Insight Insights
Change yourself, change your life.
Better yet: Unleash yourself, love your life.
People who know me in person are sometimes surprised to learn that I have long struggled with depression and with feelings of negative self worth. Tall, good-looking, worldly, gregarious, funny, insightful, compassionate, eloquent, MC, firedance-in-a-loincloth…and yet also somehow sure that I am wholly uninteresting and have little of value to offer the world. I’m joyfully changing that trajectory.
Last weekend, I went to a seminar (Wednesday through Sunday, so a long weekend), which was the follow-up to a three-day seminar I participated in in March. There is a part of me that somewhat fears sharing about this, but it’s not because of the vulnerability of expressing honesty about my own foibles, but because there are some who are put off by this type self exploration. I decided that that’s OK: Not everyone needs to be receptive to this. For those who are curious, read on.
There are two major gifts I received from attending these seminars:
- I feel centered. Powerful. Peaceful. Capable. Like I can do anything—more, like I’ve always been able to, only now I know it.
- I got close to new people in a way that normally requires starting at an earlier stage of life—teenage or younger.
It’s called “Insight,” and it opens yourself to yourself—in no small part through discovering your own reflection in the others with whom you participate. That awareness of yourself brings peace, power, and clarity, and the recognition of your shared pain and challenges brings you close to the others. (Many waterworks and some hard core release of deep-set pain and repressed feelings are probable. I ugly cried more than once.) It is transformative. I dug deep into areas—some I was aware of, many I wasn’t—and learned a hell of a lot about myself.
Over the course of a seminar—whether three days or five—every person transforms between the start and the end. They (we) enter looking guarded, angry, isolated, sad, distant, fake, bland—which unfortunately means “normal” in our everyday world. And yet, every one of the people with whom I experienced it completed it looking more joyful, peaceful, and healthier than when we started—which wholeheartedly includes me! I got incredibly close to the people in both my groups. Several of them—whom I now have nothing but love for—I have absolutely no doubt I would have had nothing but contention with, had I met them outside of the experience. I am well aware that there is more that connects us than divides us, but I don’t recall ever having it so poignantly laid out for me as through these experiences.
I went there, especially to the first one, “knowing” what it would be like. I know this stuff. I read, live, and breathe it. Heck, I teach it! I figured that that first one would be a good weekend to reinforce what I already know and maybe pick up a few new tips, tricks, and tidbits.
Well, it’s true that the underlying concepts are not new: I could point to ideas and even direct quotes that I’ve read or heard from the likes of Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, Brené Brown, and many others. What feels different about this is that it takes those concepts and immerses you in it for several days, exposing your deepest recesses to the warmth and possibility that those truths make possible within yourself.
Add to that the wealth of information that I either didn’t know, or that it didn’t matter whether I knew it. To wit: There were quite a number of people in my groups—maybe one third of the participants—taking this seminar for a second, third, or more-th times, and they were breaking down barriers and healing or strengthening areas as surely and as strongly as those of us there for the first time.
I would absolutely love if there were more people who could receive the gift of discovery that Insight offers. Please feel free email me, and I’ll answer questions as I am able—and potentially collect them (anonymously) as a follow-up FAQ.
You get out of it what you bring to it.
My love to all of you.
