The Way Back to Yourself

I woke up crabby this morning.

Unsettled. Irritated. Just off.

Nothing catastrophic had happened. There wasn't some enormous problem I needed to solve.

I just didn't feel how I wanted to feel.

And there it was.

One of those incredibly ordinary moments where I get to watch myself be human.

Because what is the first thing we tend to do when we don't like how we feel?

We want relief.

Why do I feel like this?

What's wrong?

What do I need to do to change it?

Who or what caused this?

How quickly can I get myself back to feeling good?

I know this tendency well because I have lived some version of it most of my life.

Just get through this.

Get through this challenge. Fix this problem. Change this habit. Heal this thing. Get my body where I want it. Make the money. Finish the project. Clean the house. Have the conversation.

Then I'll feel better.

Then I'll relax.

Then I'll enjoy myself.

Then there will be relief.

Except there was always something else.

I Thought the Goal Was to Get Through It

I have accomplished a lot of things I once believed would make me feel different when I reached them.

And achievement does feel good.

For a minute.

Then something fascinating happens.

The human mind is incredibly capable of finding the next thing.

The finish line moves.

Now I need to maintain what I created.

Now there's another goal.

Now I see what could be better.

Now I'm worried I'll lose what I worked so hard to create.

Or I look at the thing I desperately wanted and think:

Okay. What's next?

I started noticing how often I was suffering through the process because I believed the reward was waiting for me at the end of it.

And then I would reach the end and discover something almost insulting:

The process had been the valuable part.

That's where I had built the strength.

That's where I had learned something about myself.

That's where I had changed.

That's where I had built prosperity.

And sometimes I had been so busy trying to get through it that I barely experienced any of it.

Eventually I had to face something:

The challenge wasn't interrupting my life. This was my life.

That realization became part of the beginning of Beauty Code Way®.

Humans Like Relief

I don't think there is anything nefarious about our desire to escape discomfort.

We're human.

Of course we want relief when something hurts.

Of course we want certainty when we don't know.

Of course we want someone to give us an answer when we're confused.

Of course we want the uncomfortable conversation to be over.

Of course we want the body to change faster.

Of course we want to stop repeating the pattern we already know we're repeating.

Of course we'd rather feel good than feel like shit.

But I've learned something about myself through watching this tendency:

If my entire relationship with discomfort is organized around making it go away, I miss a tremendous amount of information.

I miss myself.

And this is where one of the paradigms I live by became real for me:

Suffering to heal doesn't work. The only way out is through.

Through doesn't mean suffering harder.

It doesn't mean glorifying pain.

It means I don't have to abandon myself because I don't like the experience I'm having.

I can stay.

I can look.

I can feel.

I can become curious.

I can use my body.

I can use my five senses.

I can observe what my brain immediately made the experience mean.

And sometimes I can become still enough to recognize:

Don't leave the moment.

Because this moment is my life too.

We Are Always Telling Ourselves What Something Means

Something happens.

Then almost immediately, we create meaning.

She didn't respond.

She doesn't like me.

I didn't follow through.

I have no discipline.

My body changed.

Something is wrong.

I feel guilty.

I'm a bad person.

I don't know what to do.

I'm behind.

This is hard.

Maybe I'm on the wrong path.

We are extraordinary meaning-making creatures.

And the meaning can become so familiar that we stop realizing we've created one.

We just experience it as reality.

That's why awareness has become so important to me.

Not because I need to analyze every thought I have.

Because when I can see the pattern, I have somewhere to participate.

I can ask:

Is that actually true?

What am I making this mean?

What is my body doing?

Where did my attention just go?

Who am I being in relationship to this experience?

That doesn't instantly solve everything.

It does something I value more.

It brings me back to myself.

We Look Outside Ourselves When We Don't Know

This is another tendency I know intimately.

When we don't know, we look for something that knows.

A teacher.

A system.

A personality type.

A book.

A coach.

A profile.

A framework.

A label.

Something that can explain us to ourselves.

I love tools. I have studied and used many of them. Archetypes, Gene Keys, Human Design, habit change, the body, the five senses, patterns, relationships and my own conditioning have all helped me see myself more clearly.

They can give me language.

They can help me recognize a pattern.

They can concentrate my attention on something I might otherwise miss.

