The Flux of Things

It can be useful to see inner work as a continuous process unfolding in cycles. I find it helpful to envisage the movement of change as a spiral. As you engage in processes that grow your awareness and sense of self, you can see this as the widening out of the spiral.

Inner work is an intensive process, and at times you might feel like you're revisiting the same bend of the spiral, but the nature of the spiral is that it's ‘ever-expanding outwards’ (Kai Cheng Thom). Even degrees away from where you were is movement; it may feel slow, but a culmination of small shifts is closer to how things change their form.

Change is just something made different from what it is, which I view as an organic happening, second to second. It’s not this “one big thing” that happens if we “do the work”. It’s more of a lawless motion of how things move and respond, a constant happening beneath the surface of our awareness.  

It’s this awareness piece, rather than the change itself, that I see as integral to inner work. It’s the process of noticing how something is different all the time – from how we digest a morsel of food that coverts to energy; to how we think, respond or act; to an emotional instance that peaks and falls; to a flight response that rests back into calm; to thoughts that ease after a cycle of rumination; to a bracing that loosens; to an impulse that becomes action; to a fidget that helps release tension, to the metabolising of old wounds etc. Placing our awareness on the flux of things can signal to our fearful parts that movement is possible.   

Rotatio Tarot Card (The Wild Unknown Alchemy Deck, Kim Krans).

The Butterfly of Resistance

During the process of unearthing issues, exploring unconscious material, and building a deeper awareness of your patterns, a cycle of ambivalence can emerge.  These conflicting feelings and thoughts about what you come to know about yourself can feel both hopeful and confronting. This is when resistance can kick in.  Resistance is a natural part of the change process, as you retreat to the security of old patterns.

‘Resistance turns out to be necessary to awakening and strengthening the imaginal cells that become the butterfly. In this sense, our inner resistance is not wrong; it’s something that we misunderstand, because each step forward, we will have cells that resist transformation. Resistance is natural to the parts of us that are afraid of a transformation that will lead from crawling on a branch to flying in the air’ (Michael Meade).

The tension between your old way of being and the new comes with its own growing pains. But it's in this very tension that something is bubbling and bristling in a new direction.

For example, you practice speaking up for yourself in session, which, for the first time, elicits a spark of agency, but it shrinks back into a familiar sense of guilt when you return to your everyday context. An old pattern of self-silencing may emerge, but maybe something in you feels different now because you've spoken up. We can't underestimate the significance of your mouth shaping around words you have never spoken, or your chest opening as your head lifts in a knowing that you have the right to take up space. We can pretend like it didn’t happen, but the sense of it can’t be taken back. Our work together welcomes ambivalence and resistance as dynamic forces you can learn and grow with.