The Work Will Show You How To Do It

My teacher talks about the importance of seeing yourself as both a patient and a doctor. In order to heal, you have to perceive yourself as both very vulnerable and very strong. That’s what self-compassion truly means.

Some people just want to be doctors. They go around prescribing remedies for everyone else, without sitting with their own pain.

Some people just want to be patients. They talk about wounds and injustices, without realizing that they’re shaping these experiences by what they do, say, and think right now.

When we lose the balance between patient and doctor, we get stuck. We become either The Victim or The Expert, both of which keep us from ever learning anything new.

The Victim thinks he can’t move forward till the past is rewritten. The Expert thinks he can’t move forward till he’s figured out the future. Both are forms of procrastination, of turning away from the one place where anything is ever possible: the present moment.

We don’t normally think of our struggles to exercise, write, meditate, or eat better in this way, but when it seems hard to do what we said we were going to, the reason is always that either we won’t let ourselves be vulnerable or we won’t let ourselves be strong. This holds us in an endless preamble that keeps us from writing the story we want to write.

So you have to remind yourself: The work will teach me how to do it. You don’t need to understand everything. Just make a start of it, and you will not fail to learn. Forget your perfect offering, as Leonard Cohen said. Just put your hands in the clay and keep them there. It will get better and so will you.

As always, if you'd like to be held through your own process, contact me and we’ll set up a free coaching call.