The World Comes to Me

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree and Rising.

Yoda and I finally did the visualization exercise that we postponed back in January when I was told that The Treat was gone from my life—the third death to touch me deeply in only a few months’ time and the most emotionally devastating. I’m glad we waited because I was able to approach the exercise from a position of power rather than prostration.

By the time I left Yoda’s home office, we’d spent almost three hours together, assessing my progress during the first phase of my certification and wrapping up with the delayed exercise. Yoda had been second-guessing herself because she’d come close to insisting on trying the exercise the night I sat devastated in her office, just trying to get a hold on the chaos I felt inside. She thought this visualization was particularly powerful for clients who’d hit a proverbial brick wall and in cases where the emotions are on an even keel and life is just…hard…the client usually bounces out of her office afterward. However, it’s so powerful that volatile emotions can take a client in the opposite direction, and she thought I might be too fragile then. With so much trauma in my life over such a short period, she was probably afraid I’d leave her house and go crash my car into a real brick wall!

I won’t give the intimate details of the exercise. That would cheapen it and could never mean as much to someone else as the little synchronicities and layers of symbolism do to me. But Yoda was right about it being a powerful exercise.

The first thing that gave me a huge boost of confidence was when Yoda asked me to choose a particular situation I’m having a hard time overcoming and just can’t seem to break through. I couldn’t. Not right away. I can think of many such situations over the past three years, even a few over the past six months. But nothing came to mind. Not that I’ve “broken through” all my breakthroughs, but the ones that are left don’t seem insurmountable. That was a giddy feeling—not being able to offer up something that really weighs me down.

I finally, after about ten minutes, suggested a barrier I don’t want to encounter again because it’s taken so much work to get beyond it and it’s hurt in so many ways. It involves the self-doubt I used to get when someone I loved or respected overran me with their opinions and logic and I let their conscious and subconscious agendas and dramas cause me to question myself. I decided to use this exercise as a tool so that if I’m in a similar situation in years to come, I won’t lose the progress I’ve made in this period of personal growth.

Near the end of the visualization, I was to combine all the traits and feelings I seek to defy my doubts and shape them into some object in my mind’s eye. With my hands, I molded something that gradually took form. I had to chuckle when I realized I was holding a giant ball in my arms and it was a planet Earth with textured continents and smooth oceans. It wasn’t just the planet, though—this was the Earth on the World Card of a Tarot deck, a card that has a special meaning for me. It’s the card of the ultimate feminine aspect, of getting “the world,” of having everything I want, and when I think of having everything I want, it’s rarely in a material sense. No, it’s much bigger than the material world. It’s having all my dreams come true.

Later, when the visualization part of the exercise was over and I felt really calm and joyful, we sat down to discuss what I’d learned about myself and to craft an affirmation statement I can rely on whenever self-doubt should resurface. Of course, being a writer, I wanted to create a couple of paragraphs!

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Yoda reined me in and tried to get me down to one sentence. Okay, so I made it a complex, compound sentence with three prongs. She suggested I might want to keep it short so I didn’t have to memorize it, which was a nice way of saying, “You ninny, you’re not listening!”

I turned it into 3 sentences then, and that’s when the third powerful aspect of this exercise emerged for me. The first sentence was where I am “now”—even if now is in the future. The second sentence was a defiance of what the challenge as been so that I’m saying now that I choose what to take into my heart and mind. The third sentence reaffirms my strength and then states the outcome: “…and the world comes to me.”

The outcome, even though the exercise wasn’t structured to have an affirmation with an “outcome,” encompasses getting through all the other steps of the affirmation as though they’ve already happened and I’m “at” the outcome. The world comes to me. This is an intensely personal moment. It’s not an outcome that others might logically see, should they look at the problem, challenge, solution, and then outcome and try to follow where I’ve walked. It wouldn’t make sense to me either except to have seen the connections made during the visualization.

But the outcome becomes a mantra, my own personal slogan, and a very powerful one when related to something very personal to me.


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