Writing out my thoughts has helped me to gain a new perspective of myself. In sharing these writings, it is my hope to help others to better understand themselves. It is my belief that with each of us who chooses this path of greater understanding of thy self, that it inspires others to do the same. This building momentum is the force that drives me to share, for in my vulnerability, I find my strength. I believe that you can also find yours there.
~~~In reading some of my posts, you will see that growth is not always pretty. It is in breaking apart and coming undone that a seed sprouts and breaks free of its own captivity. It is also out of mud that the lotus blossoms. ~~~Please join me in seeing the beauty of growth within the deconstruction of our limiting beliefs. ~~T.C.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to lay down some tracks for helping others to meditate. This past week, I added a creator profile to my SoundCloud account and laid down some meditation tracks!
The links are below. It’s my goal to add 1-2 guided meditations/week. We’ll see what actually unfolds. =)
Sadly, my work on InstaGram has dwindled. It was becoming increasingly more difficult for me to “keep it short & simple” with the memes. When I tried to shorten the memes, I lost their intent and meaning…
Happy Meditating!
Namaste
Funny looking edit here. Tried to reposition the profile image, to no avail. Promise it looks a little better on the app/site.
This blog is peppered with various strategies for moving through emotional turmoil. Tonight, I experienced a new strategy that was more efficient than others I’ve used so far.
Wednesday’s are transition days for me, and they stand as a reminder of where my life is not how I had planned. Having the day off made today a less distracted and thus a more emotionally charged Wednesday than usual.
While sitting with my emotions, I used my usual alchemy techniques and while the edges were less sharp, the heaviness of grief still weighed on me. It was then that I felt myself “beside myself.” Then I began to assure my “beside self” that I had every right to feel every bit of what I was feeling; even down to my desires to smash things, which weren’t okay desires to follow through, yet I acknowledged they were okay to feel.
So now I sit, no longer needing to be beside myself, reintegrated, and more at peace with myself and this situation. Yes, there is still some work to do, yet it already feels that much better.
May we each find our inner path to peace, understanding that what we feel is what we feel and it’s really okay to feel; self-validation. Understanding that just because we feel it doesn’t mean we must live it. And that blocking our feelings prevents us from fully living.
Somewhere I lost my way. It happens to us all at some point. Getting back into the writing saddle has been more challenging than I expected this time.
It was innocent, the loss. Or so it seemed. Until I realized one day there was something missing. It’s as if I left my best friend behind at a rest stop and it took many miles before I saw my friend was no longer in the car. Yet it’s worse than that because I was left with a sense of loss without understanding what the loss even was for some time.
During this time I’ve allowed myself to be distracted and not all in healthy ways. It seems that imbalance is inevitable and when we find ourselves out of balance, how we respond is more important than the actual loss of balance.
I’ve also allowed life circumstances to chip away at my resolve to write and share, having already felt too vulnerable. Yet, I see now where this was a fallacy. It is in writing and sharing that leads to better understanding, at least that’s what works for me.
So cheers to getting back in the saddle! Now to find the sunset, the partner in crime and the horses… 😉 🌅
May we all be well in our journeys, understanding that where we have taken side trails that it is just part of the learning process.
Judgement. We all hate receiving it, yet when we scratch the surface, many of us are living our lives judging ourselves and others. In observing my own thoughts and behaviors, I see where I judge nearly constantly, both myself and others. In hearing others talk, and in attempting to separate myself from the habit of gossip (even when I have someone’s “interest” in mind), I see how easy it is to engage in the judgement more than not. But is it right?
While I do believe that on some levels judgement is required, when judgment is overactive, we can find ourselves more and more miserable and separated from others more than united. Discernment allows us to make choices that benefit us and others. Without discernment, we would be frozen in the water.
When we feel that judgment no longer serves us, we must see what we want to change first so that we can make it happen. The next step is to replace one habit with another. To this, I’ve decided to give more spoken complements than silent judgements. This helps change the tide while also recognizing that, on some level, judgment and discernment is necessary.
