top of page
virginia writing half_edited.jpg

3 steps to making sustainable life change

The lawyer who gave up a Ferrari

As I stood contemplating the sweeping sea views from the loungeroom of my then hillside Mornington Peninsula home, it dawned on me that I was no longer seeing that view with the awe it first invoked within me. All I felt was a sense of emptiness, a dissatisfaction of sorts. A spark of curiosity then arose as I mentally surveyed the elements of my life.

That spark arose around three years ago.

From the most discerning onlooker’s perspective, I’d had it all. Working my way ‘up’ to the coveted position of partner in a lifestyle legal practice, I had carefully collected all the hallmarks of success and sculpted life so that only the most enviable elements featured on my social media pages. Beach holidays, investment properties, a garage full of exotic cars completed with Ferrari pedigree. To those of you that have driven Ferraris, you hear me when I say, ‘second gear is a bitch’.

Weirdly, I was now staring into the headlights of the second gear of my adult life, and it too was ‘grinding’. Could I change it up? Could I keep filling up the emptiness with more of the stuff society valued?

The shiny existence I had fabricated began to show hairline cracks in its duco. As I audited each area of my life, it dawned on me that I was fixated on possessing elements of life that no longer represented a state of satisfaction to me.

I was imprisoned by my ideas of success.

This personal audit opened my mind to the question of who I would be if I was no longer who I thought I should be?

At the time I had participated in a 28 year marriage, held together by the accumulation of that ‘stuff’. It was a turbulent marriage, but one I had known how to handle. I knew the patterns. Better the devil you know, right? Of course, those 28 or so years further entrenched the patterning of all that was familiar to me as a child and that illusory ‘safe’ idea of reality is difficult to break free from.

This is why we resist change.

We hold onto patterns and belief systems because they are familiar. I call them our house rules. Those rules bind us tightly to a false reality, as they come complete with belief systems that once kept us metaphorically ‘safe and loved’ in our childhood environment. They are so deeply entrenched in our psyche that for the most part they are unconscious.

Yet those unconscious rules become our identity. My personal legal system came complete with commandments like: ‘Be smart’. ‘Don’t get angry’. ‘Be a good girl’ … and one of my personal favourites ‘don’t wear red lipstick or god won’t love you’.

To make life changes requires you dissolve the idea of who you think you should be. This identity shift, to most people, is a terrifying prospect. Yet, the rules you hold onto result in the creation of choice limiting resistances.

Back then, I realized I too had limited my choices because I was afraid to leave my marriage. In my mind’s eye, I had been projecting a future that came with a rather negative outlook. What I saw, looked ‘unsafe’. Aside from having to deal with a very angry ex-husband, I wondered what the breaking apart of my former identity would reveal about me. Who would I be? Would anyone love me?

I was projecting a future from a place of fear.

How I changed it up...

1. Acceptance

The first step I took was to radically accept that I had created everything within my reality. When I understood that I had created everything in my life solely for my experience of it, I felt a sense of relief. I then became still and energetically expanded myself until I fully felt into my creation.

This arose from a sense that you cannot move through an experience by pushing it away. Pushing away is resistance. Accepting where you are in every moment helps you feel your experience fully so it can be released and moved on. You are energy and this is just physics at work.

2. Surrender

I then needed to energetically let go of absolutely everything (including red Ferraris) from a place of positivity. Do not try to judge what that will look like. Judgement requires your thinking mind to get involved again. Just sincerely let it all go.

I let go of the effects of the patterning that held me to an identity labelled ‘successful human’, so I could then allow a more authentic identity to form.

 

3. Feel into the future.

This part is not so easy to explain briefly, given there really is no future.

From the present moment, most of us imagine our future from a place of desire. ‘if I was rich, better looking, smarter, etc…’. Those are fear-based thought projections which move from an idea that you are lacking something.

The reality is, in an abundant universe, there is no lack. It is all one energy.

 

To feel a ‘future’ from a present sensation of freedom and satisfaction, you align with a frequency that will resonate with and animate that physical reality for you.

I know this, because way back I thought I knew what my life ‘should’ look like. I created a life in fear of not being valued unless I did what others thought was valuable. My effort to control my future, with what I thought I knew about a life of success led only to a fear-based outcome: dissatisfaction.

When I used my senses to feel into the positive frequency of peace and satisfaction, that was exactly what I created. It is from a sensory place that all shifts in reality are created. You cannot think your way into sustainable change.

You must first feel it.

I am not the person I was three years ago. I share my experience with you because swapping out the 'valued' red Ferrari for the ‘forbidden’ red lipstick was, and continues to be, so very satisfying on every level. I let go of what They told me to do and I ended up in paradise.

If you want radically sustainable life changes in your work or personal life, click here to book the preferred consultation for you. I also have a book that might interest you.

bottom of page