This article is created in partnership with Nicky Clinch, master maturation coach, author, and founder of The BodyMind Maturation Method. She is dedicated to guiding us through the powerful life changing process of growing out of who we thought we were and into who we were always born to be. We’re honored to work with her. ~ ed.

“I’m just so tired of myself.”

Tired of having the same reactive response and the same conversations with my partner again and again.

Tired of blaming my job for my unhappiness and my “need” to overwork to prove my worth and earn my belonging.

Tired of making change after change but still ending up with the same experience of myself wherever I go.

At some point, we all come to this realization—that something deeper needs to shift. It’s a moment of awakening in which we realize that we are the source of our own suffering and that this incessant searching for something on the outside to fix us is not going to give us what we want.

The problem is that when we arrive at this moment of enlightenment, we’re perplexed. We notice but don’t know what to do with that noticing. So then, we’re off again to our same circus. Repeat ad nauseum.

We need a guide—someone to teach us another way.

Put down the self-development and begin your process of maturation.

In this world obsessed with “fixing,” there is a much more liberating and empowering pathway of healing waiting to walk us home to our True Self and a vibrant, joyful life.

To summarize master maturation coach Nicky Clinch’s words, coming home to self is not about being bigger and better; the powerful self is already there.

It’s not about development. Instead, we need to deconstruct what it is that is blocking our access to the power within us, and dissolve the attachments to the identity of who we thought we were and the incessant suffering of our own minds.

We need to release all that we are not to allow the birthing of who we were born to be to mature through.

That’s something Clinch has first-hand knowingness about.

In her 20s, she was a drug addict, alcoholic, bulimic and was on the edge of life. Medical professionals told her that she wasn’t going to live to 30 if she continued on that path. So she made drastic changes and for the first 10 years of her healing journey, sought out “all possible therapy.”

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The next 12 years after that were spent training in various modalities of transformation, beginning with earning her certification as a macrobiotic counsellor, chef, and energy healer at the International School of Macrobiotics, committing to transformational training at The Concord Institute and, a year later, spending her summer apprenticing for a Shaman of plant medicine in the Peruvian rainforest.

Over the past four years, she has apprenticed her mentor, leading maturation facilitator and teacher Dr. David Norris—an apprenticeship that remains ongoing.

As a someone whose calling is Transformation, Clinch knows that true healing requires deep feeling and a willingness to take responsibility for how we are experiencing our reality and the stories we are stuck in that are generating our whole world.

We don’t need to become “better” versions of ourselves; we need to come home to ourselves.

We are and always have been whole, enough, extraordinarily powerful. We just forget and we can’t see this when blinded by the thoughts in our mind, memories of past, and stories of who we think we are.

Nicky’s BodyMind Maturation method is a marriage of the Buddhist practice of coming home to self (called Maitri) and ontology which is the study and science of Being. That is what is underlying the basis of Clinch’s book, Surrender: Break Free of Your Past, Realize Your Power, Live Beyond Your Story.

When we surrender to our own maturation we meet ourselves right where we are and cultivate an unconditional self-acceptance and self-responsibility to be with the human experience in the present moment.

That’s what Surrender offers us. Alongside a deep, thought-provoking inquiry process with practical journaling exercises, Surrender helps us take a deep-dive into our own consciousness and integrate life-changing healing in our mind, body, heart, and soul—on both an individual and societal level

Shed your constructed self, learn to be who you truly are, & begin to change our world. >>

But just as is encompassed in Clinch’s subtitle with the words, “break free of your past,” maturation also includes the process of letting go of and releasing our idea of self. It includes bringing consciousness and a deeper awareness to the power of our own minds—the automatic thoughts and emotional memory from our pasts that we are bringing into our present every step we take.

So often, we view things through trauma and past-colored glasses.

The newest scientific data presents that the average person has 6,200 daily “thought worms,” or first, original thoughts in a series of related thinking events stemming from the original (1). Some studies present that 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts cross our mind every 24 hours. That’s a translatable way of saying that we are being lived by multiple ponderings of thought constantly—and we aren’t even aware of it.

We are being lived by multiple ponderings of thought constantly and we aren’t aware of it.

When looking at all that mental content, up to 70 percent of our mental chatter is negative, which is referred to as negativity dominance (2). We see this at work in our lives almost every day.

“Food for suffering is thinking we need to be a better version of who we are.” ~ Nicky Clinch

That’s by design. Eons of evolution has wired our brains to be vigilant and note when things threaten our survival—be it emotional or physical.

The moment we have an experience, it becomes a memory. That memory is attached to a story. All of the sensory data from that moment is then attached to the memory and that story.

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The tricky part is that our brains cannot distinguish between past, present, real, or imagined. So, every time we see anything remotely familiar, our brain scans and connects our present to our past. It all becomes entangled, and before you know it, when some subconscious detail reminds us of trauma that’s happened to us, our parents, or our ancestors, our whole being is flooded with the past representation of reality and that is all we can see.

