Why is everything so hard (or easy): Following the Energy!!
Universe Around Me
Have you ever felt like you are beating your head against a wall trying to accomplish something? You try over and over, and every time something just seems to go wrong. I have found that this happens most when I am ignoring where my energy is trying to take me.
I don’t mean energy in some esoteric mystical sense. I use the word to mean the flow of the universe around me. I spent decades of my life trying to make things go my way. I would get an idea, become convinced of its validity, and then I would try and try to bend the universe to my will and make that idea a reality. There is a huge problem with that, the universe is BIG, like really BIG, and the things that happen, they have a lot of momentum. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty small. I can’t change the universe, I can’t even change the world, and in fact I can’t even change a single person around me. But I can change me.
I like to think of it like a strong powerful river, with tributaries and streams coming off of each side. If I am trying to swim upstream, trying to get to a tributary that I have passed, or that it isn’t the right time for, I will never get there, and I will wear myself out, and possibly drown in the current. If I look ahead of me, on the other hand, I can see some of the tributaries, I can see some of the small islands in the river that I can rest on, and I can swim downstream to them.
That’s enough of metaphors about it. Let me give you some examples from my own life. When I decided a few years ago to go back to school, I had no idea what to study. I chose my first major for my associates, Alcohol and Other Drug Studies, because I knew a lot about alcohol and drugs from a large portion of my past. Not the best of reasons to choose a major, but it worked out rather well.
Swimming Downstream
In one of my first classes I had to get an internship working in the field of alcohol and drug treatment. I found out during that internship that I really liked this field, and I wanted to study it further. As I was doing this, doors seemed to open for me, I got positions I applied for, my schoolwork came easily to me, I seemed to be able to swim down this stream with ease (oops…metaphor again). This path led me to two jobs in the field, and then to the founding of a company in mental health. I followed this where it took me, and never looked back. It wasn’t all easy, but as long as I was doing the right thing, then the right things seemed to happen.
On the other side of that coin, there was a program that we began at my company. It was a group format treatment for addiction and trauma, was well designed, well researched, and the first two groups of people we took through it, reported incredible relief and personal growth, and loved being involved. However, after those two groups, we did not seem to form any new groups. It wasn’t the right time for the groups.
Using the program in a one-on-one format developed. So we put the group work on the back burner, and turned our energy towards something that seemed to happen organically, our work with first responders (mainly police, fire, EMS, and dispatchers). We turned our energy in the direction in which it seemed to flow, and things just took off from there. Two years later, our 1stResponder work has significantly expanded, the trauma and addiction work has moved into a case-by-case basis, not groups, as we originally thought.
Following the Flow
Fast forward to a few months back, when an opportunity to work with a large number of veterans arose for our company. We became affiliated with a non-profit organization providing PTSD treatment to post 9/11 combat veterans. One of our clinicians on staff told us that the entire reason she got into mental health was so she could work with veterans. Interestingly enough, addiction and trauma are very heavily intertwined in veterans, and that clinician has taken our program and used it on an individual basis with some of her clients, and we may start a group of it for veterans. It may now be the right time, and we are not forcing it, we are following the flow!
The point of all this is simple. Learning how to go with the flow, roll with the punches, and adjust course corrections, based on where the universe seems to be taking you, gives you the opportunity to travel farther and down more paths than you ever could by trying to force your way against the universe.
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Jeremy Larsen
www.coherenceassociates.com
info@coherenceassociates.com