20 May Ever since I can remember, I was overwhelmed … and then it changed
Ever since I can remember I’ve been overwhelmed. Afraid of life. At the same time in love with life.
I’ve hated how confusing it was. Been embarrassed by it. Pretended I wasn’t.
Over the years I’ve played with changing my relationship to these feelings. Similar to how I describe the differences between anxiety and excitement in my book Becoming Safely Embodied.
Which has me realize…yet again…one of hardest things we’ll ever do is relaxing our grip on the storyline imprinted in us unconsciously.
‘Course, it doesn’t help that we’ve added layers and layers to the original story making it rich and robust and hard to challenge.
Certainly I have lots of real life instances where I’ve been scared. That’s probably what propelled me into decades of academic attachment study and research and 40 years of clinical practice to suss out the multiple ways neglect anchors in our Internal Working Model.
And then…I also have a lifetime of yoga, meditation, Sufi, BSE and other practices challenging and clearing my heart of the layers of imprinting.
Which all came crashing into connection (oddly enough, when I sought refuge in a sabbatical unplugging from who I thought I am and who I should be).
My inner world was rocked. Well, more than rocked.
It was like an inner explosion erupted. There were days I felt paralyzed, hiding what was happening even from my beloved husband, Jack, because I couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
Psychological frameworks I knew offered to calm my nervous system. Work with my parts. Link my past and my present.
Since those are critical elements of building internal structure, it’s what I’ve done for decades, since I was a teenager.
I’ve made healing my life work. It’s foundational to what I teach in books, trainings courses, coaching programs.
And yet…this was different and I couldn’t even say why I knew that.
Rather…what I did know was I was grateful for the years building the self structure to contain this inner eruption even as it wrecked havoc on my mental stability.
Desperately I reached out to the wisdom teachings for guidance.
Using the teachings I stayed with sensations as they pounded through me. I told myself I was training my body to let them rise, crest and fall.
Then again and again and again.
The intensity of felt experience ruptured the storyline I’d constructed over a lifetime.
Gotta say it was one of the hardest things I’ve been through.
There’s more to this, of course. But the headline is realizing that there is way more to us than the story we use to describe our inner and outer lives.
Discovering who we are and what our heart and soul has incarnated for is a worthy quest.
You’ve probably heard me describe healing trauma as a Modern Day Bodhisattva Path. I’m more and more convinced of that.
The s*** storm of life happens.
Then, it’s time to transform that **** into compassion, goodness mercy.
Now it’s time to add our light into the dawn, to flicker with tender vulnerability, igniting our heart fire to glow from within.
In the process being the change we want to bring about in the world.
The first part of the story is building a self structure to actually hold the power of prana as it moves in through and around us.
The second part is allowing prana to destroy that structure so prana can revitalize itself with consciousness.
One of my videos may describe this better if you’re interested…