You know theses posts and blogs, books and articles, on ‘How to Become Successful’? Are you aware of the myriad of reactions and feelings they trigger inside you as soon as you see even the title? Have a look and listen inside your body next time, because there are important hints as to why you’re even attracted to such titles, and why you have to keep reading them instead of writing them.
I remember reading the words below many years ago and feeling them resonate powerfully within me, but I had no idea why, or what to do about it…until later when I transformed those parts of me which believed deeply that I couldn't, and didn't deserve to be, successful.
Here are the words:
"My heart wasn't in it, you see, so I could only allow myself a limited amount of success. Every time it threatened to go beyond that, I'd turn down a great part or run away or get sick - I'd do something to wreck it. There was never a clear choice to really succeed." From 'One' by Richard Bach.
I had, from many viewpoint moments in my life, clearly made a bizarre choice to not succeed. But why? And how was this so, when my mind kept telling me I could be successful if I just kept seeing myself as thus and doing everything required to manifest it? My mind knew what to do, but something was stopping success from happening…
Well, this is how it was for me; I grew up being told two things, often simultaneously. “You are useless”, and “You must be very successful, for me”. I was confused. Like all human beings I had a goodly amount of the natural desire to achieve, to live, to discover and experience - my early school reports described me as being highly inquisitive and having loads of curiosity. But I was told way more often that I was ‘stupid’ and ‘useless’, and this I was gradually, not believing, but embodying.
What was happening inside me, deep in the very cells of me, were endless experiences of 'can't', and even 'mustn't. A stifling of the positive and a feeding of the negative. It was as if my cells were inadvertently being programmed for failure. This resulted in my body expecting, and even courting, failure each and every time I became curious or inquisitive about improving at anything. Trying to go out there into the field called success became ever more horrible due to the guaranteed discomfort of failure and subsequent familiar shame. They hurt, and they screw up life's dreams.
So, I did what many of us do; I had years and years of counseling. And I read every book on the subject of blame, shame, depression, anger, angst, and success which had ever been written. (By the way, see that? How can 'success' ever succeed in a sentence with such uneasy bedfellows?!) And then I went to workshops, trainings, and later surfed the web-waves about success on the internet. But, despite moments of surging excitement, or brief ‘successes’, nothing really changed.
You see, you can’t change your mind with your own mind. It just doesn’t work that way. In the same way, you can tell yourself you are not afraid of spiders, but if your body has a negative memory around spiders, your fear is embodied. And you can't tell yourself to be successful when every cell in your body tells you you won't be. Why? Because it’s not your mind which is afraid of spiders, it’s your body. It's not your mind which isn't strong enough to manifest success, it's your body's strong memories of all the times you were told you weren't good enough, or of when you failed, often spectacularly. We all fail at times, but failure is rarely held compassionately; instead with damaging ridicule.
Your body holds the memory of each and every experience you have ever had, including those with spiders or with failure. Your mind simply translates the triggered memory of those feelings into words with which to inform both you (thought) and the world (speech). Your mind can’t ‘feel grief’, but your body does. Try this? Next time you have an uncomfortable moment around an event, hear how your mind describes it - sadness, fear, anger - and then immediately go to your body and see where in it you feel it. Then ask yourself this, could you have known how you were feeling without your body’s signals? This is your body's re-feeling of the sensation it had at the time the discomfort was sown - maybe with a mocking by your class in junior school when you answered a question wrongly - which is informing you now of your mood or emotion to a similar event in adulthood.
Each time I wanted ‘success', stimulated by the very word, my body ‘told’ me I was useless through its re-expression of the old shame set up in childhood. My mind wasn’t able to tell my body things were different now, because it was my body which needed to experience it differently in order to have and express new sensory information. In Alexander work, teachers give students new experiences of movement in order for them to be able to change old and unhelpful movement patterns from within, because the same thing stands: we can’t change ourself with ourself; we are always going to do the familiar, the well-grooved, and our body just does what it’s always done until that way is transformed into a space where a new, more appropriate-for-now, way can begin.
But no one can give me the experience of ‘being successful’ - that is so personal, so subjective, so illusive, and the journey there an important part of my life. Even winning the lottery wouldn’t give me the bodily experience of my taking my own road to my own sense of success. So, how can this be done? How can I get to experience me as a success?
