Gazing out a Canadian window into the woods, white with fuzzy hoar frost coating every branch and twig in a magical grey-white land, I have a choice.
I can tune into this cold and dreary darkness or into its magical beauty.
I actually choose both! I attune to the cold, unknown greyness and to its magical, mysterious beauty.
Attuning to the dualities of our world is what helps to give us emotional balance and resilience. Since beginning to use the acronym EFIT for Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy about six years ago, I have grown to appreciate emotional fitness as an apt metaphor of what we are helping our clients – individuals, couples, and families achieve with all modalities of EFT – and what I continually seek for myself.
What I Did in 2022
I have been carrying you in my mind over the past few months as I work to revise my 2018 book Stepping into EFT and create an accompanying set of EFCT / EFIT Workouts. I am constantly thinking, “What will be the most helpful way to help my colleagues grow in this amazing model we have to practice?” Thank you for all the feedback you have given me about what is useful in the last book and in my training videos. (Please be sure to check out my new training videos.)
2022 was filled with many lessons from life and from my EFT colleagues that I hope to carry forward into 2023.
I learned about disenfranchised grief – grief that results from various losses which have no socially validated, public rituals for mourning or acknowledging the loss. Broken relationships, the grief of immigration, losses and dangers in Iran, Ukraine, and other places of war, political unrest, and starvation, ongoing re-exposure to racial and other minority stressors, changes and losses from COVID … the list goes on.
I also learned about the Japanese art of kinsunkura – the art of repairing broken pottery with liquid gold or lacquer dusted with powdered gold. Emotional fitness may be like kinsunkura, treating breakage and repair, loss and recovery as part of our story, rather than as something to disguise.
What I Hope for 2023
I hope the year ahead is one of renewal for you! I wish for you an abundance of loving connections and peace in 2023. May you celebrate repairs of broken places and grieve with patience and hope as you continue to construct the patchwork quilt of 2023.
I look forward to seeing you online on February 4 for EFT in Action. Let me or Steve Wampler, the registration coordinator, know if you have an interested couple for this event! February 24 and 25, 2023 will be our first in-person training event for years – EFIT 1. Please join us if you are new to EFIT. If you have completed EFIT Level 2 and would like to assist, let Mary Hinson, the registration coordinator, know.
Book ahead for AIRM (online) and EFIT Level 2 (in-person) trainings later in 2023 and tell your colleagues about our September in-person Externship!
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