10 Steps to Create Lasting Change in Your Life

Published on January 31, 2013 by admin   ·   1 Comment

 Kate Corrine Van Vliet/TinyBuddha

“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

From time to time I read my old journals. When the moment strikes me, I choose a journal at random from my bookshelf.

This time it was the beautiful green and gold one my mom had given me in what must have been September of 2010, because the writing chronicles my life from September 20, 2010 to January 1, 2011.

Basically, it is my perceptive exactly two years ago.

I had just started my second year of grad school and I was a month into my internship at an outpatient drug and alcohol rehab facility.

I loved what I was doing and I was really good at it. With conviction, I had found my passion.

During these documented months of my life, I was also:

• Catching myself being “in my head” and too hard on myself
• Feeling angry with my parents after identifying the residual effects of the parenting I received, and then forgiving my mom for not understanding how to foster my spirit
• Exploring my birth chart, seeing a psychic (or two), and using meditation and Dan Millman’s ideas to find my life purpose
• “Practicing” with men and dissecting the happenings of all my past romantic relationships
• Recognizing self-sabotage and self-deprecating tendencies and making an effort to change my self-talk (what I say and how I converse with myself when alone)
• Beginning to understand that my thoughts affect my behavior, which impacts the circumstances of my life
• Learning how to love myself, faults and all, and how to be my own partner so I know how I want a man to treat me
• Practicing presence—trying to stay in the moment
• Asking myself the hard-to-answer questions that I had previously been skilled at avoiding. Example: Why is my heart closed-off?
• Investigating vulnerability, yet still feeling unable to attempt it in any real way
• Trying to set personal goals
• Starting to have close, meaningful relationships with intelligent, curious, and motivated women for the first time in my life
• Acknowledging guilt I felt about making my life what I want it to be
• Struggling with verbal communication and assertiveness—what I needed to say to people in my life
• Starting to see what love really means—the action, the verb, instead of a noun

Reading my words from two years ago at a completely different stage in my life has allowed me to see the complex undertaking of change from a new viewpoint.

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