What is your dream? What childhood Bogeyman may be stopping you from stepping into it?
Nicki was the volunteer in one of my teleclass series recently. Her dream is to “develop and run a private practice for healing that incorporates various energy modalities. I want this practice to bring movement and growth and healing to peoples lives.’ I want it to be financially successful to support my family & community in luxurious ways. “
In this session she came to an understanding of what was blocking her success.
She was able to reframe an old family belief that equated success with loss of love.
She was able to see the possible connection of this old belief with her previous recurrences of cancer. She realized how changing her thoughts on success could actually enhance her future health.
Nicki has support from friends and family, and lots of relevant experience: She is a Certified Energy Health Practitioner, and also an RN, currently working with frail elderly people. Over the past year she has successfully taught several energy tapping classes to her patients. She has also taught in the community. Her group work led to opportunities to work individually with people. All sessions, both group and individual, were enthusiastically received and very useful to the attendees. She said she was always invited back to do more group teaching.
“But,” she added, “I notice I always postpone the follow-up teaching opportunities, usually based on ‘being too busy.’ By the time the new class is scheduled people have lost their momentum and the attendance is shrunk in size or non-existent….
“I have a ferocious curiosity for learning. Although this is a blessing, it also serves as a temptation to spend hours reading books, newsletters, internet, to attend webinars, conferences etc only to discover once again, that I have not taken further steps in developing my own private practice… other than in my head.”
But Nicki was hiding from her own personal Bogeyman. She said she was an outwardly confident person, and people around her were always surprised to find that she sabotages herself. It turned out that underneath it all, there were two big, relatively unconscious Bogeyman-type reasons why Nicki thought that she couldn’t fulfill her dream.
One reason was how she was raised to think about success. Like many of us, she lacked confidence and was afraid of failure. In her family, no one had ever been successful like this before.
These were some of the beliefs she had taken in from her childhood:
People that have a lot of money don’t have time to enjoy their family.
We don’t have a lot of money but we love each other.
It is dangerous to be outside of the family.
Be safe, don’t take risks.
Some things will never change.
And there was another powerful deterrent. Nicki had experienced cancer three times. When we worked together, she was just recovering from recent cancer surgery. She said that she was afraid that success would mean lots of stress, and it would take time away from her self care. And this: “So much of what I have learned points to stress as being a catalyst for cancer growth… what if the stress of having my own successful practice would contribute to a new cancer?”
I love helping people who are hiding from their deep true self expression to go beyond, under, around, above what they think is keeping them safe. Usually they kind of know half consciously that there is a contradiction there. They are trying desperately to keep themselves safe, using old strategies that don’t work any more. In fact those old ways of thinking are actively getting in the way of doing what brings them deep joy.
But I have found that we tend to let our old beliefs go unquestioned. And when we do turn to face them, there is our soul, caged, painfully wanting to fly free. What I want most of all in the world is to help our souls to fly free to generate their creative magic in our lives!
I especially like to do this work with metaphors. I help people to get beyond the apparent barricades of their old beliefs, out of their traps, off the hook, out of the quicksand, off the tightrope, no longer under siege or wandering in the desert. Or I find that they feel like they are cramped in some kind of small tight container, what someone called “a box of NO.”
I also love to work with EFT. Tapping lends itself elegantly and powerfully to opening a door to our inner spiritual wisdom. The surprising solution is always right there in the metaphor when we open the doors with EFT.
Nicki’s particular Box of No was made out of endless layers of cotton batting that kept her trapped and motionless. It was soft, but strong. She was a very small person in there. Sounds from outside the batting were muffled, and of course she couldn’t see anything. She could only just distinguish between light and dark. It is hard to be successful or effective in that set-up!
The first step I wanted to take with Nicki was to ask her to look again at WHY she wanted to have this private practice. The reasons she was giving were mostly about what she thought it would or could do for her. I pointed out that her statements were coming from a position of lack, in effect saying “I don’t have the things I want, and I need money, so I need a practice that will bring them to me.”
I explained that the beliefs we hold create a magnetic energetic shape in the universe. The world shapes itself around this energetic form that we take. Our lives then manifest our shape. So in this case, Nicki kept shaping and then manifesting more lack of confidence and funds.
“Where is the YAY! (one of her words), where is the generative flow from deep inside you?” I asked her. “What can you bring from your heart to your practice? Instead of shaping yourself as a helpless victim, find a way to offer yourself as a generative source,” I suggested. This was a good opportunity for tapping.
Nicki chose this old family belief to explore: “We don’t have a lot of money, but we love each other.” I wanted to consider what her family was unconsciously trying to get for themselves by holding onto their beliefs about money and success and family. We determined that they held some powerful assumptions:
- Success = more money and less love.
- The more money you have, the less love is available, because you have to work really hard to make money and that takes you away from those you love.
- Success sets you apart from other family members who haven’t been successful.
- You have to numb your self down to not want anything beyond your family unit.
- Therefore, do not be successful, or you will lose the connection and belonging and love of your family.
Another good opportunity for tapping.
We also worked with Nicki’s metaphor. We drew a stick figure that represented just the energetic structure of the situation, using my process that I call Metaphors of Emergence. Each of the images in the picture has an evocative meaning for Nicki’s creative spirit.
At first she called her picture “Numbing Down to Not Want.” We invited Nicki’s resident inner wisdom to suggest a powerful way to emerge from her Box of NO.
You can see the results of our work! Her little cotton-batting covered self stands kind of under and behind there. The big bright energy-filled figure emerged from the tapping and the metaphor work. (Make allowances for my drawing… My drawing skill is not a consideration!)
At the end of the session, I asked Nicki to come back to the idea that success=stress=cancer. What did she think of that now?
She responded:
Those beliefs about stress and success felt like the source of my being when I wrote them down before. But they don’t have power over me now. The source of my belief now is coming from a place of my endless power, not from lack. It was the beliefs about lack that were causing the stress! I am a power generator. I have never thought of myself like that before. It feels believable though.
And actually, that is how I feel when I work with people. I love awakening them to their own generative power! It is not about doing tapping “right,” or saying all the right words, I can see now that recognizing the power of my own generataivity, helps the other person to tune into their own, and that creates health all around.
Success, money, health and happiness are all one!”
By the end of our tapping and metaphor work, Nicki had renamed her metaphor picture “Standing in My Generative Power Like a Christmas Tree.” (She said, “That sounds kind of hokey, but that is how it feels, all lit up and sparkly.”)
Her final comment was: “I realize now that the source of my being comes from a place of endless power, not lack. I am a power generator myself! When I approach my work from this perspective, I feel an endless flow of love and a creativity. Now I know what success truly is.”
This belief felt true to her at a 10 on a scale of 1-10.
For more information on working with Metaphors of Emergence, tapping, and connecting with inner allies to support your creative self expression, check out my work with HeartSong Coaching and Intuitive Mentoring.
In this life spirit coaching package I help people who have been hiding from the Bogeyman under their childhood bed, starving their dreams. They learn to face their monsters and grow to shine as the capable strong healers and parents and workers that they know they are deep inside. They get to find ways to shape themselves to make their good dreams come true.
https://www.intuitivementoring.com/teleclasses/heartsong-coaching/
With my love and blessings to you,
Rue
Scale, Bogeyman and bridge images from Dreamstime.com
