The view provides perspective...
- Ginger Bliss
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
This morning, I flew to Florida and as the captain announced he was beginning our descent, I looked out the window and saw this beautiful view. And I began to cry, both happy and sad tears.
The happy tears were from reflecting on seven years ago when I sat for the first time in the window seat on a flight as I embarked on my initial solo pleasure trip. It was something I had put on the bucket list I created around my 50th birthday. I had decided it would be the first thing I would mark off the list, so I went ahead at that time and booked the flight and hotel hoping that would ensure I would follow through.
I had flown by myself for business a few times but hadn’t ever considered going anywhere by myself for pleasure. Using the words solo and pleasure together seemed like an oxymoron to me as there’d be nothing pleasurable about going anywhere by myself. I could always do hard things when I had to for work or other people, but not just for me. Simply the thought of getting on a plane created significant anxiety, even though at the time I wouldn’t have labeled it as that. I wouldn’t have wanted to admit that I felt anxiety about anything. Before this bucket list trip, though, I had worked with Ginger Rothhaas, my at-the-time new self-compassion coach, for several weeks in order to make the trip a reality.
As I looked at this beautiful view today and thought back to looking out the window on that trip, I realized not only how much more comfortable I was looking out the window of a plane today, but, even more importantly, how much my view of myself had changed since then.
Sitting by the window that first time I was extremely nervous, but upon landing I also felt very proud of myself for having done it. And by the return flight I was already even more comfortable because I had done other hard things and had accomplished additional goals. My coach told me that courage is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. And that trip was a perfect example of how true that statement is. In my memoir, Brave Enough To Be Bliss, I provide all the details of that experience, but this brief overview helps set the stage for the sad tears.
In the years since then that I’ve been learning about myself and growing into the person I am today, likely the only things that remain relatively the same about me are my heart and soul. While I have enhanced the connection with each of those, they were the only two that didn’t need a complete overhaul. The unhealed pain of my past had wrecked my brain, so most of the work I’ve had to do has centered around learning tools and strategies to keep my brain from hijacking my entire life and keeping me in the state of misery I’d been in for more than five decades.
I recently made the determination that if I were to publish my memoir again, I would publish it into about three smaller books and I would place Chapter 23 of final section at the front of the book. There isn’t anything wrong with where it’s placed, it’s just that I now see how others could have trouble slogging through the pain at the beginning not knowing the outcome. It is a real and raw account of my life, so let me just say, it isn’t necessarily uplifting in the first few sections. I have to set the stage for how my mind worked then in order for readers to understand the baseline I was operating from to then see how it played into the rest of my life. For anyone without background knowledge of my life before and after, I could see how the book might begin a tad bit depressing and concerning.
Realizing all of that recently and then looking out the window today made me think of my clients, friends and family members who so fear doing the work on their own healing and self-development because of fear. I understand it, I can relate to it having done the same thing for decades but from the view I have now, I can easily see how much their relationships are negatively impacted, how often they self-sabotage the things they say they truly want in their lives, and how detrimental they are to their own success personally and professionally. And so today, that is why I shed the sad tears.
Fear is brutal. It lives in the brain and wreaks havoc on a life without us even being aware we are the ones creating our own misery. The brain’s primary job is to keep a human safe, so it does that based on past experiences and when those past experiences have included pain, the brain works overtime trying to ensure there’s no more pain in the future. The problem is that the brain doesn’t realize when we're no longer actually in the danger we were during the past experience, and the same level of protection is no longer needed. Healing requires facing the pain and feeling the pain so we're able to rewire the brain where it has a set of new instructions and doesn’t just keep directing the same past behaviors that existed to help keep us safe.
I can see it as clearly as those fluffy clouds in the beautiful sky that sit high above the green trees and parcels of land below. But that’s simply because of my perspective, sitting high enough above the work of the past seven years where my perspective is so much different than someone who is just beginning the journey. I can see how the story turns out. Life…is…hard, but it will never be THAT hard again for me. No matter what challenges arise in my future, I know nothing will be as hard as my past because I’ve changed the way my brain works so it’s not stuck in a loop trying to protect me from people and situations I no longer need protection from.
I’m in the beginning stages of developing an audiobook/podcast hybrid that you’ll be reading more about in the next month, but the first podcast I created was with Ginger Rothhaas and I wanted to share this video excerpt with you to provide encouragement and remind you that you are not alone regardless of your pain.
Life is short. Please don’t leave it with less love given and received because you haven’t healed from past pain. If you need help seeing what could be limiting you and your life since you’re used to looking at yourself from a limited viewpoint, reach out to me or someone else who can help you see you from a different perspective. Just don’t allow fear to keep you from loving or being loved because, my friends, love is what makes this hard life worth living.
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