Last weekend was ASCEND, my first ever Primal Potential transformation weekend. It was amazing. I wanted to share with you one of most powerful moments of the weekend (for me).
On Saturday, I was heading back into the meeting room after a lunch break. I walked through the hotel foyer and noticed one of my clients/attendees/friends sitting alone outside the room. She waved me over.
This amazing woman, we’ll call her “K”, she’s been with me from the beginning.
She was one of the first listeners to the podcast and joined the 2nd Fat Loss Fast Track. She’s still a Fat Loss Fast Tracker, in her 4th or 5th group. She’s more than a client. We’ve become friends. Though this was our first time meeting face-to-face, I feel incredibly bonded to her.
She sat with a bag at her feet.
As I walked up to her she nervously said, “Remember how I told you I was going to make you a super hero cape?”
I laughed. I remember. She has repeatedly told me that I’m helping her save her own life and I deserve a super hero cape. I imagined a bright cape with the Primal Potential logo emblazoned in the center.
I quickly wondered if she was giving me a cape and if I should wear it for the rest of the day…
She reached into the bag and said, “I made it for you. This is how I show love.”
I burst into tears as she pulled out the most beautiful quilt I’ve ever seen (I’m tearing up now as I write this).
Before I show you this incredible work of art, I need to tell you a few things about K.
She’s relatively new to quilting. Just a couple years ago, she’d never used a sewing machine.
K works a lot. She has a really demanding work schedule and doesn’t have much free time.
K stumbled upon a quilt design that was based on intersecting circles. She had never done any type of curved design before and decided this was the one she wanted to make for me even though it felt daunting and like a lot of hard work.
Isn’t it magnificent? You should see it in person. It’s stunning.
I sent her a thank you email when I got home and she responded with more of the story behind the quilt. I asked her if I could share it with you and she said yes.
Her lessons are so much more powerful than if I tried to summarize them:
All of those parallels I talked about came to me as I was working on it. I started cutting the blocks in the evenings when I was at the beach in September, and I still wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Freaked me out a little, but I didn’t quit, I didn’t give up and find a new pattern. I just came home and started practicing. I KNEW this was the one. Please picture me with tweezers in my hand nudging the curves together and a camping headlamp on my head for more light! It was simultaneously tedious and hilarious.
Over and over, the repetition of starting to sew the blocks together, I thought of how it was the building blocks for the foundation that you teach us. This piece is the journal, now let me attach a mantra. Over and over. Ok now that’s easy now and the blocks are looking better. I’ve got the hang of it! Now I’ve gotta add this piece, the flf breakfast. Oh sh*t it looks weird. Let me practice again. F@ck, let me get the seam ripper. Ok, now these are getting better. Hey I’ve got it. Now I’ll add another.
Now I ain’t gonna lie. I got the individual blocks sewn together and put them up on my design wall (on a fuzzy felt thingy that the fabric sticks to) and I was pissed. The colors were wrong, they didn’t look like the quilt in the picture. I’ve f@cked up. There’s not enough contrast. Where are the big circles? They didn’t appear! Oh no! What a mess! This isn’t going to work. IT DOESNT LOOK LIKE IT SHOULD!!! Should I quit? I’ve done this work and come this far. Do I scrap it all and find a new pattern (the next shiny diet plan) or do I stick with it and keep going? My journey for sure doesn’t look like I thought it should.I thought I would simply breathe in what you teach and the fat would just melt off. It doesn’t look like what I had in my head. But I’ve stuck with it, just like I stuck with the quilt.
So even though it didn’t look like what I intended, I kept going. And very slowly the circles appeared. They appeared because the seam allowance disappeared as I sewed. That little 1/4 inch made all the difference. The inches are all around us. Sometimes we’ve just got to grab that little quarter inch and sew it right in. Especially when we think that little bit won’t make a difference.
The pop of pink became the focus point. I thought of it when I listened to the four agreements podcast. Even when you forget, when life gets far away from the focus, they’re still there. You can look for them, and it’ll always bring you back to center. And off-center is always ok. If you ever meet [my mom], she will tell you that the pink should have gone dead center. She told me like 100 times. I disagree. And I stuck with my guns and didn’t let her opinion influence me. Keep my blinders on, do what feels right, and forget about the opinion of others.
The circles are the magic of the quilt. They’re the magic of this journey. How every little lesson you teach us (the foundation block) becomes part of a bigger circle. And becomes part of multiple circles. How the things I learn from you and the foundation I’m building affects all the areas of my life. This mantra right here, this is a part of my financial goals, and it also helped me let go of that silly b!tch yelling at me. The quilt pattern name doesn’t have anything to do with circles. It’s actually called Winding Ways. I think that’s pretty cool, too. Even when you feel lost, like you’re winding your way through life lost with no plan, you are on a journey through a new circle, or multiple circles.
If you stand too close to the quilt looking for the circles, it can become a busy mess. I purposely used lots of difference fabrics that don’t go together, don’t seem like they should be beside each other. I even left one in I don’t really like. So many different fabrics, different things in this journey come together in ways you don’t think they will, but they work. If you don’t see the circles, it’s because you’re looking too close, focusing on the wrong part. When life feels like a busy mess, like you can’t see what you’re supposed to see, you have some choices. Shift your perspective, shift your eyes, look for the blocks. Go back to the foundation and remember all of the steps that got you where you are. Look for the blocks. Or another choice is to take a step back, quit nit picking one area, step back and look at the whole picture. The circles are there, even when you can’t see them.
Sh!t girl, even the backing didn’t turn out like I wanted it to. I wanted the pink to be in the upper left, and then when you turn it around, the lion in the lower right. It’s not. It got turned around when it got quilted. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. You can’t look at the front and the back at the same time.
And back to that lion. He almost didn’t make the quilt. Because I am type a when it comes to this sh!t. And he’s not perfect. I had never appliquéd anything in my life. Anyone who quilts would take one look at him and see what a mess he is. But he made it on the quilt because PERFECTION DOESNT MATTER! It’s a skill I need to work on and develop. If you ask me in a year or two to make a new lion, he will be much better. I’ll be better, more practiced. But I never want to forget that perfection isn’t required, nor is it even attainable. Small improvements over time.
How do you say thank you to someone who’s given you more than money can buy? Those 2 little words, thank you, can be so simple, “thanks for holding the door” or they can be so deep and important that they feel insufficient. From the bottom of my grateful little heart, thank you. Thank you for everything. You’ve changed my f@cking life. I can’t wait to see how you blossom and grow. I can’t wait to see how I blossom and grow. All I know is that I’ll be one of your biggest cheerleaders, always here for a good movie quote or inappropriate meme, and always be a friend.
I love you Elizabeth Benton.