Pointing people to the power of their wellbeing
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
Time and time again we see the impact of people realising for themselves their own capacity to rise to the occasion, to handle things without stress and to be at their best more often. They are freed from the obligation of their unhelpful habits and instead get to experience their own, natural state of wellbeing and innate intelligence, which is otherwise clouded by those habits. When they see their wellbeing as an internal process, not conditional on external events they have more freedom to navigate their circumstances, whatever they are.
Knowing this is on offer for everyone, without fail, is a powerful thing. But it’s not always easy to point them to it.
In fact, our own unhelpful habits of needing to get the words right, or to ‘help’ others, can cloud our own wisdom when it comes to pointing people to it.
The people we work with frequently say, “I wish my 18 year old self had known this,” or “This would really help my kids/partner/colleague” when they start seeing how much more their minds have to offer. But they get tongue-tied when they start trying to explain it, trying to get the words right instead of transmitting the essence of what they’ve seen for themselves. Often people get caught up in worrying whether the other person will ‘get it’ and what they will think.
They forget the magical and invisible part of the process of understanding, that the capacity to have a realisation is universal and possible in any moment, and that these realisations are the real building block of how we learn. A realisation transforms how we experience the world, it naturally moves our thinking along, and as our thinking changes so does our behaviour.
So in order for people to see this more clearly, we want them to have their own realisations, and their system will do the rest.
Photo courtesy of Ged Welch
Age, class, cultural background and education play no part in our capacity to have realisations, which is why the impact of this understanding is universal. However the way that we point people so that they have a realisation will differ from person to person and moment to moment.
What we’re pointing to something that is really simple, but our conditioning makes it hard to see the simplicity. We use words, diagrams, metaphors and the odd model in order to signpost people so that they look where we are pointing, but the power isn’t in the words or the diagrams, the power is in the other person looking and having an insight for themselves. And our words and diagrams are just one way that we’ve found useful.