Acceptance & The Gift of Birds – Part 2

If I know – and I do – that others are doing the best they can and that is not only enough, but good, who am I to hold myself to a higher standard?

There is a strange and special alchemy about coaching, which is partly what makes it such a rewarding activity.  I almost always am coaching people in areas where I need to work myself, and the insights we discover can always be reflected back towards me – it’s one of the not so secret bonuses of being a coach.  Even when I don’t see it in the moment, upon reflection, the bonus is always there – and often blatantly obvious.

For those of us who continually work on ourselves, it is as if we are a series of Russian Nesting Dolls – we remove one layer and then at some point realize we have another layer of the same thing underneath.  Whether we ever get to the pure soul at the core is debatable, as is whether we really want to.

At any rate, the next day I had my normal weekly session with my coach (Spiritual Teacher #3 – ST#3), and in the hopes that she would somehow make sense of everything for me, and still eased from the flock of birds from the night before, I had had a calm and productive day.

As soon as we started talking, though, all the anguish and despair, all the frustration and confusion came surging back into my body.  I trust ST#3, and she sees me – there is no hiding anything from her, that I know of.  And I don’t want to hide – I want to be honest and see whatever there is to see, at least I think I do.  But something is clearly not right because my body is very cold and giving me strong signals of distress.

ST#3 is a loving and generous woodpecker.  She delicately pecks little holes where she thinks a delicious morsel may be hiding, but then, rather than pulling out the worms she uncovers and eating them herself, she leaves them for me to discover as they work their way out.  So at the end of our session I felt covered in little openings – but nothing was big enough for me to get my hands in.  Didn’t feel too good – actually, I felt pretty awful.

Towards the end of our session ST#3 had offered to hold the secret of what I wanted safe for me if I told her what it was, and I tried to feel what it might be, but couldn’t, and I was both angry and disappointed with myself for my failure.  Freezing cold, both head and heart iced up, I just wanted to get into bed, get warm, and hopefully wake up the next day feeling better – but I had a coaching call scheduled as coach.

As Abraham-Hicks teaches, all negative emotion is an indicator of distance between how the real you views a situation, and how you think you perceive it.  The real me, the greater me, the source of me, the soul of me – however you want to phrase it – does not judge and criticize:  the real me only loves.  I was clearly out of alignment with myself, but too miserable to be able to see even that.

What I did know – absolutely – was that the kind of anguish I was feeling could be a very productive state, and would move me forward, especially if I would accept it sooner rather than later.  So I worked on breathing deeply, and conjuring up good memories, like all the birds I had been seeing, and all the other gifts of moments of beauty I had experienced – especially since leaving the convent – and I began to feel like a very fortunate creature.

As I defrosted, I finally put it together that I had just been given another lesson in acceptance, and – even better – that I had only taken three days to process this one instead of the two weeks it took after coming out of the convent.

It was later, during the coaching session with a client I adore, that all the gifts finally clicked into place.

My client was excited about lots of changes that will be happening soon in her life, and she is eager for them to happen.  We talked about her amazing growth and the benefits she has experienced while being where she is now: in a place where relationships with others have not been very satisfying, her most important relationship – with herself – has become more intimate, more loving, and more committed – pretty cool!

My client has a clear vision of where she wants to go, and it is one of the things I admire about her.  She is noticing signs of her new direction everywhere, and enjoying their manifestation as a clear indicator of her movement ahead.   We discussed her keeping a written record of the synchronicities and indicators she is seeing – both as a source of future pleasure for her, and as a way to ramp up the flow of her positive vibration and keep her in alignment – and I shared that I wasn’t seeing signs of a particular direction, but that I was receiving moments of incredible beauty in unexpected places, as well as clear signals that it would benefit me to concentrate on acceptance.

As I described how a moment of sun filtered through the dust on a glass figurine was exquisite in a way that stopped time, and how a spider had managed to create a spectacular web anchored between the side-view mirror and passenger door of my car – despite an hour of traveling at highway speeds, and then started explaining the birds, everything finally came together in a magnificent convoluted coaching bonus.