OK, this is a big one.....those of you who read my first entry will know why straight away, but for those of you who haven't yet, my Dad died nearly four years ago, so getting a message from him last night was a very major deal for me!!!!!
So, now I'll explain how I came to get the message.....stay with me, hopefully it will all make sense by the time I get to the end.....
Here goes...... Last night I went for my final follow up strategy meeting with my Holisitc Horses gang as the conclusion to Part One of the confidence course I'm on. Lisa introduced us to a new confidence building technique called the Time Line. In short, we had to think of a quality that we wanted to have more of in our future with regards riding. I chose self belief, as my fear is subsiding and my confidence is increasing, but there is still something missing that I need to help me to achieve my goal of riding out on my own, and I think it is self belief. Everyone else is telling me that I can do it, my horse is showing me that she can do it with me, and so I just need that final 'push'.
Lisa told us to imagine our life as laid out on the floor in a line and decide where we are on that line (the present). She then asked us to backtrack to a time when we had the quality we wanted more of. She asked us to fully associate into that time and then to continue to go back along the line and gather up three or four experiences and associate into each one. By associate Lisa means to re-live the moment, remember the people who were there, how we felt, what it looked like, what the colours were, what sounds we could hear, what noises and voices there were, smells etc.
We then had to step off the time line, go back to the beginning, get back on and walk slowly along the line pausing at each experience, associating each experience, until reaching the present.
We then had to get off, go back to the past, and walk along the time line a little quicker this time.
We then had to repeat the last line but then continue a few steps into the future, imagining a time when we had more of that quality, and turn and pass back a message to the current us.
We then had to step off the time line and get back on into the present, and receive the message from the future us.
OK, a lot to read through I know, but if I didn't explain this all to you then I think you wouldn't fully understand what I want to try and record about what happened.
So, I got to the bit about thinking of past experiences in my life when I had high self belief. The first experience I thought of was when my Dad died, and I selected a very personal reading for his funeral and magaged to read it out, 6 mths pregnant, at his funeral. I was so proud of myself for being able to do and it felt like a big leap forward in my life in terms of realising my inner strength and higher self.... I was determined to do it for Dad and he kept telling me that I would be able to do it and so I believed I would. The second expereince was the day I married my lovely husband. There's nothing quite like someone saying they want to spend the rest of their life with you to boost your self belief. I visualised my husband grinning from ear to ear, and then saw a picture I see regularly in my mind, my Dad's face just before we walked up the aisle, looking at me so lovingly and telling me I'd made it! The experience before that was when I had my first big promotion at work and was given a huge pay rise and a sports car, and ringing Dad to tell him and him being over the moon and saying how delighted he was but how he wasn't at all surprised as he always knew I would be successful, and the final experience I went back to was passing the entrance exam into Oxford High School, and Mum and Dad coming in to my prep school to give me the news as they were too excited to wait until I got home, and them both whooping and cheering and cuddling me and telling me that I could do it.
Well, you might be able to predict the realisation that hit me once I'd associated all of these experiences. You guessed it, it struck me right between the eyes, there and then, that when he was alive my Dad had been my champion. My Mum is too, very much so, but she is also a worrier like me, and sometimes that feeds my doubt. But it dawned on me that the giver of a huge amount of my self belief throughout my life had been my Dad. And so I completely broke down, because how could I step into the future, having acquired more self belief, to pass it back to the present me, when I didn't know where to get it from, as my source of self belief had died??????.........
So, how did I work through this? Lisa asked me if I could imagine what my Dad would say to me if he were alive, but the pain of imagining this was physically taking hold through my body, because thinking about what Dad would say to me if he was alive was something I had stopped allowing myself to do. I think this is because my way of trying to come to terms with his death was to tell myself to not go down that road, to accept that he was dead and that I would never see him again, and to try and get on with my life.
So, what Lisa then suggest I do was to think of those times in the past, during my moments of high self-belief, and just remember the words he would have said to me.
We left it at that for the evening. I got a tissue, and was very quickly chatting to others in the group. I started to feel lighter, better, very quickly after that experience, and felt very calm and grounded on the journey home.
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