May we each see the habits which no longer serve us, so that we may move forward, individually and collectively. May we learn to judge ourselves and others less and less, allowing greater compassion for ourselves and others.
It is very easy for me to give, ’tis much harder to receive. I give of my time, patience, efforts and knowledge to others everyday. Sometimes I get paid for it and sometimes I don’t.
Religious dogma and society support giving more than receiving. “It’s better to give than to receive,” Acts 20:35 (KJV). Welfare recipients are shamed for being “needy.” Yet I wonder if there are deeper reasons…
Receptivity means having faith and surrendering. It also means being vulnerable and “accepting” what we receive. Receiving is also being, which is actively “doing nothing.” (that was triggering to state). Receiving is very much a divine feminine trait; where being feminine is often associated with being weak. Again, where religious dogma and society can play a role in how we perceive things.
In sitting with my discomfort today around being receptive, I saw several “forces” at play. Being receptive means “getting what I deserve.” There is still part of me that wrestles with that aspect of my personality where I believe there is “an irredeemable deficiency” about myself. With that in mind, to get what I deserve could mean more discomfort for me. This belief also discounts Agape or unconditional love.
Being receptive also means being vulnerable and feeling unprotected. In service to others, I have repeatedly “put myself out there” and have often felt used, abused, taken for granted and unappreciated. I see where I have done this to myself, to make up for my “irredeemable deficiency” where I feel I must “go above and beyond” to prove my worth… I call this trait “super size me,” where I must “give more,” to make up for my deficiencies. Which again, discounts Agape.
Yet staying in this place of “keeping a lid” on who I am here to be, I feel as if I’m wearing a shirt several sizes too small. It restricts my movements, my breathing and keeps me from being the person I am here to be. There is great sadness in feeling my own suppression. So I’ve resolved to reach up to the stars and have faith in receiving the greatness that supports who I am here to be; this is vulnerability.
May we each find new freedom and faith in receiving and in being vulnerable; it takes more strength to be vulnerable than it does to power through everything. May we find peace in our own vulnerability, receptivity and femininity. (sounds much like sea anemone, and with that in mind, may we also laugh at ourselves more!)
When we feel broken or incomplete, we seek external fixes from which to feel whole. Maybe we seek this “fix” from others, through our behaviors (shopping, chemical dependencies and even positive things such as working out) or we may even just outright deny there is even a problem. Maybe we lash out and and get short with the bank teller, our loved ones or another motorist; thus creating more trauma. Until we go within, these external “fixes” are merely band-aids.
When we feel broken, we rarely take the time to look at the beliefs that lead to this feeling, this perception. To heal this feeling is to give the hurt what it needs. Often it is love, sometimes it is recognition, or it may be attention or something even as simple as breathing into it. Each of these is a form of surrender.
It is in seeing our pain for what it needs and giving it just that thing which allows us to heal. Sometimes we may need to reach out and ask for help and support from our Higher Power, or from friends and family. For it is in asking for support that we also surrender. In asking for support we also allow the vulnerability of connection, helping others to identify their own needs and meet them…thus perpetuating the healing.
May we each see our wounds for what they need and then meet those needs, with or without the help others. With each wound that is freed from bondage we, as a collective, are also set free.
How often in life do we focus on treating the symptoms instead of getting to the root problem? Please take a moment here to pause and reflect. We all do it, we’ve done it and many of us are living it; daily.
It seems that each year that passes the expectations increase: work, life, home, social media. I find myself, especially at work, multi-tasking “to the max” (showin’ my age here) and then wondering why I’m tired and then later having difficulty sleeping.
Yet, in my work I help clients find a balance between self-care and care of everyone else. Some are more receptive than others. Some resist even the most basic of changes to help themselves live better.
It took me decades to figure out how important a daily routine of quality self-care for myself was, a routine I’m still tweaking. I cannot imagine where I’d be without it.
