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Winter Is a Time to Go Inward

December marks the beginning of winter. The light wanes here in the Northern Hemisphere, and cooler temperatures dominate the day.

It is a time of deep silence and retreat, when Nature stops, rests and gathers strength and wisdom for the coming burst of new life in the spring. In the silence of winter, is the opportunity to discover your own essence, deep in your heart.

Many years ago in my spiritual guidance training, we learned that our soul lives in our deep heart—the area of our heart that is beyond our ego and everyday experience. It is the deep heart, where our soul lives, that whispers to us guidance on how to live our most fulfilling life, far beyond what our minds can imagine.

Each winter, Nature calls us to stop, go within, and reconnect with the wisdom of our own heart. It is there that our soul can share with us what we long to hear—the way to live a truly glorious life that allows us to bring out our full potential and live our deepest purpose.

Our soul follows the same seasonal rhythms as Nature. It goes through a rebirth just like most of the natural world. For our soul, winter is a time of letting go, clearing out all that has been from the previous seasons, and creating space for what wishes to be birthed in the coming year. If we take the time to go deeply within and cultivate inner silence, we will start to hear what our soul longs to create in the coming year.

The challenge that many of us face in December is the pull of many outward demands on our time: attending holiday gatherings, completing end-of-year work activities, entertaining guests, shopping for gifts, spending time with our families and friends. These demands can put us in direct conflict with the soul’s call to go inward. Very few of us can take the time to completely step out of our lives and turn deeply inward to commune with our soul.

However, there is a beautiful practice that stems from Advent that I am offering as a process to support your soul through this hectic and potentially challenging time. It has four steps, which you can do at your own pace, but ideally should be spaced out a few days apart to allow time to distill the learning from each step. If you are able to take a few days between Christmas and New Year’s, this is a wonderful activity to do in retreat during that time.

Harvest the seeds of the life you have lived

Take time to reflect on the past year and journal the answers to these questions. What were your most important events and learnings? How did those events influence and change you? What are the learnings you will take forward into the New Year?

Create space for the new life

Go through the different areas of your life and clean out everything that no longer has life or connection for you. You can do this literally by cleaning out your closets, desk drawers, files and cabinets. Unless you make space for a new life, there will be no room for something new to be birthed.

Practice tuning into your deep heart—your soul

The birthing process takes time; it doesn’t happen overnight. Cultivate a daily practice of meditation, spending time in Nature, tuning in—whatever allows you to be in the silent space within where you can hear the whisperings of your soul. Practice patience.

Sort out what is essential versus what is not

Evaluate all you are doing and identify what you can let go of. Simplify your life so that you make more time and space to support your inner process. Creation is a two-stage process. It occurs first internally before it occurs externally. The more you can support what is unfolding internally, the more you will start to see it occurring externally without effort. You will be attracting what is needed to support your soul’s unfoldment.

I encourage you to try this process in the month of December and see how it impacts your life. In a time when there is so much pressure to “do,” the process will help you “be.” Being is a much more joyous experience and will help you attract what you need to live a fulfilling soul-directed life.

This winter season, I invite you to dive deep and connect with your soul so you can birth a more fulfilling life in 2019.

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The Impact of Conditioning: How You Are Limiting Your Possibilities

Likely most of you have seen this picture at some point. It’s been around for many years. I used it 20 years ago when I taught Stephen Covey’s landmark personal effectiveness workshop, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

We would divide the workshop participants into two groups. One half would close their eyes, and we would briefly show the other half a similar drawing but was clearly an old lady with a scarf on her head. Then we would switch and have the other half briefly see a similar line drawing but was clearly a young lady wearing a necklace. We then had the entire group see this picture and asked them what they saw.

Almost unanimously those that had been shown either the young or old lady would immediately see the same lady in this picture. Many really struggled to see the opposite lady. We would even have to trace with our pointer the outline of the other lady to help their minds grasp the alternative reality in the picture. It was fascinating to see how easily everyone was “conditioned” to see a specific image!

This simple yet powerful exercise demonstrated how we see only what we are conditioned to see! True to Covey’s words,

“We see the world as we are, not as it is.”

The latest neuroscience research confirms this disturbing reality as it has discovered that as much as 80% of our behaviors are driven by our unconscious conditioning. This unconscious conditioning dramatically shapes our reality and therefore greatly influences our response to that “reality.” What we see in the world and how we respond depends on whether we have been conditioned to see either “the old lady” or “the young lady.”

But the truth is both the old lady and the young lady exist. Both “realities” exist, illuminating that there are many ways to see the world—to see reality. This simple exercise of how unconscious conditioning limits a person’s ability to see alternative perspectives begs the questions…

What are you not seeing in your life?

What opportunities are you missing?

What creative solutions are blind to you?

What do you perceive about your relationships that are shaped by your conditioning from earlier experiences?

