An Umbrella Made Of Clouds

Once again, the echoes of a magnificent coaching training -“The Evolutionary Coaching” program co-created by Dr. Zerrin Başer and Peter Stefanyi, Ph.D.- are resonating in my mind.  

The knowledge that touches me deeply always takes the shape of a metaphor before residing in my memory. After a while all the sentences, words, feelings and emotions melt away in that symbolic pot and become invisible. From that moment on my metaphor speaks to me without the need of words and I feel its silent story within me. Like two old friends, a glance is enough to understand each other. Precisely for this reason, the drawing I hastily sketched in my notebook on the final day of the training contains the essence of what remains with me from those three days.

So, when I decided to write this short piece, I first had to deconstruct my metaphor. At first -with a little help from AI- I made it visible to others as well. And now I’m adding the voice below. Finally, I hope the feelings and the emotions reach you through this page too.

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There is a beautiful expression in Turkish: Caught in hail while running from the rain.* Sometimes we want to protect ourselves so much that our focus is solely on what we are trying to avoid. We don’t even bother looking at where we’re heading… Especially if we have a huge umbrella that we believe is protecting us, we feel even safer. But what if that’s what’s actually drenching us?

We all have some limiting inner voices that keep us from reaching -or even stepping toward -our dreams. Alongside these voices, a myriad of scenes and images from our past -tied to feelings we’d rather forget- also rise into the present uninvited. Each of these voices and images is like a tiny, emotionally charged cloud, ready to pour rain onto us at any moment.

Some of these clouds are so high up in the sky that their raindrops never even reach the ground, so they don’t soak us. Some are closer to us but since they let sunlight pass through, they cast no shadow over us. Still, we know they’re all up there in our sky and we watch them from a distance. In fact, knowing that these clouds won’t affect us or our day-to-day lives makes us feel a special kind of love for them- a childlike, magical affection. We befriend them.

But some clouds are gray, dark, loud and frightening. They always come with a downpour. As a matter of fact, even the smallest and transient rain clouds can, under the right conditions, attract each other like magnets and turn into massive, black cloud clusters. These can weigh hundreds of thousands of kilograms and with the energy they hold inside, become even more powerful than an atomic bomb. Now they are capable of more than just temporary rain but also hailstorms, thunderstorms, lightnings and hurricanes.

We all have so many of these clouds in the “sky of our inner reality.” Sometimes they fly solo and sometimes collectively, feeding on each other. They cast shadows over our “pure selves”. As if that weren’t enough, we, at times, weave them together into a huge umbrella in order to keep the blazing sun of reality from blinding or burning us, and then tightly hold on to it. All to protect ourselves… Just to eventually realize that it’s sunny everywhere but where we stand. It keeps raining on us no matter what. Our personal weather forecast: “thunderstorms with heavy rain.”

No wonder we get frustrated. We often get angry at the sun, for withholding its light and keeping us in the dark for no reason. We blame the thunder that scares us, or the rain that soaks us. But strange enough, we never think to blame the umbrella of clouds we are holding on to, so fiercely. We stubbornly refuse to see that the reason the rain keeps falling onto us whilst the sun shines bright everywhere else, is the umbrella of clouds we choose to carry.

When we realize that we are avoiding things with no valid reason or keep saying or doing things that do not support us without understanding exactly why, let us stop and ponder… In those moments what if we sincerely asked: “Is this really me? The pure self I’ve known since childhood? Are these voices, thoughts, beliefs truly mine? Or did something change along the way?”, what kind of answers would we give ourselves?

Of course, the rain will fall, the wind will blow, and the sun will shine. That’s the intrinsic characteristic of weather. As the weather shifts, our mood will shift too… Or perhaps… does our mood shift our weather, our inner sky? Realizing what doesn’t really belong to us and shaking it off lightens us. What remains is the “pure self” we’re not used to seeing so much.

And when we finally take the power of the potential energy carried by those clouds and with that power, give our umbrella a good shake -returning each cloud to its proper place in the sky, to its rightful layer and distance -that’s when our body, kept too long in the shade in the name of protection, fills with light. Our hearts warm up, our eyes shine, our souls sparkle. Who knows? Maybe even a rainbow will appear after those previous rains. And our inner child rejoices in the newfound freedom.

*Jumping out of the frying pan into the fire