Project Alchemy Part Nine: Accustom To Your New Reality

Project Alchemy Part Nine: Accustom To Your New Reality

In the last section, we talked about redefining your story, and how doing so can provide you with the strength and hope to move forward.  Now, I’d like to challenge you to accept your failures and dropped projects as simply a part of your past.

As much as you’d like to excise them or pretend they never happened, they are a part of you.  Refusing to accept it, ignoring it, or trying to mask the past are all sure ways to make the burden just that much heavier to carry.  

When you dislike a part of yourself – whether your romantic failures, your lack of physical health, or financial issues – that dislike spills over into other areas, and the negativity then only breeds itself and grows.  Like attracts like.  

It’s hard to feel good about work if you’re still beating yourself up for the failure of your marriage.  It’s hard to appreciate your great family life if you hate yourself for how much you weigh.  As much as you try, you can’t compartmentalize your life; it’s all a part of a whole.

Once more, here is where I would like to bring in the concept of alchemy.  Your past struggles and hardships need not be what weigh you down.  Use your inner strength, your passion ... albeit, your power ... to transform the hardships and struggles into that which you can use to create scenarios and the life that you envision.  

Take the power of those negative, rooted emotions, and use it to propel yourself forward into new territory.  Use the deep strength of your murky sadnesses to harness the truth of your deepest fears - and conquer them.

Part of the solution of which I speak is to work on accepting yourself and your new reality. If you had to downgrade your lifestyle, stop hating on your ten-year-old Camry that took the place of your BMW.  Treat your new, smaller home with respect and love.  

Learning to simplify all over again can be one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed upon us. Embrace where you are now, as much as you might wish to be somewhere else.  There is more truth and power in the here and now than there is in the yet-to-be-manifest future.

Clarify, once again, your goals and dreams.  Reframe your past, and find opportunities to tell that story to others.  There is truly so much healing in storytelling.  When you do so, you’ll start to find the hidden gems inside your failures.  You may actually find that your dreams, goals, and visions have changed altogether.  Embrace these with excitement, because you now have an incredible jumping board to leap from, and an effective new 'tool kit' with which to work.

It can be tempting to look around you and be convinced that no one else has failed like you have, or is suffering like you are.  Quite frankly, that is idea is utter nonsense. Sometimes, and quite possibly more often than not, the most successful people hide the biggest scars.  Name any famous person, from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Gates, and underneath the outward success lies a string of very human 'failures'. 

Telling your story to others won’t just help you through, it will also help those that you share your story with.

Let us finalize this series now with Part Ten; Revisit Your Project In Time.

If you wish to read the Introduction and first two parts of the Project Alchemy series, you can do so here.