Bonnie shifted her perspective
and restored her energy for choosing creative focus with Reveri.
Bonnie and her husband, Tom, uprooted their lives and moved across the country. They left the home they had built and all the places they had known. It can be difficult to make such a drastic change, especially if like Bonnie and Tom you have lived in North Carolina for 30 years. But like most of life’s big changes, they needed to do so for the better.
The pair found some land in Oregon to build on. Prior to their secluded life in the forests of North Carolina, where they could walk for miles and not see another soul, they lived in rural Maryland.
Bonnie was accustomed to a private and secluded lifestyle. In fact, that was the type of environment she thrived in.
“Tom is a dandelion. He can grow anywhere — even in a crack in the sidewalk. Bonnie is an orchid. She flourishes in particular environments, natural places, few people, and is self-constrained.”
Move a plant from a window and into the shade, it begins to visibly wilt. How many of us have resisted change or not made the correct decisions to be in the environment that enables our growth?
There is only so much in our own control, however, as the couple soon learned. Houses started getting built around them, and a homeowners’ association (HOA) followed. Before they knew it, they found themselves surrounded by angry and nosy neighbors.
This was a shock to the both of them. It had a particularly dreadful impact on Bonnie. It never occurred to her that a life like this existed. For the entire first half of her life, she minded her own business and coexisted among people who minded theirs.
“My home-as-refuge counts more than someone’s pressing opinion of my petunias. Whenever they poked a stick at me, I broke it off and (nicely) handed it back to them; I resented having to do this.”
The engineer in her said, “Well, we just have to leave.” But it’s very complicated and challenging to find land these days. The world is very crowded. Unfortunately, it wasn’t such a simple solution as uprooting their lives once again.
So she tried to resolve it internally, looking for ways to ameliorate her stress.
“During four years of this I tried many things to turn down the intrusive stress.”
“Libraries and podcasters had answers, but they clogged each other up. All were enticing and worthy, but in the end they’re resource materials, not downloadable solutions.”
Then she found Reveri. From her very first experience with the app — Bonnie believes she started with the Relieve Stress exercise — she felt a huge perspective shift. Suddenly it all made sense, and it was all okay.
The perspective shift enabled her to see something that she’d been previously blind to: That the most agitated people were moving away. “I think they had overstimulated themselves by the effort of building… Once the core group left, new volunteers didn’t (yet) fill their shoes. I allowed myself to loosen up in proportion to these changing facts. In Reveri terms, this is ‘riding the wave.’”
Then, Bonnie returned back to her old self. Her creative half came back to meet her logical (engineer) half, who had been in the driver’s seat for so long. She realized that her initial decision, to simply move away when met by antagonistic forces, came from a limited perspective. “If X, then Y.”
But what about secret option Z? Only when her creative self rejoined did she begin to feel complete again.
“Then, I began to study the life I had cut off so pragmatically. You really can’t do that, or I can’t. Using Reveri and daily writing I’ve been able to bring my old life into my new one and thread them together.”
Bonnie uses “Reveri all around.” Especially Relieve Stress, Improve Sleep, and Enhance Focus full-length sessions. Also, Quick Relief exercises are some of her favourites these days.
“Here’s the thing: What I’m learning is worth knowing. It’s strengthening my core values of competence, autonomy, and initiative. I trust my earned intuitions again, and my integrity is intact. My energy for choosing creative focus is restored.”
Bonnie is a real Reveri member.