natural within us.  Maybe we wander off from knowing what that feels like, but it is always there waiting for us.  You'll feel it in moments when you might least expect it -- a surge of joy, a sense of feeling nicely settled, a sense of being connected to someone.

Our own authenticity is really what we experience in ourselves when we are simply in our natural state of mind.  

I absolutely know when I am in my natural state, because I feel good.  Warm feelings, pleasant feelings, these are the signs of your natural self. You don't have to go anywhere or do anything for this to arise in you.   It is just there.

In that sense you could say that stress and worry are unnatural states. Even if they are very normal!