What if the solutions to your challenges were right in front of you but you couldn’t see them?

With a limited perspective of reality, you hinder your ability to find creative solutions, see opportunities, respond to situations, and make truly conscious choices.

You are victim to your unconscious conditioning, reacting to situations in the same way over and over again, missing alternative perspectives that could potentially give you insight to a more creative, fulfilling and successful outcome…and life!

So how do you release your conditioning in order to expand your perception and interpretation of reality?

It starts with awareness.

The more you can stand apart from your thoughts, feelings and judgments, the more you can observe and be at choice. This takes practice and patience. Your conditioning has been functioning automatically for many years, and it will take time to “decondition” yourself. A regular meditation practice is incredibly helpful to cultivate this ability. If you don’t have one, you can start by sitting and focusing on your breath for 5 minutes each morning. This is an easy practice that can yield a huge return.

Be curious about a perspective that is different than yours.

If you “see the old lady” and someone else “sees the young lady,” be excited and inquisitive! Seek to really understand their perspective. This practice can foster a genuine curiosity in life—the key to eliminating judgment and evaluation which lock you into a limited perspective. Practice makes permanent; so the more you can seek first to understand instead of sharing your perspective, the more you will open yourself to other “realities.” You’ll start to cultivate the ability to see both the old lady and the young lady…and who knows what else?

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What’s Love Got to Do With It?

It’s the summer of 1986. I’m standing in the living room of my newly inhabited apartment. I have just started my job as a computer scientist after graduating with my BS in Mathematics. Getting my degree and landing this job is the fulfillment of a huge goal that took me six years of working while going to night school. I should be delightfully happy, yet inside I feel something missing.

I lift my hands in the air, look to the heavens and pray, “God, please show me unconditional love.”

In meditation this morning, this prayer from 30 years ago flooded my awareness, giving rise to a reflection of my life journey. Little did I know back then how that simple, innocent prayer would launch my life into an amazing series of profound experiences to teach me unconditional love.

What does it mean to love unconditionally? So much of my own experience of love has been conditional. If I’m a good girl, I will be praised or get a special treat. If I get “As” in school, I’ll get money. If I am like my sisters, I’ll win my mother’s acceptance. If I dress or look a certain way, I’ll be liked. If I behave like what the preacher says, I’ll get into heaven. If I be the wife you want, you’ll love me.

What I took away from each of these experiences is that I am only lovable if I am a certain way, and to me that meant who I am at my core is not acceptable or lovable.

I’ve had numerous relationships over my life, yet still 30 years after my prayer, I find myself without a life partner. This morning’s reflection of these past 30 years revealed two painful truths. I don’t fully love and accept myself. I’ve done a mountain of personal work, and yet, still I find places where my harsh inner critic keeps me from fully embracing my unique self. This pattern of self-criticism reinforces my belief that I’m not good enough to be loved.

The other, even more painful realization, is that my unwillingness to face and break through the pain of not believing I’m lovable has kept me from having the depth of relationship I truly desire—one that allows me to open my heart to its most vulnerable and authentic depth of honesty about who I am.

Half-jokingly I’ve always said, “If you truly knew who I was, you’d run screaming.” On some subtle level, I was saying this to prepare myself for my partner—at some point in the relationship—to bolt. However, there is a harsh self-truth in that statement. I don’t unconditionally love myself. My heart remains guarded and my “acceptance system” filters and manipulates my behavior to avoid the pain of not being good enough. It keeps me in fear of losing the conditional love I believe the other person has for me. It sabotages my relationships.

The truth is, it’s what we believe about ourselves and about our partner that keeps us trapped in this torturous conditional love cycle. And quite likely, the pattern of accepting conditional love is playing out in our partner as well. It becomes an unconscious pact—if you accept and love me, I’ll accept and love you. This keeps us trapped in conditional love that establishes lovability only from the other in relationship. That inevitably sets us up for disappointment and manipulating behavior, never experiencing the deep acceptance we so long for.

One of my great teachers, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, said, “All love is directed towards the Self.” When I first heard that, my insides bristled as that sounded so selfish and narcissistic, but upon reflection this morning, I think I finally get it. It is the unconditional love of myself—the brilliant parts and the wounded parts—that sets me free to express who I truly am in the world, allows me to unconditionally love others, and opens the door to the depth of love and joy in relationship and in life that I so deeply long for.

It’s a journey to love myself—unconditionally.

Fortunately, there is a way to accelerate the journey to unconditional love so it doesn’t take 30 years of painful experiences. The revolutionary Human Design System reveals who we truly are—our authentic self before conditioning took over and changed our self-perception. When I discovered my Human Design, it acknowledged what I had always known about myself, but resisted because I believed was unacceptable. I began to embrace the amazingly unique being that I am and to unravel the conditional love I adopted. As a certified Human Design Practitioner, I now help others in their journeys to unconditionally love themselves, just as they uniquely are.