Greetings,
Mile Hires.
You know,
Everybody wants to create change in their life.
Something within calls them to grow,
To reveal more of what's within them,
And just to enjoy a more expansive life.
It's interesting,
Though,
The ways we often go about creating change in our life.
We get all enthusiastic,
And we dive in,
And we effort and effort at it,
And then after a while many just falter.
And I've had that experience myself.
And what I've come to learn is that if I want to make change,
Especially any significant change,
It works far better to take little steps,
Little steps,
And continuous little steps.
It's kind of like the difference between a sip and a gulp.
And a lot of people use the gulp approach when they're moving towards some change or initiating some change.
The sip method works best,
And that means successive,
Incremental,
Progressive action steps.
Successive,
Incremental,
Progressive action steps will get you a whole lot further than a few big gulps and then maybe falling away and not proceeding.
You know,
In a big ocean liner,
They are so heavy,
And they get up to several dozen knots if they're really trucking.
And it is humanly impossible to shift the rudder of those big ships with just the big rudders alone.
There's just too much forward energy.
So an engineer a long time ago developed what's called the trim tab,
Which is a littler rudder that's part of the big rudder.
Now,
The little rudder can shift and change.
And the more they trim tab,
The more they can begin to move the ship and move the rudder.
And I believe that we need to use that trim tab or that sip method in our own life.
I took a writer's workshop about,
Whoa,
15,
16 years ago,
I believe,
In Santa Fe,
A really talented writer who was also a therapist.
And there were about 20 of us in this group.
And he told a story about a client of his who lived at a distance who was a church secretary.
And this church secretary was a phenomenal person.
She had used her spiritual path to overcome heroin addiction.
She had reached back out to this writer therapist because she had had to have an operation.
And as a result of that,
She got hooked on the painkillers.
Now,
Before that operation,
The church was constantly asking her to get up and share before the whole congregation witnessed for her wonderful reliance on God and all the shift,
The great change she had made.
And now she was humiliated.
She was keeping it secret.
But how could she tell anybody because she was supposed to be this hero and now here she was addicted again.
So she reached out to this therapist and he had written a book about these small changes.
Do One Thing Different is the title.
And she reread the book.
And so this secretary decided it was time to use the sip method,
Successive,
Incremental,
Progressive change.
And so she on the first day,
She sawed off one 12th of a pill.
She was taking 27 pills a day.
So that first day she took 26 and 11 12ths of a pill.
And she kept doing that day by day,
Just a little bit off the pill.
It took her a month to get down to 26.
But she kept going and she found that she could cut a little more off the more she kept doing this and maintaining her dedication to the little shifts,
The little reduction of what she was taking in.
Until about a year later,
She was entirely clean.
And then she got up in front of the congregation and she shared that and everybody embraced her in their heart and got a lot of great growth out of it.
So the end result is what we really care about.
And sometimes we get over enthusiastic.
And we want to make it all happen really quickly,
Because of course,
We're instant gratification folks in this society sometimes.
And sometimes those big gulps seem okay,
But then after a while,
They're hard to sustain.
So why not make progressive bits of change,
Cheerleading oneself all along the way,
And realizing that the more we do that,
The cumulative power of that starts moving us along even more fully.
I teach this in the meditation retreat,
I tell them at the end of our four wonderful days,
I'd rather have you do 15 minutes a day for the next month,
Than have you all enthusiastic from this retreat,
Sit down to do 45 minutes or an hour,
Because I'm not sure you're going to be able to integrate that into your life with all the things you have to face.
So why not those 15 minutes because regular daily 15 minute sessions will become more powerful than like once a week hour long sessions.
I've seen that and known that to be true.
So I offer this to you,
Whatever it is you're working on in your life.
Remember this phrase,
Which I think is from Philippians,
This one thing I do,
Letting go of the things that are behind me,
And reaching forth to that which is before me,
I press toward the mark for the high calling of the prize of God.
So press on,
Take some sips,
And let your life continue to grow into your greatness.
Many blessings.
