Tiny Buddha

Tag: heal

  • We Have to Own Our Part to Heal Our Broken Heart and Find a Deeper Love

    We Have to Own Our Part to Heal Our Broken Heart and Find a Deeper Love

    “True love does not only encompass the things that make you feel good, it also holds you to a standard of accountability.” ~Monica Johnson

    I remember the confusion I felt as it slowly began to register to me that he had indeed read all of my messages and was indeed ignoring me. Even though my eyes were telling me this, it still didn’t make any sense.

    Just the day before, he’d initiated contact, called me beautiful, and wanted to know the details of my day. We’d talked all day that day, as we normally did. But this was a new day. And he ghosted me. He discarded me.

    It hurt like hell. My heart felt like it had literally been ripped out of my chest by the Hulk. It was forceful and it was intense.

    This absolutely could not be happening. So I ashamedly sent a few more messages, but he still ignored me.

    My tears flowed like a steady spring rain. My head hurt. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to do anything but see a notification from him, proving me wrong. Proving to me that he did not ghost me, that this was a terrible dream.

    But that solace never came.

    For the first few days after this, I craved him like my favorite dish.

    But then I started to realize that this man who’d shared so much intimacy with me had just left me with no explanation. No goodbye.

    So I became angry.

    I was slowly going through the grieving process. Denial. Sadness. Now anger. I was about to enter my next phase, which was acceptance. I reached this phase through accountability. I realized that even though the way he exited our relationship wasn’t mature, I wasn’t innocent.

    I’d been needy, desperate, and clingy, and I’d hung my self-esteem on his “hey beautiful” texts like a person gasping for air. He was my air. His validation is where my self-worth started and began.

    I began to realize that I had pushed and pressured him. I had made him the source of my joy. I had put a heavy burden on him. I was taking love from him and not giving him love in the way he needed it.

    It would have been easy to play the victim, to say “woe is me” and hate him. It would have been easy to be resentful, bitter, and full of venom.

    But instead, I chose the road of accountability.

    I extended him grace and realized that as humans, we are always doing what we feel is best for us at each moment. I extended him forgiveness and I forgave myself.

    I looked back over the last months and realized that I had abandoned myself. I had abandoned the self that was secure and had outsourced my self-esteem to him. It wasn’t fair to him. He hadn’t signed up for that.

    Yes, he could have handled it better. He could have had a conversation with me. He could have done all kinds of things. But at the end of the day, that’s his cross to bear. My cross is that I had to begin to heal from this experience, I had to grow from this experience, and I had to evolve into a woman who was ready for true, genuine, reciprocal love.

    I knew, deep in my heart, that he was the catalyst. So I thanked him. I released the hurt, anger, and confusion. It turned out that ghosting experience was the best thing that could have happened to me because it put me on the journey to true love.

    Through this experience I learned:

    -The importance of knowing your worth in a relationship

    -To recognize and understand my boundaries

    -That it’s okay to be selfish and put your needs first in dating

    -What it really means to love and accept myself

    The day I thanked him in my heart and released the pain from that experience I learned so much. That day mostly taught me how living as a victor will attract the deepest love you have ever felt. I’m so happy I didn’t listen to my ego and stay in victimhood. I conquered. I took accountability.

    If you choose to see what you gain from breakups, even the ones that break your heart into a million pieces, you will be much closer to experiencing a love so strong it will knock you off your feet.

    If you want a deeper love, you need to be whole. Wholeness requires healing.

    So many people are walking around as empty zombies, full of resentment and bitterness. Usually this happens when we’re unable to take responsibility for our part in a hurtful situation.

    I understand you may have been cheated on, lied to, left in the cold, used, or, like me, you were ghosted. But do you see how in some ways you might have ignored red flags, or you were not firm in your boundaries, or how you sought validation outside of yourself, or were clingy, or pressured the other person into a relationship?

    I am not blaming you. I am not making you wrong. I am asking you to take accountability for how this situation can teach you where you are wounded, and use it as your catalyst. After you’ve come out the other side you will be so much closer to transformative love.

    The purpose of accountability is not to negate what the other person did or to make you feel regret, shame, or guilt. Those emotions do not serve you; they only keep you stuck in a downward spiral.

    No, accountability is about realizing you have more power than you think. In many cases we get our hearts broken because we give our power away. We make others responsible for our happiness, joy, and worth. It’s not fair to them.

    When we put people in this position, they may feel cornered. They may feel they have no other option but to run. That doesn’t condone immaturity or insensitivity. But odds are, they don’t mean to hurt us; they just don’t know what to do. It happens. If we dry our eyes and ease our anger we will see that this situation provides an opportunity to take a deep look at ourselves and recognize just how much love we are giving ourselves.

    In order to get love from anyone else, we have to love and heal ourselves. We then are able to attract whole and healthy people who are ready to love us like we truly deserve.

    Guess what?

    The next man I met became the love of my life. And six years later, he has never ghosted me.

  • If You Want to Find Your Contribution to the World…

    If You Want to Find Your Contribution to the World…

  • Healing Chronic Pain Is an Inside Job

    Healing Chronic Pain Is an Inside Job

    “Time is not a cure for chronic pain, but it can be crucial for improvement. It takes time to change, to recover, and to make progress.” ~Mel Pohl

    Let’s face it, living with any kind of physical pain is a challenge. I understand that completely. In the fall of 2007, I contracted an extremely painful and debilitating condition, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, a structural collapse that compresses the muscles, nerves, and arteries that run between the collarbones and first ribs.

