Tag: acceptance

When it’s not easy

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

We get to do the work.

When we’ve been doing the work of growing and expanding ourselves by learning concepts and tools to help us evolve into who we want to become, sometimes we may think, “I should know this already. I should be better at this. Why am I still reacting this way? Why is this still hard for me?”

Why, friends? Because we are human beings with human brains.  

Just because we know the work, the tools involved, and the ways of thinking that can benefit us, doesn’t mean we no longer have human emotions and human experiences. That we no longer have to do the work. 

We learn the tools and beneficial ways of thinking in order to help us navigate our human experience on purpose, consciously and deliberately, with compassion and grace for ourselves and others. 

There isn’t a point where we get to stop doing the work—unless we choose to be stagnant and stay exactly where we are. It’s possible to do that, but also as human beings, it’s unlikely that we’ll want to choose that for ourselves.

We will always get to do the work. And that’s not a “bad” thing. It means that we’re continuing to expand ourselves and grow beyond where we currently are. That we want to be even more of who we are becoming.  

Our primitive brains evolved to want to be efficient (to do “easy” things), to avoid pain, and to seek pleasure to help us survive. 

When we’re wanting to live a fulfilled life where we’re not just surviving but thriving, we can’t always choose the easy things, we will likely be uncomfortable facing new situations and experiences, and we will delay immediate pleasure/gratification in order to attain our long-term well-being. 

So we do the work in order to overcome our primitive brains and utilize our sophisticated brains (our prefrontal cortex) to their fullest potential. 

Some thoughts for helping us continue doing the work:

  • I’m getting better at this, even if it’s not easy yet.
  • This is still hard for me, and that’s okay.
  • I’m learning something from this and that’s why I don’t already know better.
  • I’m reacting this way and catching myself instead of being unaware.
  • My awareness is helping me through this.

The work is always here. No matter how much we know, we don’t get to escape the work. And it’s worth it to see who we become.

Your turn: Are you willing to keep doing the work to become the best version of you possible? Instead of thinking “I should know this by now,” what is a more compassionate and empowering thought? Are you open to remembering that you always have a choice to do the work or to not do it, and to confront the consequences depending on what you choose?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

When you beat yourself up

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Stop it.

How does our sense of self-compassion motivate us differently than our self-judgment?

Most of us are used to judging or punishing ourselves into action. This might sound like: 

“I’m so disgusting, I need to workout extra hard today.” 

“I’m such a loser, I have to figure out how to make more money.” 

“I’m so inadequate, I need to find a partner.” 

“I’m a mess, I have to get this right.”

Whatever it is, we think mean things about ourselves in order to “motivate” us to do what we think we need to do in order to feel better about ourselves. “If I stop beating myself up, if I accept myself the way I am, I’ll get complacent and lazy, and never change.”

We think we need to beat ourselves up in order to take helpful actions. We might be in a rush to get “over there” because we think that’s when we’ll feel better about ourselves. Beating ourselves up may have gotten us results in the past, but at what cost to the relationship with ourselves? 

When we have a self-judging narrative, everything we do can feel punishing:

  • Instead of seeing a healthy plate of food that will nourish our body, we see a restrictive, limited diet
  • Instead of doing a workout and celebrating what our body can do, we see it as a way to burn calories and whip ourselves into shape–sometimes even as a penalty for “not eating right”
  • Instead of staying happy in a new relationship, we find ways to prove that we’re not worthy of happiness
  • Instead of becoming aware of how we talk to ourselves, we beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up!

Kindness, love, and respect for ourselves doesn’t start when we hit a certain goal of ours. 

In fact, when we do hit that goal without doing the work of self-compassion and acceptance, the reward will likely be temporary and we might still not like ourselves the way we thought we would when we finally get “over there” by hitting that goal. It’s because achieving goals doesn’t create our feelings. Our thoughts create our feelings. 

Kindness, love, and respect for ourselves can start right now, exactly as we are. 

Decide that that’s possible. 

When we have compassion and acceptance for ourselves exactly as we are at this time, we can start making the changes we want to see in our lives from a place of care, love, and patience. It’s about our relationship with ourselves. So that in the long-run, we are where we want to be with ourselves and in our lives, loving and accepting ourselves along the way. No matter what.

Your turn: Are you open to feeling accepting of yourself as you are? If not, what’s getting in the way? What are some of the self-judging thoughts you’re aware of? What are some self-compassionate thoughts you can have about yourself instead? What would happen today if you found some self-compassion for yourself in a situation where you usually beat yourself up?

Feeling challenged by finding more self-compassionate thoughts? Book an exploratory session here to build your self-compassion practice.

