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Zig-Zag is the True Path. Prepare to Arrive!
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Zig-Zag is the True Path. Prepare to Arrive!

The Toolbox Approach (TM) is a personal development process that can give structure to reprocessing experiences. Emotional and neurological dysregulation is at the core of all resistance to inner work

The course we take in life is like being the sailor in a sailboat and is always a tacking one. Tacking is the maneuver that sailboats use to move forward against the wind and doubles as a great concept for all of us navigating the winds of life. Tacking is getting somewhere through a lot of necessary errors that are a zig and then a zag line to a place you wanted to see, dock at and then ultimately also find your way back home from with the experience of having gotten there informing you profoundly.

As a child I always observed my father’s love for sailing from a distance. His love for sailing was in a private place from me, which I understand now. It brought to him lessons from his younger years and while he tried to incorporate it into adult life, he was in a phase of accomplishing and providing and I watched how he started to learn from it more later on, when he couldn’t do it as much. I learned the concepts of sailing like life lessons occasionally too, when he would talk about sailing more than do it with me. It still informed me profoundly that tacking is the way to approach life and like any sailor, I learned after many course corrections. I learned that to truly have an inner navigation system meant accepting that everything I do is like little errors. Each error requires a course correction and all together they get me near my purpose but not quite on top of it. I am the sailor, pilot or powerful person who guides my life always.

The Toolbox Approach (TM) is a navigation system that generates tools for your inner work so that you can be the powerful person who guides your life, accepting all the course corrections. It takes tools to do this because we have resistances inside us that comes from accumulated life experiences that only got quickly processed. They lay there waiting for us to finish the job. The ones that completed through already guide us well and therefore we all have Core Self lying in wait for us when we uncover unprocessed material. Today, I am taking a step back from the separate phases of healing in the approach to talk about tacking and the zig-zag course of the True Path so you can consider the initial phase of inner work and the “Prepare to Arrive” and the “Clean the House” practice invitation here at the end of the article/post.

Mastering the art of tacking is an essential skill for any sailor. It requires a combination of knowledge, intuition, and experience to effectively navigate through the wind and execute a successful maneuver, which is always a zig-zag path forward. By understanding the right inner commands to hold to, being aware of the wind’s behavior, and using tools, sailors can enhance their ability to “see” the wind and make informed decisions about when to tack. With practice and determination, we can be sailors that can confidently tack our boats, adjusting their course and embracing the challenges that come with life. We will find that our sailboats also have a trusty motor, your life’s motivational force inside, to lend a helping hand. So, if tacking is a lot of error-based course corrections to move forward against the wind, you also have the tools inside your inner motivation motor as back-up. That is the value of The Toolbox Approach (TM), it keeps your motor available and tacking itself is a tool inside this whole process of leading a Core Self-directed life.

So, the path to where you want to be starts with an error that gets corrected, which then becomes the next error, and so on. This tacking and zig-zag line crosses the True Path. We spend a lot of time worrying in life, but scientifically only 10% ends up true, it is 90% ineffective to worry. We don’t have to worry about making the wrong decision, but we do have to be mindful of the next direction after the error. Learning the tools for your own inner work becomes like super powered instinct that helps you know when it is time to align your next direction after a necessary error.

The two instincts to hone are the awareness of your own lack of clarity for where to direct yourself and your own dissatisfaction. Yes, ironically, growing tolerance for these negative states so you can observe them and not avoid them are positive instincts to hone. I know it is hard to accept, but this kind of turbulence in your life is beneficial, in that it tells you that you are off course in some way, and you need to find your way back to your particular path of clarity once again. These instincts can tell you that you’re off track and help you change direction or can be absent and get you exactly where avoidance goes, the wrong way!

Seeing the Path Through the Zigzag

You can simply read this next section or take some time to enter into a process and create your own zigzag diagram. Simply put, you can draw a line for “True Path” and then a zigzag one over it. This paragraph is for seeing something in your own personal zigzagging. Then you can consider the 10-day challenge offer below. Think about times of lack of clarity and dissatisfaction now and consider the zigs and zags these may have actually been crossing over your True Path. Follow the diagram below if you are interested in making this a personal process. For me, I saw that the line that always coursing through as my True Path was that I could never give up on my sense that I could see a certain kind of organization to people healing themselves. Early on I felt it as emotional disconnection inside my family and then inside myself and I tried to throw my body on the line many times to bridge the disconnections. I saw that becoming a therapist before I was fully healed was a very important zag that kept me on this path, believing in change and healing, instead of disenchanted from it. Try seeing this modified example as an invitation to use the concept on yourself:

Prepare To Arrive

Most of us want to do inner work but get blocked from it in various ways; from stopping after one self-help book, to not finding the time, and having a conflict with therapy or a therapist. Some get blocked by wanting to move on and not focus on the past, or resentment feeling forced to do inner work and even through distrust in these “types of things”. There are a whole host of other things, however, the truth is there is really only one universal block, dysregulation. The accumulated emotional experiences we have in life are all imprinted on our nervous system in a neurological story akin to hieroglyphics on a cave wall. This is the way that prehistoric humans captured story and to look at it at first glance is a head scratcher, “what’s the story?”. Well, we all have a hidden story of what has happened imprinted like this on our nervous system, the thinking and rational part of our brain is only a small part of knowing that story and because of this all of us carry fragments of neurological story that blocks us from inner work. It is dysregulated content, often patterns of dysregulation that makes us fight, flight, freeze or fawn when we try to, or accidentally access it.

Prepare to Arrive means accepting that you may need my 10-day challenge that acknowledges what I have learned as a therapist for almost two decades, we help ourselves and allow others to help us only to the amount we have arrived inside ourselves. I can attest to the value of therapy but also to its profound failure in my own life. My abandonment wounds would not allow me to trust many people and it took becoming a therapist myself and then 15 years in profound re-traumatization of my past to arrive inside myself and let the real helping and healing begin. This $25 course guides you through a process of two, twenty-minute check-in’s a day for 10 days. The Patreon Course, “Prepare to Arrive! Finding the Path to Inner Work and Healing gives you a process I call “Clean the House” in which you slowly regulate in a miniature version of the full healing journey experience. This serves as preparation to doing inner work but also serves as a wonderful tool both as a daily practice for mental well-being or a reboot when you are going through something. While my purpose is to help everyone Prepare to Arrive and then embrace inner work and the development of your own toolbox with the approach as your guide, my goal is never to prescribe your path but only to help you recognize there is one ahead that may only be challenged by a fragmented past narrative and dysregulated nervous system.

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LOOK FOR THE BOOK: “You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach (TM)” to be published late spring/summer 2025!

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