The Phases of Sustained Change

We are born into family, community, and social systems, that expand into education, and work systems. We arrive whole, with built-in biological needs for safety, belonging, and worthiness. Conditioning is part of the deal. 

The way we are raised, along with the direct and indirect messages we receive shape the somatic patterns of who we are at a cellular level, affecting how we integrate our experiences.

Over time, we learn to adapt to these systems, navigating our environments to meet our needs for safety, belonging, and worthiness. Like boulders in a stream, these adaptations evolve over time in the form of resistance, judgement, and attachment-ways of being that promote and protect our innate needs. 

There comes a time when these adaptations-the ones we embody to safeguard safety, belonging, and worthiness work against us, impeding our flow. The protection we once sought becomes a barrier to what's really calling for our attention. 

Acknowledgement is about recognizing how these adaptations once served our needs by protecting us. And how we can now embody new ways of being that more effectively support our flow with life, in a manner authentic to us. 

As leaders, when we face a moment of truth fraught with pressure, stress, or discomfort, we will almost surely revert to reacting from a historical, adaptive pattern of behaviour. 

Even when we cognitively declare a new way of being, we need to learn the skills for how to objectively recognize our conditioned, patterned responses, directing our awareness to what's really calling for our attention in the moment.

Discernment is about identifying what's real from what's true. 

After acknowledging that we were not born with adaptations to meet our needs for safety, belonging, and worthiness, rather we developed them for protection, we build the capacity to distinguish between what's real and what's true. 

Painful feelings of exclusion, or neglect from not being enough-what we needed protection from-are very real. However, the underpinning narrative is untrue.

Once our lens of perception shifts toward what is fundamentally true about who we are, away from what has historically felt real, the way we view ourselves changes, which changes the way we see everything.

When we begin to practice discerning what's real from what's true-seeing ourselves more objectively, trust informs our relationship with Self, changing the way we see the world.

As we are guided by self-trust, new shapes emerge within our embodied intelligence. We are reacquainted with somatic awareness where we can feel our feelings, being authentic and true with ourselves again. 

Our historical, adaptive behaviours that once provided protection now lead us to feel emotionally ungrounded, like we're out of balance. To drop into ourselves during a moment of truth and feel what's taking shape, without resistance, judgement, nor attachment, is a gift. 

Integration is about connecting with our somatic intelligence, aligning our internal and external experiences,  embodying our core values, and trusting the innate wisdom of present moment awareness to help us navigate our systems and environments, so that we may more effectively inform, and be informed by them. 

Life and work will continue to offer endless moments of truth. Building resilience practices leveraged in somatic intelligence, and embodied wisdom  prepares us to meet them with grace.

A return to wholeness is how we meet our needs for safety, belonging, and worthiness in a truly authentic manner.