What if you are not as broken as you think you are?

Just live

What if you are not as broken as you think you are?

Read that again.

If you’re as broken as you think you are, you need to be fixed.

You are a problem to be solved.

If you’re broken, you’re living from an outdated version of yourself. I’m not saying you don’t have to deal with and process trauma. That’s a given. We’re human. I’m saying once it’s done, it’s gone. If it gets pressed on again, rinse and repeat. Processing emotions beats ruminating about them every time.

I spent my late twenties and thirties immersed in sadness. Rumination was my pastime. It was the heartache of a life. I figured out in my forties that it was a joke and I didn’t need it anymore. I began learning about my emotions instead of managing them. I felt them instead of psychoanalyzing them. This gave me the strength and courage to disassemble the life I had just allowed to happen and created my life from there. Forty to sixty — the proof is in the pudding.

I used to think that mastery meant knowing. I read all the books and intellectualized my understanding. It took me years to undo this way of processing, to stop studying and ruminating. Now I know that mastery is trusting. Trusting life. Trusting love. Trusting myself. Trusting the divine source of wisdom that guides me when I can’t see the way.

Because I’ve experienced it, I see it in everyday life. Everyone has an Achilles heel. They excel in most areas of their lives only to be blindsided in one area that hits them in a hidden way from the world. It seems to be part of being human.

I recently worked with a powerful client over four sessions. He had built everything a man could desire. Money, power, perfect body. A full life by every measure.

Through hours of conversation, we uncovered one event that had never been metabolized, never been processed, and had been running him like an outdated operating system. The emptiness and loss of a woman he loved. From togetherness to coldness one week after their breakup — that was the wound he carried. Every other part of his life he had figured out — except for the one that was hurting him.

During our first session I sat in stillness as he shared every sordid detail of his current experience. We allowed for there to be no resistance or fight. There was zero need to figure anything out.

Into our second session we looked at his undercurrent of low hum mental acrobatics that had followed him around like a shadow. We looked for ways it could be dissolved, not through effort, or trying harder, but through surrender. We did not need anything out there to occur, or for his heart to be in a particular place in order for him to be fully alive, engaged, and powerful.

In the third session we went from figuring out to letting go.

By the fourth session we found the unhealed wound. The one that left him closed, unsure and alone. Once we found that and worked on processing it, the road to wholeness was started.

He is now setting himself free. Thought by examined thought.