You Are Whole. Right Now. (Period.)
It would seem logical that my work as a Mindfulness Coach would set me squarely in the personal development field.
But to be perfectly honest, I'm not a huge fan of the term “personal development”.
Because, simultaneously logically and paradoxically, what initially draws most of us to the personal development realm is some sense of personal defectiveness or deficiency.
Some shame-infused sense that there’s something irrevocably wrong or broken about us that we need to FIX if we ever want to be OK in this life, much less ever truly belong or be loved.
And that core belief — even if below the surface of conscious awareness and showing up as seemingly well-intentioned perfectionism or success-striving — that we’re fundamentally flawed will tinge any personal growth efforts with a flavor of self-criticism and judgment that will actually only further calcify the protective mechanisms that functioned importantly when we were younger but which no longer serve our highest good in our adult lives.
If we approach our personal development path as one of “self-improvement” we’re likely to keep feeling that void inside us that we fear makes us fundamentally unlovable or unworthy of happiness.
The longer I do this work with people, the more clearly I see and believe that the only real work we each as humans are generally actually doing is dusting off the core Self (capital S) at the center of our being.
We’re returning home to our true nature — whole, inherently lovable and loving, uniquely authentic. Connected to one another, to the whole of life, to the universe (maybe you felt a glimmer of that in that moment of awe-some alignment between the Earth, moon and sun this week).
We’re remembering — in an embodied way, felt through the vessel of these bodies we move around the planet in — our own intrinsic wholeness.
Through mindfulness coaching explorations grounded in kind, curious, nonjudgmental awareness of what’s happening in the present moment, we start to remember the Truth (capital T):
That there’s nothing broken or deficient about you in your core essence.
That you are perfectly whole and complete just as you are in this moment, regardless of your conditioning or traumas or past circumstances.
Does that mean that you’ll never want to “work on yourself” again? Absolutely not.
It just means that, once you remember your unshakeable wholeness, you can pursue the personal growth endeavors you pursue from a place of simply deepening your sense of and your manifestation of that wholeness so that it can shine and ripple even more brightly and clearly out into the world, even more positively impacting those you encounter on your path.
You'll no longer pursue your “personal development” like a fix-it project, because you've returned to remembering that you’re 100% whole exactly as you are.
Nothing broken, so nothing that needs to be fixed.
What if you were to view any tweaks you make from here as simply ways to more deeply integrate and live from that place of essential wholeness?
You have always been whole, and you always will be.
That inalterable wholeness gets obscured sometimes in this whole being human process, but it's permanently there within you nonetheless.
It’s just a matter of practicing to remember and connect to that Truth again and again and again.
With Love,