A Lesson from Hair

I have been seeing the same hairstylist, Joan, since 1987 or so. We really got to know each other. She originally worked from home, then sold that home and worked exclusively in the shop.

In 2020, with the pandemic, Joan’s shop was closed for a while. I switched to a new hairstylist who worked from her home. It was very difficult to tell Joan I was going elsewhere. How do you “break up” with a hairstylist you’ve been seeing for more than 30 years?

At the same time, I thought I was ready for a change.

“So,” my new hairstylist, Rina, said cheerfully, “what would you like me to do?”

I told her some of the things I thought I’d like my hair to do. She tried to please me.

At first, I kind of liked it. But by the next visit, I had changed my mind. I came in with a picture of someone whose hair I wanted to emulate.

CC BY-NC-ND by kightp

Rina did her best. But . . . somehow it didn’t work on me.

And—now it was shorter than I wanted. Truth be told, it looked horrible.

Rina tried and tried to please me. Neither of us knew what went wrong. My hair was looking worse and worse.

Finally, I called Joan back. She seemed delighted to have me back, which blessed me greatly. When she saw my hair, she merely said, “It’s never been that choppy before!”

I said, “I know. I don’t know what she did wrong.”

Joan said, “You have to go by how your hair grows, what it wants to do. She texturized your hair, which should never be done with your hair; it’s too fine. I will fix it, over time,” she added confidently.

You have to go by how your hair grows. That’s the key!

All these years that I had the same basic hairstyle, albeit with Joan’s expert touches that made it up to date, I thought Joan was just being rigid. But she wasn’t. She was going by the way my hair naturally grew. She was working with reality, not trying to make reality conform to some idea of how I wanted to look.

You see the point? It’s true for our lives too. When we work with our natural design, the way God made us, with our particular strengths and even weaknesses, we will be our best self in the world. When we try to conform to something that “looks good” on someone else, or that’s “the latest trend”–well, you end up with “choppy hair.”

It takes time to correct that. Thankfully, hair always grows out. And you always have the possibility of moving back into the groove of how you’re made.

I call it being Aligned with Your Divine Design(TM), or, as e.e. cummings put it, “being nobody-but-yourself.” My real goal in helping you “heal your heart issues” is to remove the blocks that keep you from being Aligned and “nobody-but-yourself–in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else,” to again quote e.e. cummings.

It’s the heart issues that make us succumb.

If you need help healing the heart issues that block you from Aligning with Your Divine Design (TM), check out my coaching at HealingCodesCoaching.com.