It’s Time To Take Off The Training Wheels
Those protective mechanisms that once kept you safe are now holding you back!
We’ve all got them. Those comfortably irritating voices that tell us ‘It’s not safe!’, ‘You’ll get hurt!’, ‘You’ll end up alone!’, ‘You’re doing it all wrong!’, ‘Stop, it’s too risky!’, ‘They… won’t… love… you…!!!’
It’s irritating because to the part of us that is waking up, being told what to do is not on the menu. This part wants to jump, fly, take the risk, be bold, speak up, take a stand, say No! and declare a passionate Yes! Here, the shaky voices of containment, hover like mosquitos, unwelcomed and distracting.
However, to a slightly smaller, scared part, these voices belong to a comforting companion who has been walking alongside us for a really long time. We’ve become used to them. They’re our best friends. We wouldn’t be ourselves without them. Or would we?
Whether we like it or not we make choices that limit us. We don’t know it at the time as initially, these same choices are there to protect us. It’s the choice to be quiet and speak when spoken to or the choice to please the adults even when it goes against every cell in our little bodies. The choice to trust others instead of ourselves.
In order to fit in, feel safe, and be loved, we adapt and adopt, and relinquish our authenticity and aliveness. For a short period of time, this may be okay, or even necessary. But if we turn this mechanism on without realizing it, how do we know when it’s time to turn it off?
After all, what is familiar creates comfort and this combination feels safe. Until it’s not!
The training wheels help us get onto the bike but they stop us from getting in the race. There are no training wheels in the Tour de France. But I bet you every one of those humans started with extra wheels and support.
Sometimes, knowing when to let go of the training wheels is obvious. But some protective mechanisms are harder to shake. Like the unhealthy relationship we have with our feelings that we adopted from those who are still wearing training wheels way beyond their necessity. Or the beliefs and patterns that have become so ingrained because we’re still employing their services twenty years after they were due for retirement.
The thing is that the training wheels support us to build a healthy relationship with our fear. Fear isn’t something to be eradicated. It’s a vital core feeling that supplies us with energy and information about attuning to danger (and hence keeping us safe). Cool, hey!
Taking the training wheels off is like next-level fear training. A call to an even greater relationship with our body’s capacity to attune to its environment. Dropping out of the head (where all those ‘training wheel’ stories live) and down into your mature embodied wisdom, where the magic lives. Discovering what it really feels like to come home to yourself, to jump on the slipstream of inner knowing, and to trust… yourself.
Because trust is born at the centre of fear!
So I invite you to slow down just a little, to notice whose voice is actually speaking when you hear the familiar narratives of ‘Oh, let’s watch some TV and leave that (..insert new exciting project..) till later’, or ‘You can’t do it’, or ‘They’re better than you’.
Are they your true voice? Are they the smooth cogs on the wheels of your bike? Or are they the squeaky old rusty training wheels that need a farewell ritual so you can get on with being you?
Now where’s that spanner…
Stacia
