“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” ~Benjamin Spock
I used to believe that I was my thoughts. I really believed that everything happened well because I had analyzed and planned and prepared. I didn’t even know that I was doing this. I didn’t know there was any more to me than my thoughts.
I also used to believe that there was something seriously wrong with me, so thinking about how to fix myself was my main pastime.
All my life people told me, “You’re too sensitive,” “so intense,” “you’re just so emotional.”
I told this to myself, and plenty of other people told it to me too, both directly and indirectly.
I didn’t know how to live. I had an analysis of life rather than an experience of life when I was with others. When alone, my life was deep and vivid and rich. I felt it all. Little did I know then, no one knows how to live. We do it.
It only felt safe to feel it all alone. I’d get sideswiped by inexplicable emotion at inconvenient times. So, I just tried to keep it all under wraps, keep it all under conscious control.
I didn’t trust myself at all. I didn’t trust my body. I didn’t trust anything other than my thoughts. My body was so unpredictable and confusing, this sensitivity was so out of control.
Then, when I was twenty-five and married, after just graduating with my Master’s degree as a marriage and family therapist, I couldn’t do it anymore. It all fell apart. I realized that there was more to me, and the life I was living was a fake, a construction based on my thoughts.
I got divorced. I quit my job. I moved. I dropped it all. Realizing how much of my life was a lie and how directly I could connect with and trust my body made me see that I couldn’t keep living that life. It was a beautiful break down.
It was then that I started studying hypnosis in depth and I came in direct contact with my subconscious.
It was a funny paradox that it was so hard for me to relax because it was hard for me to let things be easy. I thought that every thing took a lot of effort.
I couldn’t believe that I could have such immediate and powerful results from a seemingly simple process of listening to my sensations and using them to give my body what it wanted. (more…)