Evolutionary Blog

The importance of taking time to heal after a breakup by Jason McClain

The most cringe-worthy statements I've heard on how to handle breakup grief:

From a woman: "The best way to get over a man is to get under another one."  From a man: "Just drown yourself in p*ssy until you forget her."

There are so many things off with this I am not even sure where to begin, but I will start with the fact that it will not help you get over them at all. It may numb the pain - it may anesthetize you - but so much of the gift and benefits in facing the pain will be lost.

It is important to grieve and give yourself time to heal. 

After each relationship, I recommend taking at least 6 months and stay single and celibate during that time. In the last 15 years, I have had periods of being single and celibate that were 14 months, 18 months, 22 months, and 7 months. None of them started out as intentional - other than knowing I needed to take time - and the duration was undetermined when those periods began, but there are several solid reasons for this.

Reasons To Take Time After A Breakup

1. You are not truly fit and ready for healthy romantic love until you are fundamentally okay being alone; you have to love yourself before you can love another

2. So you do not repeat the same patterns and mistakes.  Have you ever wondered why you date a person with the same problems or had the same kind of conflicts in each of your relationships?  Almost like the movie Groundhog Day? You can avoid that by taking the time to do some conscious and intentional work to resolve those patterns and triggers and gaining the benefit of new and more subtle intricacies and patterns.

3. Learn what you need to learn from the previous relationship. 

a. What was your part in the breakdowns and conflicts? What could you do differently to have a more loving, easeful, fulfilling experience

b. Which areas do you need to heal from your more distant past that impacted that relationship - the stuff that predated that relationship but were uncovered by the level of intimacy you shared?

c. What triggers arise that need to be cleared or healed?

4. Uplevel your next partner and next level of relating

a. What did you love about the love or lover that you want again in the future? 
b. What are the qualities and characteristics you want in your next lover that they shared?  
c. What new and additional qualities or characteristics do you want or need in addition?
d. What did you miss or skip over that you need to make sure has attention in the future?

5. So you can be more open, more present, and ready to love fully - rather than guarded, closed down, still hurt and scared to love again. So you are ready to love more fully, deeper, and more completely than you have before.

What’s next is always better if you make sure you are better.

What’s next will always be better because you will make sure you are better.

If you avoid these important steps, you will - at best -  be engaged in spiritual and emotional bypass and at worst you will engage in transference - or worse still, just stuff it all down never to be addressed and it will fester and turn into even worse pathology down the road, negatively impacting your emotional and even physical health, and negatively impacting your loved ones around you and certainly your next relationships and you will end up being destined to repeat the same mistakes. 

Or you will simply shut down more and more and become less and less open and less and less present and therefore, less capable of true love and true intimacy.

Let’s avoid that.

Become intimate with yourself by taking time to heal and grow so you can be ready for an even deeper love that could be right around the next corner or in the next coffee shop once you are ready and open to the possibility.

--

The example from my own life that is most poignant here, was in early 2017 when I met the most recent love of my life.  I had been in love before, but never like this. A paragraph I was so smitten with her that I would drop things when I was around her. I would cut myself shaving if she stayed the night - something I had not done in a decade.

I was overwhelmed with my love for her and my attraction to her.

It will be useful for you to know a little bit about me and my relationship to convention and obligatory holidays - while being a romantic: I would often give her roses - always two dozen. Usually weekly or biweekly. And always hand-arranged by me. I wrote her poetry. I would make sure that I not only demonstrated but also verbally expressed my love and appreciation of and for her on a daily basis. 

I’ve worked with hundreds of people over the years, and one of the common threads - in every case where they were starting their own business - was some version of self-doubt.

It shows up in many different forms: questioning whether they are good enough, whether they know enough, or have enough training. It shows up on how they set their prices, and in the way they have uncertainty about the future. It can also show up as perfectionism (because nothing is ever really good “enough” - and a half dozen other versions I could list.

One or more of these plague most solo-preneurs just starting out. Each of them are simple enough to resolve (and we can - and will - resolve them for you during the webinar on Thursday). Still others - as laid out below - require mindfulness and practice to let go of.

The most interesting challenge clients face - and the most pervasive dynamic I have witnessed among them - is many degrees more complicated.

The story may be familiar to you: you schedule a small talk - an introduction to your work - and let me assure you, these introductory workshops are the engine of your business. Through them, you provide value to the community and assist in building your following, your brand, and it’s an opportunity for people to see you in person so they get a deeper sense of you.

Someone comes up to you and tells you how amazing the talk was, how touched they were by it, and gets that glazed over look in their eye. It’s boom time, baby!

You pack up and go home and when you get home and check your email and there is a critical email from one of the evening’s participants saying that you needed to change XYZ about your presentation and how some of it was inappropriate. Suddenly all the inflation turns to deflation and you feel dejected and start to wonder - maybe this business isn’t for you.

How you actually performed becomes irrelevant because we are now dealing with a creation of your mind:

1) You collapsed two domains - personal and practical - you made a practical matter personal; you make it mean something about you personally when it is a matter of efficacy with the audience

2) Identification with your business or your material in the workshop causing you to react - you *are* your business in this situation. A case of mistaken identity. What’s more though, is these demonstrate an orientation to external validation.

This distinction Personal/ Practical is foundational in the self-esteem concepts I will lay out for you Thursday. 

Internal vs External orientations to validation will also make a headline appearance. These distinctions will go a long way toward increasing your freedom and choice and assisting you improve more rapidly.

There are a limited number of spots for the Webinar, so go grab your space now:
https://evolve-co.leadpages.net/self-esteem-burgers/

In Your Service,

Jason


Update: here is the video from the webinar. Enjoy!

