A client and I have spent a month or so establishing a deep, strong connection to her Inner Being. She’s got it down: she can tap in any time throughout the day when she’s on her own, in her own space, at her own pace.

“But I lose it the second I get out around people!” she said.

I want to share my response here, because I never hear this talked about.

What we’re doing here? It’s training.

If you wanted to be physically fit, you’d create a training schedule of sorts, and you’d challenge yourself daily– that’s how you become fit: through expanding your capacity, in a variety of situations. The more variety, the more ways you challenge your body within it’s SAFE expansion range, the more physically fit and capable you become.

It’s easy to think about with the physical body (I say this as a bit of a jock who loves movement) and so we’ll start there by building a picture:

There are different kinds of physical training.

-There are gym bros at the gym who do a lot of bicep and shoulder workouts. They look very muscular. Sometimes people become so focused on LOOKING fit and muscular in one area that they neglect another. Or, perhaps a person focuses so hard on building muscles and looking ‘good’ that they can flex well but can’t even touch their toes. Ask them to run a mile and they can’t. Ask them to step into a situation that is outside their comfort zone, and they can’t adapt to it. They’re really good at shoulder day though.

I compare this to people who are great at let’s say, meditation. Or they have a spiritual practice that looks good within a contained, controlled environment. This is the equivalent of moving to a hut on top of a mountain somewhere, ingesting only pristine food, only having to interact with people who support you in some way or another, but most of the time getting to meditate all day and be one with The Universe. Yeah, you’re connected. But what happens when you have to step out of that environment? Your entire practice falls apart, the connection disappears, and often it simply reinforces the idea that you need to be alone in your hut.

-Then there’s the opposite. Let’s say someone who doesn’t really work out very much at all, and decides they want to be fit. So they put on shoes and run 5 miles. Get injured pretty quickly. Hate every moment of it because it’s like torture. Quit. Spiritually, this would be the equivalent of not establishing a Connection to your inner being, then flinging yourself so far outside your comfort zone in life, then spending your life in emotional recoil, feeling tossed about by the whims of the universe. This is trying to challenge yourself and build spiritual and emotional resilience, without having a grounded approach to it. Thinking ‘I should be able to handle that’ or ‘other people do that so I should be able to too’, then throwing yourself into something that’s actually too much for your nervous system. Then comes a recoil: feeling bad, shitty, or broken afterwards. These things aren't true, of course, but it's an easy to believe perspective when you've set yourself up with such high expectations and no actual baseline to expand from.

Both of these approaches might feel good, but in terms of efficacy, they kind of suck.

There’s a third way. It’s the way I approach this work, with myself and with my clients.

This is where the meat of it is. This is the actual TRAINING.

-Let’s say you want to become an all-around physically capable person. You’d establish a baseline first– learn to move in certain ways.

Let’s say you want to build a baseline of decent mobility, strength, cardiovascular fitness. Once you’ve got that baseline, then you can start to stretch yourself: try new things. Try new ways of moving. Try new ways of approaching things. Try throwing yourself off-balance a bit, or learning new skills, or challenging the way you do things. If you’re learning to trail-run, you’d do a little more each day, pushing your cardiovascular capacity just enough that your body can adapt, but not so much that it injures you. You want to be panting but not dead. Feeling the burn but not tearing anything. This approach is actually scientific, and grounded: you expand your capacity from a stable baseline, stretching yourself in different areas, actually creating lasting change.

Spiritually, in terms of connection, we do the same thing. It’s not as sexy, because it’s slow and methodical. But it’s effective: it actually increases your spiritual resilience, capacity, and fluidity. It doesn’t give you the rush that running 5 miles on the first try would give you. But it doesn’t injure you either, and it doesn’t leave you needing to micromanage your environment to remain in a state of connection.

It’s the middle path, where you establish connection, and then slowly, steadily, expand your capacity, by doing the things that challenge your connection on purpose!

My client?

I congratulated her on finding a new edge.

Her new training zone is to get into connection, and then go and socialize. To expand her capacity bit by bit, day by day, just as if she were learning to trail run.

This is how I do it too– daily small steps, turning out into the world. An ongoing dance of expansion, while remaining connected. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It doesn’t have to be a hut on top of a hill with no human connection. You don’t have to avoid all the things that pull you outside yourself. Life is supposed to be rich! Full of vibrancy, colour, fluidity, love, connection, wildness! All of this can coexist with a state of deep connection to self and spirit, and the heart space. You can be connected in nature. Connected at a party. Connected on a treadmill. Connected in line at the DMV. Connected in a long immigration line at an airport.

There’s no limit to the ways in which you can expand your capacity to stay in a state of connection, when you start seeing it as something you train, rather than something you should just automatically be good at.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. And once you’ve started to taste how magical it can be, you probably won’t either :).

Big hugs,

Rebecca

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ps. I have sent out all the Plump Potion pre-orders and have 10 jars leftover. Do you want some? Here’s the link. I’ll ship them out tomorrow. 3 jars of Choco too.

pps. I have ONE spot for 1:1 private mentorship opening up on July 1st. Is it yours? Hit respond to find out more.

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