But there is a line I don't want to cross anymore.

The tool cannot become more authoritative about me than I am.

Because the Code isn't outside of me.

The Code is me.

My patterns.

My gifts.

My conditioning.

My biology.

My experiences.

What activates me.

What I love.

What I reject.

What I repeatedly create.

How I behave when I'm uncomfortable.

How I treat myself when I don't get it right.

Even how I wash the dishes.

All of it gives me information.

The more willing I become to study myself, the more I begin recognizing my own Elegant Equation.

I can use outside tools to help me see.

But my True North has to remain within my own lived experience.

Otherwise even the most beautiful system can become another way I leave myself.

 

We Don't Always Like the Pieces We're Given

This is where Purpose became much simpler for me.

I think of Purpose as a puzzle.

Imagine dumping 500 pieces onto a table.

Looking at the pile, it's difficult to understand how these random fragments could possibly become one coherent picture.

But they aren't random.

They're pieces.

And this is how I have learned to look at my life.

The relationship is a piece.

The body is a piece.

The rejection is a piece.

The success is a piece.

The thing I wish had never happened is a piece.

The pattern I can't believe I'm seeing again is a piece.

The thing I can't stop thinking about is a piece.

The thing that brings me completely alive is a piece.

Even waking up crabby on an ordinary morning can be a piece.

The human tendency is to look at the pieces we don't like and decide:

This one shouldn't be here.

I don't want this one.

Take this one back.

Give me the beautiful blue piece from the picture on the box.

But what happens if I stop assuming the uncomfortable piece is evidence that something has gone wrong?

What happens if I can simply remember:

This is a piece.

And this is a piece.

And this is a piece.

All on purpose, for purpose.

I don't have to know where every piece belongs yet.

Pattern Recognition Helps Me See the Picture

When I put together an actual puzzle, I don't pick up one piece and panic because I can't immediately tell where it belongs.

I look for patterns.

I find the edges.

I notice colors.

I sort sections.

I concentrate on one area.

And eventually something that looked like a pile of unrelated fragments begins revealing a picture.

That's how I think about pattern recognition in my life.

It doesn't change the pieces.

It helps me work with them.

Maybe I notice I repeatedly abandon myself when someone is disappointed in me.

Maybe I accomplish enormous things and don't allow myself to enjoy them.

Maybe every time I feel uncertain I search for someone else to tell me what to do.

Maybe I become incredibly disciplined and completely miserable.

Maybe I put everyone else first and quietly resent them for needing me.

Maybe I know exactly what habit would support me and repeatedly don't do it.

These observations don't have to become evidence against me.

They're patterns.

And patterns give me somewhere to bring my attention.

I don't become less capable when I see my tendencies.

I become more capable because I can see them.

Beauty Is in the Compost

Some of the pieces are ugly.

There is no reason for me to pretend otherwise.

Anger.

Pain.

Sorrow.

Loneliness.

Hate.

Rejection.

Conditioning.

Built-up emotions in the body.

Parts of ourselves we don't want anybody to see.

Parts of our bodies we wish were different.

Things happening in the world that make us want to scream.

This is the shadowland.

And I spent plenty of time wanting the shadowland to disappear.

What I've discovered instead is that the shadowland contains material.

It's compost.

Compost isn't pretty.

That's not its job.

Its value is in what can be created through it.

That's what Beauty means to me.

Not calling something beautiful when it hurts.

Not pretending darkness is light.

Not bypassing anger, grief or pain so I can hurry back to being positive.

Beauty is what becomes available when I am willing to face what is actually here.

Where there is hate, I have an opportunity to discover love.

Where there is ugliness, I have an opportunity to create Beauty.

Where there is darkness, I have an opportunity to recognize light.

Where there is pain, there may eventually be medicine.

The Beauty is who I get to rise to become through facing what has been presented to me.

The mud becomes material.

That's the lotus.

Knowing Better Doesn't Always Mean Doing Better

This one has humbled me repeatedly.

I can know exactly what I want to do and still not do it.

Most humans can.

We can know the habit.

Know the boundary.

Know the food.

Know the conversation we need to have.

Know we need rest.

Know we're overdoing it.

Know we're repeating ourselves.

And then do the familiar thing anyway.

