You Mean I’m Supposed to Be Like This!
When I teach professional trainings for people to coach and consult using this work, I always do in-depth demonstrations of readings while the students observe.
It’s always everyone’s favorite part of the workshop because they get to watch, live and in person, the process of someone discovering for the very first time how deeply they can be recognized and understood. It’s often quite a holy moment.
A few years ago, one of the volunteer subjects was David, whose face and birth date revealed a classic example of an archetype I call The Artist. I could tell this would be a highly creative and deeply intuitive man, who’d value times of silence and solitude where his creative juices could flow, and who’d be likely to be a non-conformist in all aspects of life.
Someone like this often has an emotional depth others lack, but it’s a covert emotional nature – He’d rarely talk about his feelings but I knew his emotions ran powerful and deep. Like an iceberg, what you saw with David was only the tip of what was really happening under the surface.
People with this inner design crave freedom and lean toward the unusual personally and professionally. They can struggle to find their way in life because they’re not the least bit drawn to “normal” life and they can feel quite misunderstood by others.
And this was the story that David told me as he described the issues he faced. He carried a lot of painful judgment about himself – He couldn’t understand what was the matter with him.
Why did he crave so much time alone and feel things so deeply when others let things just roll off their backs? His girlfriend complained that he didn’t talk to her, but he was overwhelmed when she wanted to download everything that passed through her mind onto him.
He wondered if he was wrong not to feel driven like his younger brother was. While David had found success as a musician, he described with great intensity how it was more important to him to have freedom in how he lived his life and did his work rather than chase money to get a big house and fancy car.
As I did the reading and described his inner design to him, David listened intently. When I was done, there was a long silence. He just sat there, looking in my eyes for what felt like forever, and then finally said, “You mean, I’ll always be this way?”
I took a breath and had a bit of an Uh-oh! moment in my mind. Was he viewing this as a prison he’d never escape? But an instant later, he let out an enormous sigh and flashed a big smile, exclaiming, “That is such a relief! You mean I’m supposed to be like this!”
He got it. This was his nature; he was designed to be exactly this way. There was nothing wrong with him—or rather, the only thing wrong with him was that he thought there was something wrong!
Like all of us, through a lifetime of accumulated negative self-judgment, there was enormous tension in his system that kept him from loving and accepting himself.
David’s patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior weren’t his fault and they weren’t a problem. In fact, it was his judgment of them that was causing the problem.
Like all of us, he was born with his inner design shining brightly in full joy, ready to begin the journey. But also like all of us, nearly from the moment he was born, he was receiving messages from the outside world that he should be more like “that” and not “this.”
We all want to be loved and accepted, and so we try to be more like “that” – and there begins the journey away from original self. To me, the most powerful and beautiful part of the work I do is to help someone come home to themselves again.
That day, as David visibly relaxed into himself, possibly for the first time since childhood, the room became a sacred place for all of us, honored to witness someone feeling truly seen.
If you live or work with human beings, you might want to know that you can learn how to do this too – whether for yourself or for anyone in your life personally or professionally. I hope you’ll check out the Events page on my site to see the workshop flyers. I’d love to show you the purposeful beauty of your own inner design!