Today, where can we begin to take the time to turn off the faucet, so that we’re not just continuously mopping the floor? Where can we create space in our over-scheduled lives to care for our own physical, mental, spiritual and emotional needs? “Waiting” until the next break, vacation, holiday, day off, etc just kicks the can down the street. Be joy now. Bring it!
Love anyone or everyone by taking care of your basic needs! The world will thank you!
Yesterday marked the half-way mark between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, and Summer Solstice and Autumnal Equinox in the Southern Hemisphere. It is interesting that many of us may also find ourselves in transition during this time. I most certainly do!
There is a mixture of excitement and restlessness here. As a very goal-oriented person, it is a challenge for me to feel settled when not working on specific goals. Learning to surrender into this space of unknowing, as if awaiting my next set of orders, creates some anxiety for me. However, I’m learning to recognize the parts of me that want to push and push; pushing is so exhausting!
A great meditation on Insight Timer, which found me, is subtitled “Divine Laziness.” There is so much beauty and wisdom in this space between; in the surrender. Breathing deeply into the unknown also gives a sense of freedom.
May we each find peace in the spaces between what was and what is yet to be. There is SO much potential here, if we can just be patient enough to allow it to be.
In a way, I feel as if this “head cleaning cassette tape” were something I had used on myself! And thus I have also “dated” myself…
What does one write about when the purpose of writing has suddenly disappeared? This blog was born out of my desiredesperate need to understand and share my process of self-discovery. It was as if I were an archaeologist who dreamt of Indiana Jones’ type adventures and yet found herself waist-deep in sh*t, sifting through sand, muck and rubbish seeking the hidden treasures within.
YET, plot twist?! The main drive behind this was more to uncover the source of the deep forebodingsense that there was something terribly, horribly, indescribably wrong with me at my core. We’re talkin’ Apollo 1 type of ‘this ship won’t launch and kills everyone on board’ sense of messed up feeling at my very core.
Looking back, I see where I did my absolute best during this process to focus on the light, to focus on the “lessons on the other side of the pain.” And some days it seemed the more I reached for the light, the more “the evasive darkness at the core” haunted me more.
Enter the Dragon: Enneagram 4 After delving into the Enneagram 4 personality, I had a profoundly freeing “EUREKA!” life-altering-180-degree-countenance-shifting moment where the pervasive and heavy feeling of my faulty core became but a speck instead of a burgeoning and endless well. For fours, it is part of our nature to have this sense of an “irredeemable deficiency.” Hearing other fours acknowledge this lead to my accepting this as “part of my condition,” and allowed the Dragon to do its quick-work to melt away the dross, eliminating the need to further excavate.
Rubicon Crossed: Check Mark… & now what?! Now, I have magically crossed “The Rubicon” and, in a way, I’m experiencing an existential crisis with the blog! My purpose for writing for so long (even pre-blog) was to excavate and DIG. I’d become a digging beast-machine. Now, there is no more need to dig. So now I’m in a place of asking myself, WTF do I do now? The purpose for my writing is …. seemingly gone?!
Yes! There are still things to “work through” and “understand” and “accept,” yet they do not have the “fire” behind them. The best analogy I can think of at the moment is to imagine you have been blogging for nearly 5 years about your experiences of finding, dislodging, accepting and loving this damned annoying and evasive rock lodged in your shoe and then when you finally see the rock you immediately see it is gold, so now your reason for writing is …. effectively gone because your self-help crisis and blog were based on the rock in your shoe. So now what do you write about?!
A different focus. Well, I have been posting inspirational memes somewhat daily on Insta (unfilteredheart77). This has required more effort than I had expected, perhaps because of shifting streams and allowing of the memes to unfold. Effortless-effort, as some would call it, can take more time and patience than blogging about the process of “vomiting” my insides out…
Please bear with me as I get comfy in this new understanding; it’s quite nice, really. So MUCH angst is gone. It’s just a matter of getting used to the new so that I can write more again!
May we accept a greater level of peace with our journeys; appreciating more deeply where we find ourselves today.