That doesn't make us incapable.

We're working with a human brain, a human body, beliefs built through experience and a perception of the world that has been shaped over a lifetime.

This is why Beauty Code Way works with what I call Rewire B4™: Brain, Body, Beliefs and Beauty.

Not because I need four more things to fix.

Because all four are participating in how I experience my life.

And I have learned that transformation becomes very different when I stop fighting my humanity and start working with it.

I experience.

I observe.

I recognize.

I experiment.

I act.

I receive more information.

Sometimes I forget.

Then I remember.

And I return.

Self-Love Gets Much More Interesting When I Don't Like Myself

It's easy to talk about self-love when I feel great.

I find it much more revealing when I don't.

When I didn't follow through.

When I reacted.

When I'm disappointed in myself.

When I look in the mirror and don't like what I see.

When I'm jealous.

When I'm angry.

When I've hurt someone.

When I know better.

When I'm crabby for no obvious reason.

That's when I discover what kind of relationship I actually have with myself.

Do I immediately become my own enemy?

Do I shame myself into changing?

Do I make one behavior an identity?

Do I abandon myself until I've earned my way back into my own approval?

Or can I stay on my own team and still tell myself the truth?

That distinction has become enormous for me.

I can take responsibility without making myself wrong.

I can feel guilt without making shame my identity.

I can recognize behavior I don't like and become curious about what was underneath it.

I can repair.

I can learn.

I can choose differently.

And I can do all of that without withdrawing love from myself.

I needed a way to keep self-love as the highest-priority practice.

That is Beauty Code Way.

Putting Myself First Changed How I Showed Up for Everyone Else

There is a reason we all know the oxygen-mask story.

Put yours on first.

Simple.

Living it can be much harder.

Especially when you've learned that being a good woman, mother, wife, daughter, friend or leader means making sure everyone else is okay.

But I began noticing another human pattern.

When I continually abandoned myself in service to other people, I didn't magically become more loving.

Sometimes I became exhausted.

Sometimes resentful.

Sometimes guilty.

Sometimes reactive.

Sometimes I wanted the people I was sacrificing myself for to somehow make my sacrifice worth it.

That wasn't the kind of responsibility I wanted to practice.

Putting myself first isn't about making everything about me.

It's about taking responsibility for the human being I bring into relationship with everyone else.

Because:

My vibe affects my tribe.

That doesn't make me responsible for how another human responds.

Their behavior belongs to them.

Mine belongs to me.

How I react is mine.

How I repair is mine.

How I care for myself is mine.

How willing I am to see my own patterns is mine.

How I choose to show up is mine.

That is what integral leadership has come to mean to me.

I can be the hero of my own story without requiring anyone else to become a supporting character in it.

The Way Is the Return

Beauty Code Way isn't something I created because I finally figured myself out.

I created it because I keep being human.

I forget.

I get reactive.

I chase relief.

I move the finish line.

I look outside myself.

I judge a piece before I know where it belongs.

I become disciplined and forget to enjoy myself.

I catch myself making meaning.

And then I have a Way to return.

I come back through Vision, Awareness, Connection and Action.

What is the bigger picture?

What is actually happening?

What am I noticing?

What is this connected to?

What pattern is here?

Who am I being?

What is mine to take responsibility for?

And what action is mine now?

Not the perfect action.

Not somebody else's action.

Inspired action in a good way, in my way.

The more I live this, the less interested I become in escaping the game of being human.

I want to be here for it.

For the ordinary mornings.

The dishes.

The bodies.

The relationships.

The mistakes.

The accomplishments.

The shadowland.

The laughter.

The patterns.

The pieces I understand immediately and the ones I may carry for years before recognizing where they belong.

I don't need every challenge to disappear before I can experience my life.

I don't need an outside authority to tell me who I am.

I don't need to become perfect before I can be on my own team.

I can study myself.

I can work with my human tendencies instead of making them evidence that something is wrong with me.

I can take responsibility for what is mine.

I can change my lenses.

I can work with my Brain, Body, Beliefs and perception of Beauty.

I can recognize the pieces.

I can participate in creating the picture.

And when I forget, I can come back.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The pieces are already being placed in my hands.

All on purpose, for purpose.

Beauty Code Way is how I learned to meet them.