So miniscule and yet so cumulatively powerful as to transform our lives.

Remembering that spell before Christmas, in England, when it snowed persistently and relentlessly until airports were closed, flights cancelled and roads across Britain brought to a standstill.  It caused unprecedented chaos to travellers and would-be-travellers – people camping at airports until flights resumed, others incaserated in their vehicles on blocked motorways for days.

It was not all negative of course – it depended on your viewpoint.  The thick snow was a delight for children and the young at heart who spent happy hours tobogganing and skiing down any slope or hill they could find.

So miniscule and yet so cumulatively powerful as to transform our lives – for good or ill.

This power of small things to potentially immobilise us, set me thinking….

Clients often come to me saying that they feel stuck in their lives and held back by something – although they often don’t know just what it might be.  Sometimes, however, they know exactly what the imprisoning “snowdrift” is – a negative emotion, a lack of confidence, a persistent way of doing something which is detrimental to them in some way – but they feel powerless to be able to change and move forward.

The challenge is that we are all creatures of habit.  We are programmed to remember and repeat what we have learnt.  Human behaviour is almost completely made up of small habits or patterns of behaviour (snowflakes with the power to accumulate into impassable snow drifts).  A habit, after all, is only a small action that we repeat, sometimes in combination with other small actions, until it becomes our default way of acting in certain situations.  What starts as a conscious action becomes, with repetition, an unconscious part of who we are and how we act.  What was once gently fluid is now rigidly set and potentially hard to shift.  On the positive side, habits allow us to do things without having to think about them.  They free us up to make repetitive actions easily and without conscious thought so that we have time to focus on more interesting things – new things.  The draw back is when we become aware that they are not serving us any more, in fact they are holding us back, and we want to change them.  Then we discover that they have grown cumulatively very powerful and we are potentially imprisoned in their grip.  Dr Johnson (1790 – 1784) summed it up perfectly, to my mind, when he said:
“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken”.

“First we form habits, and then our habits form us.  Before we know it, we see the world only from our own perspective.  When that happens we begin to stagnate” – Anon

One of my clients had not been able to have holidays abroad with her family because of her phobia of flying.  Even the mere thought of checking in at the airport would render her breathless with a severe panic attack.  Another client kept thinking he must be stupid which consolidated over time into an emotional block to learning anything new and having panic attacks before exams to the point that he was refusing to sit any.  Yet another, a senior partner in a law firm, was rendered literally speechless when thinking about standing up and giving the end of year presentation to the firm.  At some level there was once a reason for the habit to have formed in the first place and had since been perpetuated, at a subconscious level, gaining in strength with each repetition.  None of these habits of thought serve these individuals any more – they are very real, immobilising snowdrifts.

All is not lost – we are not condemned to be at the mercy of our self-destructive habits indefinitely.  The snow plough can come to the rescue (find a good therapeutic coach!); the airport reopens, the cars once more drive down the motorway.  We can perform Houdini-esque escapes from the chains.  The first step is to wake up and be aware that we are imprisoned and then we can do something about it.  The key to changing any unwanted behaviour or habit is not found in our muscles but in our innermost thoughts.

We can choose to replace these old habits of thought that no longer serve us and choose to think differently.  As with an individual snowflake which is unique in its structure – each habit is unique and we can learn to identify its triggers and its many strands in order to understand it, melt it, dissolve it, and replace it with a fresh new habit that is supportive to our goals and aims in the current chapter of our lives.

My client with the phobia of flying now happily flies to new exciting destinations, with her family and friends, for holidays.  The student who was incapacitated by blocks to learning is now proudly getting “A” grades.  The lawyer who was frozen to ineffectiveness in public speaking went on to get a standing ovation.

Life changes when we change how we choose to think about things – one step or one habit at a time.  Change the little habits in our lives and the big things magically and effortlessly transform.

So miniscule and yet so cumulatively powerful as to transform our lives.

In short – do you sometimes catch yourself feeling jaded, exhausted, dispirited and STALE?

And yet …….

Maybe we are missing something really important here.  Nothing is ever as it first appears – but we rarely stop to check.

How can Christmas be zingingly fresh and alive when we are allowing ourselves to be swept out of balance by everything around us – re-enacting the same old habits of mind and hoping that it will somehow just “happen” for us.   We need to consciously change the filters through which we see the world, we need to “cleanse the doors of perception” as Aldous Huxley famously once said.  Or as Deepak Chopra said more recently in his wonderful book “The Way of the Wizard” – “You can not bring your same old stale self to the world and expect the world to be new for you”.  It is yourself that must constantly be transforming.

Christmas is, in essence, an opportunity for transformation – for magic to happen.  Without an inner transformation there will be no outer transformation.  So how do we begin this inner transformation?

The first step is to skid to a halt – just for a moment.  Put down the shopping bags, drop the wrapping paper, and take the bits of tinsel out of your hair.  We are so used to spinning and seeing everything in a perpetual blur of busy-ness.  We skitter over the surface of things ensuring that we never fully engage in the experience and therefore never really feel it at all.  We become numb and de-sensitised.  It feels strange if we allow ourselves to stop for a moment and fully focus on what is in front of us – and a moment is all it takes to step out of time – and reconnect with the magic that is already inside just waiting to grow.

Sit in a quiet spot and take three deep breaths while you close your eyes.  Allow the outer world to withdraw and slip away like the outer wrapping paper concealing a present.  Then imagine that you are the box inside the wrapping paper – lift the lid and look inside.  See yourself sinking into the heart of the present.  At the very centre you are here and now – totally merging with all that is.  Quantum physicists and mystics now agree that this is the overflowing, ever present, spring at the heart of everything.  Stay long enough to savour the moment, to be reconnected with the centre of your being.  It is from here that the mystery and the magic flows out if you let it.  If we can practise living from this central core we will regain freshness and clarity of perception.  We will indeed become the wizard who transforms base metal into gold; the pure gold of ever flowing life, love and spirit.

This, after all, is the often forgotten message of Christmas, before it became hijacked by our modern world.  As well as being a time for remembering a very special birth.  It is a time for re-birth – our re-birth. It is a time for remembering something that we have forgotten or perhaps are only dimly conscious of in fleeting seconds.  At the heart of every moment is an opportunity for this re-awakening to happen; a re-awakening to the certain knowledge that the magic is already here – just waiting to be tapped into.  Christmas shines a spotlight if we will only let it, but in reality every moment contains the same invitation.  It is the invitation to realise that something totally extraordinary is hidden deep in the very ordinariness of every day living.  Right now – right here.  Now that is pure magic!

I hope you all have a wonderfully happy and vibrantly magical Christmas!