
How do you change your circumstances when your hands are tied? You can't, despite messages to the contrary that say there is no such thing as can't: But what you can change is your awareness of how your hands are tied. To get to awareness you have to admit that your hands are tied, you have to feel the pain of your hands being tied and you have to rise above the reality of your hands being tied with acceptance of your reality. Another way of thinking about acceptance is humility. Who are you? is always a good question to ask yourself when looking for humility. Usually the answer comes quickly and it may well be that the voice in your head belongs to someone from your past, whose messages were so strong they've imprinted on your psyche. Whatever reason your hands are tied, seeing them tied for the first time can lead to awareness. It may be that the fear of awareness is finding a lack of hope in the rope around your wrists. To release hope is to not expect it. To release the rope around your wrists is to not expect it. Expectation of change fosters disappointment when it doesn't materialise. So how do you change without expectation? How do you release the ties? You release yourself by accepting that there is nothing you can do about it, for now and the now is hope. Change takes time and all the planning in the world will not make the half penny of difference if you keep reliving the past. You want to change and don't know how to is the past if this is what you keep thinking about. You want to change but there is something about what you are doing that is addictive. It's how you survive. You know how to play the game you are playing no matter how much the game sucks. This is because the addiction is not a game, but a fact of life, your life. How can facts be changed when you go to sleep in the same bed every night with the same person who keeps on doing the same habitual things? Personal change is a huge challenge that needs a new perspective hug to get it started. Validation of regret is only the beginning. How to get beyond regret can be regretful if its unable to be accepted as grief and loss. Guilt says that its not OK to change your mind when its more than OK because its your health that's involved. There is no need to feel guilty because only you know what you are thinking. Stop talking to others about your regrets and write them down in a journal instead and keep that journal to yourself. There is no denying that when in pain, the most difficult part of wanting change is finding help. This is because the need for change is as unique as the individual and everyone is different. This means that the help that you receive most likely will not meet your need for help when you need it the most. This is what I mean by finding your hands tied. To overcome the need for help is accepting that the help given, is another person doing the best they can with what they've got. Its also accepting that you are doing the best you can with what you've got. Finding the good in the bad is a real beginning in the quest for change, and to see the good is to accept what you've got as not so much being your lot, but being where you are right now, with an 'its Ok' statement. It's Ok because you will change. You see, you've already identified that you want it by identifying what it is that you don't want. Accept what you don't want and the change will come. Just like the song where "you can't hurry love", personal change is also something that can't be hurried if what you don't want is unloved by you. Loving what you don't want changes your whole perspective on the world. It gives you the strength to carry on and it gives you the insight to make those changes you didn't know how to make before. This is because loving what you hate allows you to trust it for what it is as opposed to what you want it to be. Trust is acceptance and acceptance is trust. Trust in yourself that what you are telling you is the truth. It may well be that you don't need to change very much at all to achieve that change that you are seeking. It may well be that a change of mind is the key you've been looking for all along and making the best of your situation, that you're now happy to admit you don't like, is the lock you didn't know you had, never mind now know how to open. Truth is the answer and you're the only one who knows it when it comes to changing what it is that you don't want into something that you do.
© Chris Tyne, 2013.