Why Are We Here?
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Hi, community:
In light of Reset’s recent 4 year anniversary, I’ve been reflecting on the question, “Why are we here?” I mean this both on a personal/small business level and also on a much greater, global humanity question.
With the recent photos from NASA’s WEBB Telescope, the question of life outside of Earth feels less contemplative. In a Story Pirates episode, my kids and I were listening to, Louie, the 8-year-old author, talk about how looking up at space made him feel so small and humbled.
So today, I’m going to share with you a bit of how I go about this answer and how it’s been profound in my healing from my existential dread and anxiety that peaked over the last couple of years.
TOOLS
As a business owner, I’ve been tasked many times to identify my “why”. Simon Sinek, an author and speaker of a revolutionary TedTalk has helped many leaders understand the importance of “why”.
When we first started Reset, I had a loose understanding of our “why” as far as wanting to create a space for busy professionals and their families to pause, gain tools for awareness, and truly “reset”.
This idea of a Reset was about taking an empowered pause. In that pause, we were giving ourselves the opportunity to choose a response to best serve ourselves and others. In resetting over and over again, we create ripples in our habits and our communities.
Now, I understand Reset is much bigger than that. Our “why” is bigger than what I originally dreamed. Now I see that a Reset can also serve as a giant wake-up call. It can serve as a huge shift in your life that helps you examine everything and determine what’s working and what is not.
I believe Reset exists to carry us through both these micro, habitual, compounding opportunities for shifts and also for our greater, more profound, more enlightened wake-ups. I believe one informs the other.
I believe that once we remove the day-to-day clutter, we make room for the courage to look at our lives from a wider lens and comprehensively assess everything with vulnerability and grace. It is then that we can reach a higher level of self-compassion, patience, presence, acceptance, and joy. And that is where the magic happens.
When we’re living in continual alignment with authenticity, we can affect the world and those around us for the better. This process is how we make the world one that we want to leave behind for our children.
Quick pause: may I ask you for something? In our dreams to seriously make this world a better place, it helps to have the validation of you, our readers, and clients who have experienced our work. Would you mind taking 2 minutes to write us a review so more people can get access to Reset? I would be forever grateful. Thank you.
GRATITUDE
I’ve had a few colleagues come to me this week and say, “Congratulations on your anniversary!” and I felt so awkward. My dad would tell me that it’s important to recognize your accomplishments, and hard work, and to never devalue your efforts.
Maybe it’s my bleeding counselor heart but I don’t feel like it’s “my” anniversary. I feel like every single person who has encountered Reset from our first clients and employees to our current clients and team is a part of where we are today. None of this would have been possible without the co-creation from our clients asking for what they need, our therapists desiring a job to do this magical work and so many amazing partnerships that have propelled us into more spaces to connect people to our work.
I’m so grateful for the team members who manifested this job as their dream job all while I was hoping for someone just like them to join our mission.
I’m so grateful for the ingenuity of our team to create programs like The Family Reset and The Couples Reset (a new, intensive program launches this Fall!) and create hundreds of articles full of tremendous free resources.
I’m so incredibly honored and grateful for each of you - our supporters, our fans, our word-of-mouth spreaders, our loyal subscribers, and each of you who has trusted one of us to help you or a loved one on your journey.
Thank you. Thank you for believing in Reset. Thank you for creating a ripple effect as we try to keep doing good in this world.
(Also, thank you for forgiving typos, my mood swings, and vulnerabilities, and still reading anyhow. Seriously, you’re too good to me.)
INNOVATION
Now, we’ve done some WORK in the last 4 years building this little community of ours.
From July 2018 when it was therapist, party of 1, to today with our team of 18 clinicians, we have held almost 20,000 therapy sessions. In that time span, we have developed relationships with 1,600 individuals to help them with their mental health care. It blows my mind. And these numbers show me that this is just the beginning.
So what is next? Why are we here?
I firmly believe that each of us is here to raise our consciousness.
From Priests to Psychologists to Botanists to Physicists to Scientists, there is now a concrete, collective understanding of our consciousness. There is even a pretty known model of consciousness, whether called Spiral Dynamics of the Map of Consciousness or even the Enneagram (which we love to use with clients!).
As humans, though, we get so stuck in the lower levels of consciousness based on fear, pride, shame, and other ego-driven traits. A lot of this is not anyone’s fault - it’s a fault of a broken system, culture, and community to which most people are blind to see the flaws and instead just carry on through.
However, with awareness and doing the work, we can move beyond these lower levels of survival and start to transcend into a more peaceful, easeful, living existence. And you don’t have to be a monk to do this!
(Although, it’s so much easier being enlightened when you don’t have a 2 yr old smearing poop on your shirt or a pick-up line to wait in when you have to pee.)
FEELS
But why even try to transcend our consciousness? You might be saying that this feels like a lot of work and time and energy and also, is it even worth it?
So, yes…when we begin to all be more loving, it will change our world. It’s as simple as that. Seriously.
You see, loving doesn’t mean the conventional type of love you experience towards a child or loved one. Being loving really means you look at everything and everyone with unconditional love. That means no judgment and just a lot of acceptance. It is really a state of awareness - to be in lovingness - that fills you with so much gratitude, compassion, and grace that you can’t help but be empathetic, patient, wise, and creative.
If we can all raise our consciousness, even just a little bit, beyond scarcity, fear and pride then maybe we all have a chance at creating a better future for the next generations. But we cannot sit idly by and just hope and pray that someone will do something to save us all.
We have to save ourselves. We save ourselves by raising our collective consciousness to one where we want to save everything and everyone. We see the good and preciousness in all things and want to preserve them. We save the planet, we save the children and we live joyfully through it all.
And all of us that do this work will be strong enough and powerful enough in our collective consciousness of love to overwhelm all the nasty, bad energy out there.
So where does Reset fit into this?
We’re busy creating a place to start. Through our mission of redefining how people experience mental health care, we’re empowering people with the tools to reach our vision of having every person establish a mindful lifestyle.
We’re going into homes, businesses, schools, marriages and individual psyches to help one person and one system at a time become more loving towards themselves and those around them.
It’s ambitious, I know. But heck, 4 years later we’re beyond what I expected, so the only place to go from here is up. I’m stubborn and I have our vision to fulfill. I have ideas and plans and I’m going to keep asking for help so this endeavor isn’t so lonely.
So, are you with me?
If you’re feeling the call towards our “why”, please reach out. We are looking to expand our collaborations with community partners, businesses, and individuals to collectively raise the consciousness of our world.
Let’s do this.
Click here to learn more about The Individual Reset.