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

How to feel your feelings

~ The Healing Modalities ~ 1 Comment

Stop resisting.

All of us experience emotional pain at certain points in our lives. We often turn to food, alcohol, shopping, work, or something else to ignore the pain we feel. These temporary distractions only prevent the process that needs to happen to let the painful feelings go.

What happens when feelings hurt:

• Something occurs to trigger your emotional pain.

• You can barely make sense of it and it overwhelms you.

• Emotional pain enters your body—the vibrations in your body caused by the thoughts you’re having are excruciating.

When this happens, you can make a choice to: avoid it, resist it, react to it, or process it. 

Avoiding

When you choose to avoid your pain and pretend it isn’t there, you are basically lying to yourself. This doesn’t work long term. The truth is that avoidance causes pain to fester. The more you avoid it, the more you have to avoid it. You might eat, for example, instead of feel. Then you might get upset because you ate when you weren’t hungry. Then you might obsess about your body or your exercise routine. All of these tactics keep you from addressing the cause of the pain and instead, multiply undesirable symptoms such as weight gain.

Resisting and Reacting

When you resist the emotion, you tell yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling this way and then you feel bad in addition to the painful emotion you’re already feeling. When you resist, it’s like trying to hold a large beach ball under the water. The beach ball always wants to pop back up and gets stronger the more you try to push it down. 

When you deal with pain this way, you act it out or fight against it. You might yell at the person you believe caused your pain. You might talk behind their back, you might give them the silent treatment, or maybe take even more drastic measures against them. This may seem to help with the pain temporarily because it alleviates the vibration in the moment, but these actions almost always backfire.

When we react from negative emotion, we almost always get a negative result. Our actions are usually uncontrolled and unthoughtful. Fighting against the emotion becomes a losing battle–anxiety speeds up the vibration of the already painful emotion, making it even more intense.

Processing and Allowing

When you choose to process pain, you are choosing to feel it. We are so reluctant to feel pain on purpose. We tell ourselves that feeling pain is a bad thing because it feels bad, but this isn’t actually true. When we allow ourselves to feel our pain all the way through, we see that it’s manageable and it can do no long term harm (unlike avoiding and fighting, which can have many long term consequences).

Allow the feeling to be in your body even if you can’t make sense of it in your mind yet. Observe. Say in your mind “I am processing pain” over and over as you feel the pain. You don’t need to fix it or make it go away.

Notice any desire to react, resist, and avoid. You can say the desire out loud or in your mind, or write it down. You don’t have to act on it—just acknowledge it. You can tell yourself, “That won’t help” or “That’s not worth it” every time you notice the desire. 

Remind yourself, “This is pain…This is part of being human.” Allow the painful vibration to be there as you do laundry, take a shower, drive your car, or talk on the phone. Notice its heaviness, its energy, its ability to take your breath away. Just notice.

As you do this, you’ll begin to see that your thoughts about the situation appear. It may take a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks. Let it take as long as it takes—there’s no need to force it. Just keep noticing what you notice.

Your turn: What happens to the feeling if you just allow it to be there and feel it all the way through? Where do you feel it in your body? Does it move around or stay still? Is it hot, cold, warm? What color is it? What happens if you’re allowed to feel this way without reacting to, resisting, or avoiding the emotion?

What’s on your mind? Is there something on your mind that you’d like to have addressed in these weekly posts? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, let me know. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

Transitions

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment 
Transitions

long shadows leap the length of my mind
twirling and spinning like orange brown leaves blowing in the lane

this year, this year 
I want it to be over, but
I don’t want it to end, to
mark another year passing where 
I didn’t “do” enough
what do I have to show for it?
nothing, is the easy answer
not enough, is the harder answer

this cycle, unstoppable 
Life, Death, Rebirth 
Life, Death, Rebirth 
in every moment of the day, something dies
and something new comes forward 

can I allow this to be?
release the Resistance 
open to Acceptance 
settle into Surrender
feeling cradled by what is

this, being enough.

The Path to Healing: A Long Road to Shortcuts

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

First published on The Green Slate

I’ve realized more and more that when it comes to healing physical and emotional pain, there are no shortcuts…at first.

When you’re right at the beginning and you’ve fallen in pretty deep, into the pain, you’re looking for the shortcut. You want the pain to be gone yesterday. And you do certain things to bandage the pain, to stave it off, and it might be better for a little while. But then the pain is back, and you realize you’ve fallen even further into it.

Now you need even more of a bandage here, but you’re in so much pain that you know the bandage method won’t work anymore. So you allow yourself to stay here feeling stuck in your pain and maybe end up turning to self-pity. “Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”

“Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”

You are seeing through eyes veiled by pain. This line of thinking shifts you from the powerful human being you are and the life that you want to live, to a place of suffering, and instead generates anger, frustration, fear, sadness, and more pain. You get to a point where you begin to live in this space, feeling like you will never leave this place of pity, pain, sorrow, and even deep loss.

