It’s a warm Sunday afternoon, the sky is scattered with light fluffy clouds and the scent of sweetness floats through the air from the Wattle tree in blossom outside of her window. Josie doesn’t see the beauty in the afternoon, lately she doesn’t see the beauty in anything very much, and her life has become one huge scavenger hunt, where she spends every waking moment desperately trying to either control or fix her life.
Her eyes are as blue as cornflowers, her hair long and wavy, her body tiny and thin almost to the point of gauntness. Like a tiny delicate bird that has just endured another storm, she huddles in a crumpled heap almost invisible in the corner of her lounge suite. Muffled heart wrenching sobs fill the air with a thickness that is almost physical as Josie desperately clings to one of the huge indigo blue silk pillows which adorn her modest home. Her daughter Becky looks on in helpless desperation, not knowing what to do to ease her mother’s pain, nor her own for that matter. Right at this moment Becky just wants to be anywhere but here with this basket case of a mother of hers, how she hates the new age crap. “pull yourself together for Gods sake,” Becky yells at her mother, tears flooding down her face she just cant bear to see what’s happening any longer, she turns and flees from the room, anywhere, I just want to be anywhere but here!
Finally after an hour or two, Josie begins to regain some measure of composure, her face swollen from the tears, her beautiful eyes red she sniffles into a handful of crumpled tissues, and looks around the room hopelessly.
“What did I do this time?” she asks herself over and over, and looking to the sky she screams, “Why me God? What have I done to deserve this?” and the tears continue to flow.
Josie has been working on fixing her life for so long now, she is tired, so tired and even though every $ she has goes into books, and workshops, at the end of the day nothing really seems to be getting better. She went to a workshop just last month that promised emotional healing, it took her back to all the crap from childhood, facing the poverty once again and the nastiness of other children because her family were so poor, she thought she had finished with all that, but no, it still hurts. At the end of the workshop she did for a moment feel better, and she even felt justified in having some reason for what she perceived to be her inability to have a committed relationship with a man. Although she couldn’t understand how her having chronic fatigue related to what happened in her childhood, but at least she had something to blame. Life just wasn’t working out, and all the looking back into the past only seemed to keep bring up feelings and thoughts that kept her miserable now. And it surely was doing that, the ra-ra-ra of the workshop left her high as a kite, only to hit the ground with one heck of a thump just weeks later when reality set in, that life is still about living, and its not what you did but what your doing now that counts…
Taking a deep breath, she reached for the phone and dialed, … “Good morning,” a strong clear voice chirped into the ear piece of the phone, “Hi, its Josie,” she sniffled “I need to talk to you my friend, for Gods sake help me to understand, I just cant take this any longer, what am I doing? What is it that keeps me this blubbering mess?”
Personal Development and Workshops! What do they really do for you?
Have you ever left a workshop or training course after paying hundreds of $ feeling “Yes, that was fantastic! Only to wake up a few weeks later feeling even more disempowered, confused and depressed than you were before you went? When you went back to the instructor of the course did that person then lay the blame right back at your feet, saying things like, “well you didn’t stick to the breathing routine you were supposed to do, or you didn’t stick to the diet, so what do you expect?” Always the blame is placed right back at your feet, it couldn’t have possibly been because the theory they were tying to implant in your psyche just doesn’t work! No, and its always a mystery to me how so many of the empowerment products and process just leave you an emotional basket case, even more unsure and even more frustrated than before you became involved.
The most powerful insight you can learn from Josie is that “What ever you focus on is what you experience.” She was so busy trying to fix her life; she lived every moment trying to work out what was wrong, so all she got was more and more sadness. It’s so simple, make the choice now, to stop the self analyzing, stop the thinking about the past, stop the sadness, and live! Right this moment you have the power to choose how you’re going to feel, so what will it be?
articles public - health and healing