“Get the inside right. The outside will fall into place.”
—Eckhart Tolle

A client wrote me and from her email, it was clear that she was in a desperate place. She wants a new career – the current one is making her very unhappy. It’s unfulfilling and boring, and she feels desperate to do something else with her life. There’s a sense of urgency there. She wants it as soon as possible – yesterday would be good!

I understand that so well, and I guess you might have been there too with difficulties in your own life. 

A personal example

I remember so clearly a difficult day just soon after I started my healing practice 16 years ago. I had resigned from my work as a computer programmer and was earning virtually no income with my practice yet. I was so frustrated because I had all these new healing tools and skills… and nowhere to use it.

All my talents love supporting others – so to have no clients, no-one to support, was awful. Our talents are always looking for a place to express and give. I felt worthless, and like the only way I could demonstrate my value as a person, would be to have clients and use my talents.

On that particular day, I was feeling enormously frustrated and desperate. That feeling of desperation made me do something really strange. Desperation wants immediate results – have you noticed? There’s no patience there…

So I decided to get in my car, and go to a huge shopping centre closeby – and that I would not come back until I’ve acquired a new client. 

I think about it now and cringe with compassion. That's what desperation can make us do. Unrealistic, not thought-through behaviour. 

I had no plan of ‘how’ I was going to meet or get this new client. I sort of believed that if I’m meant to do this healing work, and help people, magically a client would reveal themselves to me somewhere in the shopping centre. I’d strike up a conversation with someone who would tell me that they had a health challenge – it could be the waiter who served me coffee, or the person behind the till, or a person walking along the shops… In my desperate mind, anything could happen and I’d walk away with a possible appointment. Someone I could help, to relieve this desperate feeling I was carrying.

Did it work out that way?

As you can most likely guess, nothing of the sort happened.

I didn’t have a plan. I was too shy to talk about my work, desperation was written all over my energy, and I had too many other emotional blocks in the way. Plus, people in shopping centres aren't there looking for healing! A completley inappropriate place to go with that intention. I went home feeling a bit defeated, slightly less desperate and with an even lower energy than before.

Here’s the thing:

Desperation for quick results is usually not a great energetic place to create a good outcome from. I believe worthwhile success is the result of a process. And this process might take longer than we ideally want it to take.

Our mind, our ego, the human part of us (whatever you want to call it) – can only see so far. It doesn’t see the bigger picture. It wants things, because we believe those things will take us out of our current emotional state and make us happy.

Those ‘wants’ don’t necessarily come from the higher parts of us. They sometimes come from a very human place like “I don’t feel valuable right now” or “I don’t have value unless I help someone else” or “I don’t feel valued where I am now”.

Jumping to the next job is not going to solve this issue. 

It will make it go away for a while, yes.

The same principle applies when you’re in a relationship, and something doesn’t work out there and you go straight on to the next one. If you hop from relationship to relationship in the search for the ‘perfect partner’ –  you’re missing the gold inside yourself.

The gold is the inner work. The work talked about by the quote from Eckhart Tolle above. 

Here's an uncomfortable truth. 

We all have many limiting beliefs or thoughts. I recently heard Joe Dispenza explain that “our personality creates our personal reality.” (You can find many of his talks and interviews on GaiaTV.com).

If we don’t do the inner work, we keep reliving the same life, the same problems and challenges… because our personality, beliefs and thoughts are still the same. We behave according to the beliefs and thoughts we have and think.

What exacly is the ‘Inner work’ I’m talking about?

It’s the work of investigating our thoughts, our thought process, our beliefs. Our emotional work. Becoming aware of what we think and feel, how we think. Are those thoughts and beliefs even true, or just assumptions we made a long time ago? 

Or, are they fake news? A client and I laughed a while ago when we realised that our beliefs about ourselves and the world might be nothing but a compilation of fake news! Yet, we live by it. 

Inner work is gently bringing awareness to how we create our personal reality by the way we keep recreating thoughts and feelings in the same predictable way. Over and over – with very little awareness of our patterns. And those patterns and limitations were usually created in moments when we felt helpless, alone, and didn't know how to react.  

Those moments  did not have to be 'big' or life-threatening. They could be as small as the look on a mom's face when we were 6 years old, or the tone of voice a teacher used. Clients are often surprised at how something so seeminly small could have lead to their beliefs. 

Our personality and beliefs are fully formed and embedded by the age of 35 (read more about this in “Evolve your Brain” and “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” by Dr Joe Dispenza).

Unless we consciously choose to investigate our thoughts, feelings and behaviour – we will keep perpetuating the same thing, the same result, the same pattern… because those brain patterns have been formed, and the brain is made to use as little as possible energy by going on automatic pilot.

So our inner work is a combination of finding the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that currently limit us, and then making a conscious effort to change that.

It's a simple concept, but not always easy work. Change takes time, and can feel uncomfortable. Our embedded brain patterns will fight tooth and nail to keep doing the same thing, rather than have to spend a lot of energy to create new pathways in the brain and body.

There is a lot more to say here and I want to finish here for now.

Here’s the summary:

If our ‘outer reality’ is not the way we want it right now, we have to do the inner work.
The inner work takes time to produce different results.

We need a lot of kindness, compassion and patience on this journey.
Yet it’s a beautiful, empowering path to do the inner work – because anything can shift in our outer world when our inner world shifts. So many different possibilities open up.
If we try to shift our reality by jumping from thing to thing (and find our happiness that way), we’re going to be jumping for a long time.
The inner world is where it needs to shift first for long-term, permanent results.

How do we do the inner work?

In my experience, it’s very hard to see the woods for the trees in our inner world when we do this alone. We simply cannot be the mirror for ourselves. Because our thoughts, feelings and behaviour are so normal to us, we find it hard to think, feel or behave differently.

Working with another person who can gently challenge our thoughts, our beliefs, our assumptions, our normal way of doing things is one of the best ways to hold up a mirror. A coach, counsellor, mentor, therapist - a person who is not invested into "keeping you the same" because of their own baggage.

Friends and family often feel threatened when we change…. (bless them) because if we change, they might need to adapt…. And that’s not what they chose. Friends and family are not the best people to help us do the inner work.

Find someone you trust and feel comfortable with, to accompany you on this journey of the inner work. 

When our inner world shifts, many different options and possibilities can open up. Truly, miracles are possible from a different inner reality. 

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