Telephone (518) 392-9150
Facsimile (518) 392-9130
Email: davidseth@davidseth.com

HOME

Criminal & DWI

Appellate Litigation

Real Estate

Traffic Cases

General Litigation

About Me

A REAL BIG DEAL:
Real Estate, Birth and Death

Selling or buying a house is for most people a brief, frightening excursion into the unfamiliar. The world of real estate brokers, lawyers, banks, title insurance companies, home inspectors, and appraisers is alien territory. Stress and fear abound until the closing. Then there's a sigh of relief at the end of the process.

Surprisingly, selling and buying houses is also a remarkable opportunity to learn things about ourselves we might not learn in any other way. Specifically, it's a great opportunity to bring to awareness our unconscious patterns of how we begin and end things in our lives and to begin consciously to re-design these patterns.

Fear Of Getting Stuck, Sadness At Ending
In buying or selling a home the feelings of both sellers and buyers are typically glossed over. The most common feeling is fear.

For most sellers the fear is that the buyer isn't really going to buy the house and pay for it, or that something so far unseen is going to derail the sale and cost lots of money. This fear is increased by the fact that most sellers are in the process of buying another home for themselves, and the sale of the first home is almost always needed to finance the new one. If the sale doesn't occur, the seller might have two homes at once, a serious financial burden often imagined as leading ultimately to catastrophe.

For most buyers the fear is that there is something wrong with the house they don't know about, or with the mortgage that they've overlooked, and that's going to cost them tons of money or make a closing impossible. Buyers' fears are often aggravated by the need to move into the home they are buying without undue delay. If the sale doesn't occur, where will the buyer live? The possibility arises of an unpleasant, long term limbo between the last home, which they've already given up, and the new one they can't quite buy and move into.

These fears, however, are usually withheld and projected onto concern about the details of the transaction and worry about it. Phone calls to brokers, lawyers, and mortgage bankers to allay the fears are legion. Complaints or suspicions about the other party, the brokers, the banks, or the lawyers frequently arise.

For sellers, in addition to fear, a common feeling is sadness. Sadness is often stirred by nostalgic memories about the house, including the growth of children, the ending of relationships, the starts and ends of important parts of the sellers' lives.

The Opportunity To Learn
What can you learn about yourself while you're buying or selling real estate and how do you learn it? In completing several hundred real estate transactions, I've discovered that the sellers' fears most resemble issues about death and that the buyers' fears most evoke issues about birth. These birth and death issues are our unconscious patterns of how we begin new things (birth) and how we end things (death). Paying attention to feelings in a real estate transaction lets us make these birth and death patterns conscious, so that instead of just following our lifelong patterns, we can begin to design how we want the beginnings and endings in our life to be.

You don't need to take my word for this. Instead, if you're now in a real estate transaction, or if you've completed one fairly recently, simply complete the following exercise and see what emerges for you.

The Exercise
This exercise can be done standing up with your eyes closed. Have someone read the instructions to you, or use a tape recorder to play them back to yourself.

Relax and breathe comfortably. Now turn your thoughts to your real estate transaction and think about the part of the transaction you find most annoying, most frightening, the part you most want to avoid. Dance your attention lightly over this aspect of the transaction and let the details of it gently emerge: who said what to whom, what you think these events mean. Allow yourself to lightly focus on the specifics of the uncomfortable part of the transaction and, if you like, to complain out loud about it.

Now turn your attention to your body. Notice where in your body you have feelings and sensations while you think about this part of the real estate transaction. Continue to think about the transaction and at the same time pay particular attention to the sensations and feelings in your body. Scan your stomach, your solar plexus, your shoulders and neck. Notice the feelings you have when you think about the transaction.

Now inhale your breath into the parts of your body where you have these feelings, into the sensations you have in your body, and see if you can gradually make the feelings and sensations bigger, more pronounced, more intense by breathing into them and by subltle movements of your body to accentuate and magnify them. Make the feelings as large as you can.

Now pause and ask yourself the following questions, pausing after each to let answers arise. You don't need to speak the answers out loud, but can if you want to.

What's true about these feelings I'm having?

What's familiar about these feelings I'm having? What do these feelings remind me of?

(For Buyers only) How is buying this house a lot like how I usually start new things in my life? How is buying this house like how I was born? What new parts of me are emerging as I buy this house?

(For Sellers only) How is selling this house a lot like how I let go of or release things in my life? How is selling this house like dying? What parts of me are dying as I sell this house?

When you've finished the answers, open your eyes, and move around the room.

Insights
If you were able to answer these unusual questions, be sure to appreciate yourself for taking the time to make this inquiry and for finding answers. Be sure to appreciate your birth or death pattern for successfully bringing you this far in your life.

If you weren't able to answer these questions, be sure to appreciate yourself for asking them. You may want to express your willingness to have answers emerge later on in their own time and way. When answers do emerge later on, be sure to appreciate your birth or death pattern for getting you this far in your life.

After you've appreciated your old patterns, and yourself for having them, you can begin to ask yourself, how would I like my beginnings and endings to be? And you can begin to design ways of beginning and ending that are joyful, easy, effortless, and simple.

| Top of Page | Home |