Sugar (of Dear Sugar) is right when she says, “Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.” Because by the time you are in a place to choose to truly heal, you will have been gutted, likely by your own actions.

You’ve asked why? a thousand times, you’ve spent days in bed because you just couldn’t do anything else, you’ve spent time forgetting to eat because the pangs of hunger are easier to deal with than your real pain, you’ve spent too much time crying, you’ve allowed yourself to disconnect from your true self, to get lost, you’ve considered doing things to help yourself heal, but you didn’t have the courage at the time to really go for it. You were allowing yourself to suffer. You weren’t ready yet. No shortcut exists for this part of the process. All your actions–or lack of, all your thoughts, and all your pain up to this point were a necessary part of it. You just go through it and it takes as long as it needs to take.

Then you arrive. You arrive at the minute, hour, day, thought, when you say, “I’m done. I’m f*cking done with this.” And you mean it. Because you will be so tired of everything unhealthy that you’ve been doing, thinking, feeling. Something inside you has chosen to surrender and accept, instead of resist. Maybe before, when you were looking for the shortcuts and you proclaimed halfheartedly that you were done, you resisted truly choosing to be done. So the pain wore on. But not this time. Not when you truly mean it in your soul, your mind, and your body. That’s when you’re ready to heal.

Everything happens as and when it needs to happen.

Everything happens as and when it needs to happen. This is where you can find the shortcuts, at this point. This is where you find the people who have the tools to help you heal and potentially shorten your path. You might finally decide to call that therapist. You might have a serendipitous lead to a different type of healing modality that works 10 times better than the treatment you were using before. You might see a friend who you haven’t seen for years and she will see your physical/emotional pain and suggest that you see her “guy/girl” and that will shift your healing path.

Because you shifted your frequency by really choosing to be done and really being ready to heal, your healers will be revealed to you, and your body and mind will be fully receptive. These are the people who can guide you out of that darkness that you thought you’d never leave.

It does take time, the right help, working with love and gratitude, but you will be healed. You will leave that deep, dark place. And when you do, you’ll look back at yourself in that place and remember that version of you that had been there. You might wonder at the fact that that was you, that you were even there at all. “How did I ever get there? I remember that darkness, that pain that felt like it would never leave… I allowed myself to be led there, to be lost. But I have a knowing now. I know I will never have to go back there and suffer like that.”

And you won’t. Now your body is stronger, your mind and heart calmer and freer. You’ve reconnected with your powerful self and gained back the vision of the life you want to live. Because you took a long road to a shortcut, but it was the right path to true healing.

Hello from The Healing Modalities!

~ The Healing Modalities ~ 1 Comment

The path to healing emotional and physical pain can sometimes be long. Much longer than you’d hope or expect. But in these things, we must be patient and know that the healing is happening. The body, in its divineness, has its own healing mechanisms and knows exactly what to do. However, since ancient times, people in the world have used methods to aid the body’s healing process.

I’ve had my share of healing journeys and understand the pain that can be involved. If it’s something of a physical nature, I like being told that there are natural ways to heal, instead of just being told to cover the pain using any assortment of pain killers. Yes, that is a bandage approach, but it doesn’t address the true cause of the pain in order to remedy it more effectively. Of course, alternative healing modalities will not help you to replace a valve in your heart, but they can help in your healing afterwards. I appreciate practitioners who spend time understanding me, my lifestyle, and my approach to life in order to recommend a healthy healing path and plan. Your full participation and dedication is necessary to achieve your goal.

If the pain is of an emotional nature, this is sometimes even harder to heal than physical pain. It takes a lot of personal work and perseverance. It takes looking inside yourself and seeing some things you might not like seeing in order to clear out those things in a healthy way. It takes re-evaluating how you feel about yourself and if you are giving yourself the respect and care that you’d like others to give to you. Sometimes because of things that may have happened to us when we were very young, we don’t know how to do this. Or sometimes because we are so focused on the way something is “supposed to be,” we lose sight of what IS and may miss chances to heal along the way.

When healing, resistance can play a major role in the process and it is hard to even be aware that resistance is there within you sometimes. But acceptance and surrender also play roles in healing, and they are what we must work towards. Acceptance and surrender are usually hard to come by and take a lot of personal work, but once they are there within you, the resistance melts away and you are in a place to truly be ready to heal.

Here, I’d like to share with you some alternative healing modalities and stories. Eventually I will make recommendations to specific practitioners, but that will come later.