In the mirror, we see ourselves post-partner spat, wondering where those fiery, hurtful words came from. In society, we see our nations shaken like the contents of a soda bottle, activated and bubbling to the surface with a sometimes explosive force.

We lose control of our emotions and in doing so, we depart from ourselves. We come to be driven by compulsions and reactions to the past here in the present. This is why we find our patterns repeating over and over again.

This is the way we humans are wired, but it’s not the way we need to be.

Trying to change our reality from inside our stories, Clinch says, is like rearranging the furniture in a room and believing you changed rooms. It feels different, it looks different, but it is still the same room.

While it may be easy to think that the emotional identity we live in from day to day is a whole house, most of us live out of just a single room—a state called survival, perpetually rearranging our belongings.

“You can have anything you want as long as it fits inside the always already familiar box of your story” ~ Nicky Clinch

That’s a small space for individuals and society to operate out of. It is incredibly limiting—and we are bringing the past into the present with every step.

What Surrender aims to do is introduce us to the importance of and walk us through the first steps toward actually getting outside of the rooms we’ve long imprisoned ourselves in—all in an effort to awaken ourselves in our own lives and awaken society as a whole, one person at a time.

This is the way to birth a new future, beyond the past.

Surrender is a process. Get step-by-step guidance while healing and expanding your self-worth >>

Throughout Surrender and the 21 Days of Expansion challenge offered alongside the book as a bite-sized sample of her upcoming Surrender Process program, Clinch guides Seekers through meditations aimed at helping them see the power already within themselves.

Through these meditations, we finally exit the room we’ve long inhabited, heal our self-worth, and become our most empowered, aligned, and authentic selves—all (finally) from the outside of the “self” we’ve incorrectly assumed ourselves to be.

Why 21 days? Scientists have discovered that it takes just that long to re-pattern our thinking (3). In just a two-minute span of time over those 21 days, in fact, we can rewire our brains to work more optimistically (4). Each of the guided activations in 21 Days of Expansion is 30 minutes long and packs a powerful punch.

5 Questions that lead to Massive Surrender & Profound Maturation

As I listened to the meditations offered as a part of Clinch’s 21 Days of Expansion challenge, each day’s meditation opening us to a deeper undoing of our constructed, survival-centered selves, I found myself particularly intrigued by these invitations to surrender. Pull out your journals and prepare to journey back towards Self:

1. What energetic or mental block is creating a feeling of stuckness and repeating itself as if it really is who you are?

Maybe it’s fear, shame, guilt, or a block around love or money. Whatever it is, we’re invited from day one to call it in so that it fills our entire being—to simply see it—and then to allow for its dissolution before our very mind’s eye.

2. What beliefs have taken you away from listening to the power and beating of your own heart?

We’re invited to call forth all the stories we tell ourselves and our beliefs and to understand that all of who we believe we are has been inherited from generations before us, society, and educational systems. After spending time meditating on and undoing this constructed self, we call in what we are now ready to see in our lives from a space of maturation.

3. What is the emptiness—the hole—you’ve tried for so long to fill?

How many times have you pushed, forced, strived, grasped, or grabbed to fill this emptiness? Has it ever been enough? On day three, we are invited to sit with how hungry we have been and to release our clinging to our hunger as we bring it from our shadow to the light of our authentic being.

4. What is your relationship with power?

Does power mean manipulation? Anger? Invoking fear? On day four, we’re invited to find the root of our disempowering beliefs surrounding power. As we release it, we are guided into the field of beingness beyond ourselves and invited to recognize how our being empowers and strengthens all whose lives we touch—and even those whose lives we do not—all by simply being who we are.

5. What is it that you’ve been hiding from yourself?

What is it that makes your heart feel heavy? We are invited to explore the various ways we internalize the wounds we’ve either inflicted upon ourselves or that others have inflicted upon us, and as we do, we begin to see the threads of humanity that connect our inner, sacred beings with the inner, sacred beings of others. We begin to cultivate compassion for both self and other.

Surrender and the 21 Days of Expansion challenge remind me I’ve a long way to go, but the journey now seems more sacred and lusciously challenging.

I’m a little less tired of my Self, and a little more curious now about what she looks like, feels like, and how she sounds beneath the complex layering of my past. There’s a deep ache for more growth, understanding, undoing—more compassion. And not just for myself, but for others.

When we begin to understand that we are whole as we are and that we no longer need the armor of the stories we’ve inherited, adopted, and created about ourselves, we can expand out and offer the same to others.

And frankly? Our world needs that now perhaps more than ever.

Come home to your deepest Self and expand into your Power >> 

“When we come from our wholeness (rather than the story), we bring wholeness to life and to all of those around us. By raising the frequency, we bring healing to the spaces and places that are in survival, that are in separation, that are stuck in the story. It was our core desire for love that first caused us to disconnect, and it is a core desire for love that will bring us home.” ~ Nicky Clinch, Surrender: Break Free of Your Past, Realize Your Power, Live Beyond Your Story.

Resources:
(1) Newsweek.com
(2) Psychologytoday.com
(3) Economic Times
(4) TED.com