The Point of No Return
Don’t we all know it. You start something new. You are crushing your goals, things go well. And then out of the blue you trip up, tumble and land face down in the ground.
What if I told you that this point isn’t a coincidence? It’s got nothing to do with how well you have been doing so far. This is the glass ceiling of your comfort zone. It contains the combined energy of all the little, unhealthy choices you have made out of fear this far that make a grand comeback.
Mami Onami calls it Point 9 in the Enneagram: The Fallout. At this point in the creation cycle, whoever or whatever has benefited from you making all these unhealthy choices is coming out of the woodwork to protest against you making better ones for yourself. Usually it’s a person. Sometimes it’s a sudden injury or a massive delay.
Point 9 is no joke. More dreams have gone shipwreck here than Marvel Sequences have been released.
It’s the point most of us give up because we are already tired from pushing, and can’t find it in us to push one more time. In training, it’s the last set or the last rep. Every fibre of your being is screaming to let go of the weights, to sit down and never get back up again.
You see, breaking the glass ceiling of our comfort zone is a mental game. The pattern that you are trying to rewrite knows it’s about to lose. It will come at you with everything it has got. It’s the arena of ego where you have to face the collective of identities and beliefs that have run your day-to-day unchecked from your subconscious. Their only goal is to keep you in it. When you are in it, you can’t get two cohesive thought together, you feel like crap and can’t see your goals through all this fear. It’s the 100 seductive reasons to slow down and never start again vs. the one reason why you should keep going. Down there, it’s you versus you.
One thing that helps to unclutter the mental clusterfuck is by gaining some perspective and seeing it for what it is. Point 9 is a mental clusterfuck that drags you into blurry waters. Where you can’t get one coherent thought together, and all you see is failure.
It’s not about falling off the horse or being too scared to move. It’s all about what you do next that’s important. This point is the right of passive you unquestionably have to go through in order to bring into reality whatever you are trying to create. There is no way of getting around it. If you keep yourself frozen in this fear, you will always come back to this point in whatever you are trying to do.
The truth is, doing what we love - writing, training, creating doesn’t always feel good. Inspiration (pleasure) is a fickle attention-seeking whore that loves showing-up at 2 am, drunk and needy. Solely relying on it only gets you so far, and no further. This is why we need discipline (structure) to carry us through these spaces, so we can still show up when inspiration is not around.
Here are two ways to do that:
What hurts? A part of you is scared shitless. Which part? What are you afraid of? Why do you think continuing this way is a bad idea? Let the fear voice itself, validate it, and understand that there is nothing in it for you. There is no growth, no new information. The price you pay for staying safe is a lot of shame because you’ll think you failed. Shame always gets me, because I think people can see how many times I fell off the horse and had to climb back up again. They don’t. It’s just me.
Go back to why you started in the first place. What was it that got you so excited to start? When was the first time that you thought: “This is what I want to do?”. Do you remember a time someone complimented you on what you created? What’s your dream, the one that you tell no one, not even yourself, because you fear it may never come true? This rekindles the fire of passion. It shifts the focus from pain to goal.
The thing about falling off and getting back on your horse that no one is really honest about is that it usually takes you a few rounds to get through this point. Sometimes two or three trials. It’s not one decision or one time showing up at the gym, tired and unmotivated. Even if Instagram would like you to believe that.
The deeper the insecurities and the fear, the more often you’ll have to break through them for it to be done. But once you do, the lesson is finished and there is no going back because the pattern doesn’t exist anymore, no roots left in your subconscious. That’s why it’s the point of no return. After you are done here, you will never go back. That’s the kind of healing process I offer.
As my dad always says, “If you can’t go any further, take one more step. Just one more.”
No matter what shows up at this point, no matter fucking what, keep going. Do it scared, do it with shaking hands, scream all the way through if you must. But for the love of God, keep going and do not stop! You came so fucking far and have done so well. The shame you are feeling because you tripped is just an illusion. You didn’t fuck it up, you gathered data on how to optimise the system.
