But I’ve been struggling to transfer my initial observations into eligible or workable posts that I think anyone, including me, would be interested in reading.

And in that moment, on a wet Sunday afternoon, I was increasingly becoming uninterested in what I had to say.

My initial response during the day had been to push through, to keep rewriting my narratives until they felt right, but something was getting lost from the transference of my initial insights I’d written on my phone notes, to the desired finished article.

My diary thoughts are often real time reflections on a day’s events. They are unpolluted, somehow alive.  They are not statements of fact and they do not ask for acceptance or agreement. They are just reflections on a experience.

But as I sat there attempting to polish them, to make them more legible, they seemed to become static and die.

They went from an organic product, to a processed food.

As I reflected on this, the words, ‘What I want to say I think is relevant, but how I’m trying to say it is somehow wrong’ popped up.

Maybe, I thought to myself I should write in real time, to upload my live notes rather than a finished articulate article, but my fear is it wouldn’t make sense or I will perhaps come over as ‘unintellectual’ or of not understanding the basics and sounding like an amateur.

Heaven forbid the world to see my mistakes, or judge my ‘fumbling’s in the dark’.

I want the world to see the finished article, an expert, the showman, someone who is insightful and wise.

I want you to see an illusion.

I want to appear as someone who I even do not actually believe exists!

Someone who’s got it all figured out and can sell the concept as a finished working model (even though no one’s successfully done that yet!)

The irony is that it’s inside of this fear and need for certainty that actually makes me create ‘processed material’ rather than the ‘organic material’ I scribble down in a moment of experience or reflection.

It’s this ‘dead material’ that is, for me, reminiscent of how I feel when I read and listen to so many other posts and articles around accomplishment, overcoming adversity or having found the secret to a happy life and living the dream or just ‘what a great time I’m having today!’ type post.

It’s a feeling I get of the authors desperation to try and convince the audience that what he/she is saying is genuinely true for them rather than a feeble attempt at trying to cover up their own insecurities or loneliness, and that the ‘ desired plethora of ‘Likes’ will somehow make what they are telling us become reality. (But all the ‘likes’ in the world won’t ever make the story teller believe it deep down if it’s not really how they feel.

We can’t ever lie to ourselves, even when we create the most elaborate stories to fool the rest of the world.)

And that’s how I felt during my weekend writing.

It’s a feeling that the narrative seemed to keep veering away from what I wanted to say and more towards a Facebook  ‘look at me’ story.

It kept pulling towards a tale that wanted to hear you say ‘wow’ your amazing!

It felt as though what I was writing was a tool to convince you about how wonderful I was in putting myself through these adventures but cunningly under the guise of a ‘self awareness’ guide.

Its as though at times I’m telling myself I want you to believe this stuff works in the real world, but not as we have been sold it, but rather as I’ve seen it work and how I use it in reality.

That I want to convince you that you can break free from your limitations and thrive inside of your own discoveries, even if at times, I’m not actually so sure.

I want to share the idea that by simply being insightful, we can and will work to change what has previously held us back and that if we learn to just stop resisting, paradoxically life will get better.

But what I really want inside of all this conviction, is to convince myself that what I’ve spent so many years learning and developing, actually works.

Its not really you I’m trying to impress or convince a lot of the time. It’s me , not you.

When something’s not sitting right, or we are fighting our selves and attempting to convince either ourselves or someone else about how we feel, or the things we have done, it’s often just our way of trying to get certainty inside of what is really, massive uncertainty.

When I transfer my shorthand notes to the finished article, what I’m really want is for the reader to make me certain of what I’ve just said.

I want you to say ‘that’s so true’ which then means ‘hey your ok’.

Because the truth is, for all of us, each day is a new day with new challenges and I have no idea whether what I’m saying today will hold up tomorrow.

Like all of us I have massive doubts about the future and about myself and my capabilities.

I have no way of knowing that something will come along and break me, that I will metaphorically buckle at the ‘ledge of the Bungy jump’ despite having previously managed to successfully launch myself into the abyss and survive a 100 times.

And I can’t promise the rope won’t ever snap regardless of what I tell myself about how safe it is.

Regardless of what I discover about myself on a day to day basis I don’t know about tomorrow and if, what works today, will work on tomorrow’s challenges.

But the interesting thing is that by accepting this, it fills me with confidence that it will work.

Or more accurately ‘it’, whatever it is, may not work for ever, but I will. Whatever comes up in the future, I will want to investigate what’s going on inside of me and how I can keep going and how I can move on from there.

And from this place, I will make you believe you can to.

Ironically, when I try and ignore these underlying feelings or the resistance, the niggling feelings or the sudden irritation or anger that may come over me and try instead push on in an attempt to convince myself and the audience that it will all be ok , I’m never convinced.

It’s when we are willing to look at what is, rather than what we think should be, and how those two conflicting points of view, if left unobserved, can affect how we feel and how we behave, that we then have an opportunity to enquire and dissipate the negative emotions and subsequent behaviours that seem to continually reside with us regardless of what we do to escape them.

For me it’s about investigating the underlying emotion that sends us spiralling off into ‘our story’ that we design to prevent us from ever having to discover the truth about ourselves.

If you have been trying to change something and keep coming up with resistance in some form, (if you do not think you have resistance, if you have tried to change something in your life, but still haven’t changed, you are resisting something) it might be worth looking a little closer at how you feel prior to the ‘internal argumentative dialogue’ that kicks in throughout the day that dominates your thoughts, or when you say to yourself ‘I should do xyz’ but never do.

What are you really experiencing? What are you attempting to avoid knowing about yourself?

Its not an exercise in analysis. Most of us have spent much to much time trying to work it out, continually adding to the list of where it may have all gone wrong in our pasts, and yet, as the list grows and the culprits of the crime of ‘who we feel unhappy about who we have become’ are found, still nothing really seems to shift and the problems persist.

Instead we can look at the possibility of just being with it. Not to run and hide or distract ourselves and instead to just observe and enquire.

Notice where it sits inside your body. Is it a shape, a size or a weight. If you could make it, what material would you make it out of? Clay? Plastic? Metal? Has it got spikes?

What colour is it?

And as you ponder this, stop and look inside again. Has it changed its appearance? How does it look now? What’s different, or how is it the same? Doyou feel different now? Better or worse?

If it could speak, what would it say? Not what you think it should say and not something that will make you right or look good, but what does it really say?

Does it remind you of another time in your life? What did you say to yourself about you then?

As the saying goes ‘ when we fight reality, we lose’.

Rather than resisting how we feel or allowing ourselves to slip into a false narrative inside our heads, just examine the underlying stimulating emotion or any internal tension that you feel and as you observe these elements begin to experiment as to whether the feeling dissipates or not by doing so.

This is a very different post from what I was attempting to write on Sunday, but I believe this one is truer for today and sits better with me, but maybe not for tomorrow.

But that’s Ok, because it may also equally sit even better tomorrow than it does today.