Letting Go Of The Rigidity

In an exercise of The Tenth Insight, Holding the Vision, An Experimental Guide, by James Redfield and Carol Adrienne, you are asked to work on overcoming the fear that holds you back from achieving your goals. The exercise is designed to put yourself in another’s shoes to help develop empathy and compassion. You are asked to jot down the names of three or four people you don’t like or with whom you disagree. Beside the names write out the things you don’t agree with or don’t like about them.

You are then asked to go back and describe each of the people as if you could see their higher purpose. You are asked to use your imagination to speculate what deeper, positive purposes lies behind the outer characteristics that you see and judge.

The final step is to go back to the first step and insert your name in the place of one of the people that you don’t like. You are then asked to describe something you do that is similar to what you don’t like about the person. You are asked to notice how you feel when you go back and read the exercise.

After completing this exercise, I have realized that there are a few things about myself that I’m not happy with, especially where writing is concerned. I am perhaps the most rigid and inflexible personality that I know of. In my Equine Career I believe that I haven’t worked with any more stubborn or inflexible mules. The more I wrote, the more I realized that my preconceived ideas of writing success are out of touch with reality. I don’t have to be on a beach in Oregon in order to write a Historical Novel about a mountain in Colorado.

Many great novels have been written by commuters into New York City on subways and trains. I doubt that I will mysteriously get a large book contract for an abstract idea about a novel. How about writing it? How about finally interviewing the principles in Colorado that have already agreed to an interview? How about completing the ground work? Do you think I might be difficult to work with? Am I the person that I complain about by putting the cart before the horse? Am I really as overbearing as the person that I thought believed they knew everything about a subject when they were really a novice struggling along? Could I use the help that I had to offer? What and eye opener! Writing well is indeed a journey to self discovery. Albert Bianchine