Lessons From Another Trip Around the Sun
As my final gift of gratitude and experience for the year, today I want to share my three most valuable and profound lessons from 2023, the lessons that have been the most important that I am carrying into 2024. This past year certainly was not an easy one by any stretch, but it was through the challenges and hardships of this year that I found tremendous growth and change.
Lesson 1: Respect the Process, Trust the Process, Be the Process
Change can and does happen overnight. However, change is the accumulation of every single event that happened prior to the implementing of the change. In understanding what allows us and propels us to change, we always come back to process. Being healthy, well, aligned, empowered, inspired, etc. is all an ongoing process in which we are active participants. In my moments of impatience, frustration, anxiety, fear, insecurity, and shame I come back to this lesson. I use this lesson as a mantra. Wherever and in whatever emotional state I am, I offer myself this mantra time and time again as a reminder to be exactly where I am, to remind myself that I am the process. It begins with a respect of the fact that everything is a process; life is a process. In reverence and respect for the process of life, I find trust and faith in myself and my life being a necessary part of that process. With all that in mind, it allows me to relax into the present moment I inhabit with full faith and assuredness that it is a necessary component of my life and my growth, and this inhabiting of the present moment entirely is what I refer to as being the process. Being the process allows us to adopt a growth mindset, offering us the wisdom that we are enough, exactly as we are in this present moment, that we are worthy of love, and we are inherently valuable simply by being alive and our own unique selves. With that in mind, it also reminds us that we are perpetually growing, changing, evolving, and we are living the process of becoming more than what we are right now. The universe requires us to respect, trust, and be the process, and through this our deepest desires will come to be.
Lesson 2: Fully In, Let It Go
Those of you who have done the Wim Hof method before will recognize the reference here. I have had great difficulty in the past allowing myself to feel my emotions to their full extent. Whether or not this is in part because I am a man and our society prizes men who show and have very little emotion is a topic for another discussion. Manhood aside, I struggled for quite some time to truly feel or connect deeply to the emotions I have allowed myself to feel. With that in mind, emotional repression has done a terrific job of wreaking havoc on my mental and physical health, and I have found next to no benefit from turning off my connection to and repressing my emotions. This year, I was very deliberate and intentional in harboring a connection to and creating the space for myself to fully feel my emotions. Anger, sadness, shame, grief, joy, awe, wonder, etc. all serve us a purpose, and I was amazed at how my mental and physical health changed when I respected, honored, and allowed myself to deeply feel whatever emotions I was feeling. Easier said than done, I will say, and although it is still a work in progress, I can confidently say that all of our emotions as humans are valid, sacred, and necessary, and in giving them space and gratitude I found myself having far greater emotional understanding, regulation, and clarity. That’s correct: I said emotional regulation. Entirely different from emotional repression. In feeling our emotions fully, that doesn't mean we behave like toddlers and are ruled by our emotions, rather it means we cultivate a relationship and connection with the emotions we feel and set aside appropriate spaces and times for them to be felt. I had a great many times this previous year where I would set aside time to connect to how I was feeling and sit with myself, allowing myself to feel the emotions fully. The clarity, peace, joy, and understanding that followed those moments, though those moments were not easy, was well worth my while each and every time. In feeling my emotions to their full extent, I found myself better able to move through them fully, or rather to let them to move through me, and I have begun feeling much lighter and more free from this.
Lesson 3: The More You Learn, the Less You Know
The third and final lesson is one I have really been exploring and understanding the meaning of within my wellness coaching clients. I have learned that I can spend all of the time in the world becoming rich in information; learning all the fitness tools, anatomy, physics, psychology, science, etc. that comprise wellness. However, it is in my experiences with people, both friends and clients, that have taught me that all of the information is simply a framework, a foundation that we can use to base our decisions off. When a real person is in front of you, a unique individual, you realize information never accounted for their uniqueness, and more often than not they defy the rules, laws, and expectations you had going in of what “should be”. Oftentimes what our information tells us is “impossible” or “not right” can end up being exactly what somebody needs or comes to us with at that moment. Every time I approach a new client and a new partnership in wellness, I have all of my information and tools at the ready, however I also respect and honor the fact that I do not know everything there is to know, especially as it pertains to completely unique, both biologically and personally, humans. In short, the more information I learn and the more experiences I have, the more I realize that there is far less black and white in this world than I have been led to believe. The more I learn, the less I know and am completely sure of, and the more I resign myself to a beginners mindset in everything I do. Mastery is not a state of being; a place you can arrive at. Rather, mastery is an ongoing process that is never complete. Mastery is the process.
To bring everything full circle and string all of these lessons together, here is what I would like my final words of the year to be to you:
Respect the process
Our society is endlessly obsessed with the future and creating a better tomorrow. This is all well and good until we begin to lose our present moment by being pulled into the future. Losing respect for the process will create stress, anxiety, and distrust in the natural order and cycles of life and the Earth.
Trust the process
Trust the process of learning, feeling, growing, and evolving. Don’t be afraid to surrender to full faith. The more you learn, the less you can truly know, and you are better off surrendering your trust and faith to the process. Is it blind faith? Perhaps. But can you really be considered blind if there are things you are inherently incapable of seeing?
Be the Process
When it becomes clear that you are the process, that you are the embodiment of nature and of the natural cycles of the Earth, be the process. Be rooted in your present moment, awake and aware of all that is occurring within you. Together, we will get to where we want and need to be, one moment at a time.
With all my heart and precious time,
Noah
