“Experiencing breakthroughs isn’t the point. Living them is” - Oprah Winfrey
I’ve heard that quote several times over the years, and in this line of work I’ve watched people experience both mental and emotional breakthroughs pretty regularly. What’s less rare though, is seeing someone actually putting their newly discovered insights into practice. My client Yvonne (not her real name) had a major ‘the meaning of life’ shift at a women’s spiritual retreat I spoke at. In a nutshell, she said the fog she’d been operating in because of all the self limiting BS that had been playing in her head for most of her adult life had lifted; she was able to see and feel what really mattered, that she was in fact a bad-ass in a great way and it was now time for her to get busy embracing it. She left the retreat with a new sense of focus, determination, and love for all things Yvonne. However, she got home to find crap hitting the fan – there were major shakeups at work that included possible layoffs, she was being audited by the state of California (that in itself is snot-inducing), her homes heating and AC system had died, and her teenage daughter was flunking out of school – seriously, a true story! It clearly seemed like she had bigger fish to fry; she couldn’t see how her new found “lightness and love” where going to get her through all these challenges.
Now this is where breakthroughs get sticky; many aspects of the experience may feel unpleasant, both pre and post the breakthrough. Beforehand, you’re usually incredibly stuck, just not able to move forward and not seeing any way around or out - and that makes sense because if you actually did have a way out, there’d be no incentive, no real pressure strong enough for you to get your butt in gear and actually change. Then, after the initial high of the breakthrough, the work required to sustain it - in the face of layoffs, HVAC system failures, and audits - can totally feel unreasonable and insurmountable. "But you know what?" Yvonne said during one of our sessions. "Those things were hard, but they weren't more important than what I had learned at that retreat." Amen Sister!! Yvonne’s been able to continue living that ‘breakthrough life’ but only because she’s deliberately and intentionally focusing and building on it, with me helping her create the following strategies to do so. She journals and meditates about her experience. She discusses it with friends and uses books and YouTube videos that remind her and keep her in that space. As various problems popped up and threatened to pull her back into that old fear-based BS, Yvonne tackles them in calm, slow, and thoughtful ways. That's the key to sustaining a new insight: eliminating whatever threatens to re-cloud your vision. Hold on tight to your breakthroughs Sisters, because once you have the awareness… trust me when I say that it becomes almost impossible to go back into the darkness. So a consistent and deliberate routine of reminding is one of the best and simplest ways to start. Remind yourself, again and again, of your new insights, until you're literally ‘re-minded’. Your thoughts will change. Your moods will change. Your life will change. And not because your situations have changed, but because you’re seeing things with new eyes. This is how you LIVE your breakthroughs! Be well Sis 💜