Give Transformation Time

Human beings are like steamships, full of features, experiences and very slow to turn. While there may be plenty of epiphanies, breakthroughs and transformations, there are a couple things that are often forgotten in the mix on the way to this thing called ‘having a better life.’

The first thing is integration and assimilation.

Let’s say we’ve attended some workshop, had a big breakthrough and now our life is going to be better. Or so says the euphoria of the moment and sometimes the workshop leader themselves. Well, that may be true, but just imagine trying to turn your personal steamship quickly. It’s filled with the past tenants of ‘you’ in various staterooms. Habits and patterns of passing through your life. Connections both large and little to the past and imaginations and projections of a future based in where you have been.

To assume that just because you’ve experienced a magical moment in an event now your entire life is going to just jump to the endpoint of everything being brilliant is naïve. It doesn’t recognize what has been woven into the fabric of you that will need to be unraveled to some degree in order for the new weave to have space let alone take over.

So without the context of time one can feel like the breakthrough didn’t happen or the magic was false. Or even worse that somehow you yourself are flawed and no matter what you do you’re doomed to remain the same.

Nope, it just takes time. Your cells don’t replenish and become new, healthy ones overnight, just because you decided to cut out sugar over the weekend. It takes time to have your system adjust, acclimatize to the new you. It takes more time for you to become habituated to living in your new world.

If you allow yourself this time, you can more acutely tune in to the nuances and shadings of events and circumstances that come in contact with the new you and begin to ‘live into’ your new life. Give yourself a frickin break. You’ve shifted planets. You can’t reasonably expect to be masterful in breathing the new air, finding the different food available and mastering the gravity that affects your movement right after you’ve just landed.

I can almost guarantee that if you allow things to grow in their own time after your transformation, you’ll have a much better time of it.

Posted by Michael Stratford in On Mastery.

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