For me it happened thus: Twelve years ago I was introduced to a way of working in which, deeply and compassionately, I was able to witness my body - even the very cells of my body. Instead of the ‘just think differently’, I was allowed to acknowledge how the message ‘You’re useless’ had embedded itself within me. Instead of using my mind to tell myself that thought was stupid (!) for still thinking that and to think the opposite, as in affirmations, I was simply and safely companioned as I deeply acknowledged the pain of that early message. My companion (facilitator) often didn’t know what I was releasing, but release it I did. And I learned to ask my well-meaning mind to stay out of the process as I set my intention to shift whatever it was hidden in my body which was blocking the way to my being successful.
Oftentimes I might know where it was likely to come from and I would set the intention for the ‘inner button’ to dissolve. But mostly I never knew - or know, for the work is part of my life now - as I just asked that whatever needed to go, to leave me. I have been amazed at times at the flash of memory of an event long forgotten, and to which my witnessing mind says, “Wow! No wonder..!!”. But, importantly, in the space of no judgement, no interpretation of the memory, I sense a higher part of me touching that terror/shame/anger deep within my body, whereupon it simply transforms - like popping bubble-wrap. After the process it is likely that an event will happen which would have previously ‘pushed my button’, but instead there doesn’t seem to be a button any more and I experience responding quite differently to the stimulus, or even not responding at all.
As I go on transforming those buttons within my body which tell me I can never be successful, things are changing. My mind still loves to tell me I need the ‘success writings’, for I guess that makes the mind feel ‘important and clever’, but my body feels gentle, kind, and encouraging, reminding me that, yes, I can be more successful, but only when I have assisted it to release all the ‘stuff’ which is getting in the way of my natural gift, the one we all have: our human potential for success, whatever that is for each individual.
Successful people begin to be successful through the absence of all that which gets in the way of succeeding, and then they work hard at gaining mastery with their chosen subject. Unsuccessful people work incredibly hard all the time, yet the hard work is the stumbling and struggling ‘against the odds’ - the odds being all the old, cellular memories that can be roughly translated into ‘You can’t’ or ‘You wont’. Reading the success books just tells us to rail against those beliefs ever harder, but 'What we resist, persists', and success remains in the shadows. The Transformational Process, in which I qualified as a facilitator in 2009, smooths the path ahead towards success. And it paves my road to my success. Not the road suggested by another, down which so many of us struggle for years until we wake up to our own. For me, these JFDI ('just * do it') reasons are why so many highly successful people aren’t very happy; they are always waiting for the shoe to drop, to be found out to be the ‘less-than’ belief which their body still holds. Or because they can’t bear to stop and find they’re on the wrong horse heading for someone else’s success. This is a tough way to live.
Personally I go on working through my blocks, my unconscious agreements made when too young to know any other way - the agreements which have set up something like these: ‘I can’t, I wont, they can, not me. Not good enough. Not clever enough. Not qualified enough. Not nice enough. Not bold enough. Not clear enough. Lazy. Selfish. Just plain wrong through and through.’ Each time a layer of these clears, something happens which sees me move ever closer to that elusive thing called ‘success’.
And the funny thing? Success is becoming less 'out there' than an in ‘inside job’ - one which has less care and more joy. Less worry and more peace. It’s my success and not tied up with proving anything. It’s my sense of my self-worth in my beloved subject, not another’s. I can still wish to be the best I can be, but it’s the best Annie I can be, not me having to be better than everyone else.... And each time I sense care and worry, I take them to my self, to my quietly loving higher-self and let them express themselves itself until heard unconditionally. Then they leave my path and I can step forward with more ease. As this happens I sense I am re-writing the story of my life without my mind’s old rod-and-stick, punishment-type method, and instead with my heart’s self-kindness and self-belief version. I know which I prefer, and which method I desire to share with my clients and my students.
So, success is an inside job, a body job, not a mind job. Shift the blockages in the cells and things truly change. Oh! And when you do have moments of joyful success and achievement, please tell your mind to leave the room in order for your beautiful body to bathe in and embody the new sensation and all this success means to you, now. This delight in success isn't a mind job, it's an important body job! Let it feel it!
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