When:  Wednesday, July 16th @ 6:30pm Pacific
Where: Online Webinar. »Register Here« 

Cost: Yep, it's free
What and Why:

The Mythology of Self-Sabotage

Self-sabotage is a huge focus of pop-psychology and in the world and business of personal development. We devote time to workshops, read books, self-examine, consider it part of our necessary shadow-work perhaps, and yet still we are often left confounded by behaviors that seem to undermine our greatest aspirations for ourselves and our highest vision or our life.

We set a goal, or declare some new way of behaving or declare an end to some way we have been behaving and how long does it take to break our "promise"? Anyone who has ever tried to stop an old habit or start a new habit has experienced this--be it the smoke from a cigarette, a fatty or sugary food we should not eat, or the affections from someone we know to be as toxic for us as deeply inhaling cigarette smoke. Or, how about starting to go to the gym? Or maybe it was some New Year's resolution that you resigned from after about a week.

Or ... maybe it was saying you would not yell at people in traffic any more. Or engage with more compassion and empathy. Until that one person who ...

Or maybe it was something bigger with more at stake: a new high-paying position, a new career path, or finishing that book you've always said you were going to write, and yet your behaviors did not occur in alignment with the simple and clear steps you know – consciously -- it will take to accomplish the thing you said you would (or wanted to) accomplish (or be, do, or have.)

So most of us have begun to reduce this to some inner-enemy--some saboteur running around and setting charges on our bridges, and undermining the soiled path we are trying to walk on, having us stumble into those pitfalls.

You know: that part of you that you have probably cursed in your mind, under your breath, or even out loud in frustration.

The idea of an inner enemy is one way of relating to this phenomenon—and it is a valid and generally accepted way of relating to it. But is it an effective way of relating to it? Is it really true? Does labeling it in such a manner give us access to resolving the problem?

Most of us are aware that how we relate to something in our awareness will produce specific and predicable results both mentally and emotionally. And will even shift our "reality". The power of positive thinking and the Law of Attraction are both commonly accepted in personal development communities and among individuals interested in developing themselves. Yet these concepts are often misunderstood, misused – and underused.

Our thoughts do not create reality, because we do not experience reality directly—we experience it through perceptual filters and we interpret—and then we generalize those interpretations making meaning or creating beliefs. However our thoughts certainly create our reality--how we interpret reality will lead to our experience of reality. Objective and subjective; exterior and interior. That is to say, how we interpret what is happening "out there" will create our experience of reality "in here" and it certainly creates our immediate emotional experience and what we make that mean through generalizations and the creations of beliefs about the world, ourselves, people, etc., leads to what I like to call our "emotional atmosphere".

How is this most often done? In language; in our linguistic structures--descriptors and labels.

In this way, while our thoughts do not create "reality" with a capital R, it does--absolutely--create our experience of reality.

As clarifying example, most of us know that we can relate to the same event in one of two ways: as a "crisis" or as an "opportunity". We know that doing so will create different solutions as we will approach it differently.

Circling back to this idea of an "inner enemy", what results does that labeling of this phenomenon predictably produce? It creates a "me vs the other", us against "it" or "them" mentality which leads to tension and separation which in turn produces even greater internal dissonance.

The best thing about this way of relating to the phenomenon is this: it is not true; we made it up. The reason that is the good news is that given we made it up, we can create another way of relating to this phenomenon that is useful; a way that gives us access to resolving the confounding behavior that keeps us from attaining the heights we desire with the velocity and ease we wish for?

The answer is incredibly simple and elegant—both in the mathematical sense as well as the aesthetic. The process for resolution of this phenomenon involves getting into communication and into relationship with those parts of us that are out of alignment, find out what their positive purpose is, take that up to the highest/deepest level and integrate it from that place. It can be a fairly profound experience that is deeply healing, and allows you to create greater and greater levels of inner harmony within your Self.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Well, that depends on the skill of the Guide. That last paragraph above encapsulates and summarizes a process that can take between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on the depth of the problem, but it is virtually always successful at realigning that part of you that is ... well, out of alignment.

Take your "inner-enemies" and turn them into your most powerful allies.

Find out on Wednesday, July 16th @ 6:30pm Pacific
Where: Online Webinar. »Register Here« 

Whatever you think you are -- you are more than that; whatever and however you identify yourself, you are far more than that. The problems with identification are many -- whether it is identification with/ as your gender, your nationality, your sexual orientation, your finances, your social reputation, your career, your role as a mother/father, your political affiliations, you religious beliefs, your competence or skill in a certain context, etc. -- to identify with any of those things will create problems if/when they are taken away or are shaken at their foundations as you will experience a very real identity crisis. But the "why" it creates problems is because it is not really who you are -- and to identify with it is *at least* selling yourself short.

In the face of such a crisis there are only two directions to move from an ego perspective -- expansion/evolution or contraction/regression. There is no neutral. You can expand to incorporate the new information/circumstances, or you can dig in, regress, and solidify (which requires engaging in some degree of self-deception).

Who you are is none of that. Who you are is Spirit. If you want to identify with something, identify with yourself as Spirit. 

Which every breath - breath out your lack of self worth that has you play small and identify with something less than your full birthright and breathe in the fact that who you are is ... all of it. 

Who you are is the Witness. 

And rest in that, smilingly.

Nothing else really matters. Anything else is chatter. What remains are the ego and self-esteem practices to engage in that have you experiencing the gap between what you think you are (identification) and what you really are -- Spirit manifest.

Let go of the small you and become a full-time God/Goddess. It is your birthright.