    Yet, as most of us do, I believed my condition would, naturally, clear up soon and the pain would leave. That’s what happens most of the time for most of our physical ailments. Pain arises because of an illness or injury and disappears as we heal over the following days or weeks. We might lay low for a while, take some medications to ease the discomfort, and then we’re back into the swing of things. No problem.

    Except when it doesn’t work that way.

    What happens when pain becomes a fixture in our lives and no amount of medication or treatment or therapy can eradicate it? What do we do then?

    Our usual response is to fight. We put on our battle armor and spend every day in an effort to overcome pain so it won’t take over any more of our lives. We search for the right therapies and the right medications, trying one approach after another, with the attitude of defeating a mortal enemy.

    If nothing works, we eventually exhaust ourselves. We wake up one morning with our anti-pain armor in a heap on the floor and find we have no more reserves to fight, so we leave it there. We just don’t have the energy to go into battle anymore.

    So, we swing to the other end of the spectrum, deciding that the best thing to do now is to ignore the pain we’re living with. This is just the way it is right now, we say to ourselves. These are the cards I’ve been dealt and I’m going to have to live with the situation. We put on our best face and try to function despite the pain, doing our best to ignore its insistent cries for attention.

    We may even decide the doctor is right if s/he tells us that the reason we’re still in pain isn’t because our condition won’t heal, but because our brain is misfiring. Okay then, I’ll put the blame on my brain and pretend the pain doesn’t exist, we say.

    But the pain stays and stays and stays.

    Neither of these extremes usually works very well for chronic pain. Fighting pain is exhausting. It creates stress and tension not conducive to healing. Fighting causes us to tighten and contract in the body, also not great for healing. Acquiescing, on the other hand, can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness over time. If pain isn’t improving, one day we might find ourselves looking up from the bottom of a dark well, filled with despair.

    Are these really our only choices? Isn’t there a middle path that might offer something less fatiguing than constant battle and less hopeless than acquiescence or denial?

    What do we do? What can we do?

    I spent years swinging back and forth between the two poles, finally settling into a kind of stoic silence until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore. I just couldn’t face a life sentence of living in unremitting pain. I decided there had to be a different way to live, to find more ease and grace even in the midst of pain.

    So, I decided to turn my belief about what pain is and how I was dealing with it on its head. I changed the way I perceived pain and the way I responded to it. I found ways to shift my relationship with pain into a more positive, constructive one and, after many years of having no perceptible change, began to finally experience some relief.

    Here are three important ways I shifted my relationship with pain and thereby began to experience more healing in my body.

    Making Friends with Pain

    It helped me a great deal to understand that pain is not an enemy but a signal and a message that tells us that the body is trying to heal. Pain is a voice from within that announces that something is out of harmony and is trying to put itself right. Instead of experiencing pain as torture, I began to understand that it was a natural communication from my body. In a way, it was me talking to me. A part of me was hurting and asking for attention.

    Since fighting pain only seemed to make things worse, I asked myself, what if I imagined that pain wasn’t an adversary, but had a positive purpose? What if pain wasn’t trying to put me through hell, but was simply trying to get my attention? How could I make friends with it instead of opposing it?

    I began to ask pain what it needed, what it was asking for, what I could give it and do for it to help my body heal. I understood that it was asking me to slow down, both on the outside and on the inside. Pain needed me to be with it just as it was, to stop pushing against it, and to listen to it.

    What I learned from pain was that, instead of offering it my anger, denial, or hate, it required a very different kind of attention. The pain, the signal from my body, was asking for a different approach to healing, a softer approach.

    I understood it to be asking for the kind of compassion and understanding you would offer a small child who is hurting. I found that when I turned a more loving ear toward it in an effort to listen to it, respect it, and offer it kindness, my whole body relaxed, my breathing shifted, my stress lifted, and my pain began to decrease.

    Finding Positive Ways to Express Pain

    I began to journal about living with pain, which helped me see it differently. I wrote about my emotional responses to living with pain. I wrote about the loss and the loneliness, the shame and the frustration. Then I read what I wrote out loud to pain, and to myself. We both listened. Something shifted. We both relaxed. Pain started to move.

    I then went a step further and found someone I could trust to hear my pain story. I asked them to please not offer any advice, to not try and fix me, but just to listen with an open heart and mind. I told them about the sadness and the terrors, the loneliness and the shame. I told them things I had never told anyone because I was simply trying to hold it all together from one day to the next.

    Having someone simply witness me in my pain without asking me to be any different, but allowing me to be in the pain I was in and really seeing it and acknowledging it was hugely healing. And pain relaxed a little more.

    Allowing Pain the Time it Needs

    I also discovered that pain was asking for time. Healing simply wasn’t going to be rushed. My body didn’t respond well to being hurried or pushed, and healing could not be approached as another goal to be achieved. Pain kept its own timetable.

    Allowing pain to take the time it would take rather than trying to hurry it out of my body allowed for a healthier emotional and physiological response that was far more conducive to healing. My body became more relaxed around the pain and I began to release stress, tension, and contraction. I breathed more freely, moved more slowly, approached everything in a more relaxed manner, and stopped obsessing as much about my healing.

    I stopped pushing against the pain and pushing against the situation and began to trust the healing process. Paradoxically, when I allowed pain all the time it needed to heal, it began to release. When I demanded that it leave immediately, it dug in its heels, but when I related to it soothingly and with patience and love, I felt relief more rapidly.

    —

    I have found over my years of living with chronic pain, that these approaches are fundamental to creating more ease and grace on a daily basis, to releasing stress and tension in the body, and to relieving long term pain. None of them are guarantees of becoming pain free overnight, but all can offer relief, hope, and positive shifts almost immediately and, as those of us who have been living with pain for a long time know, any movement toward relieving pain is cause for major celebration.

    I’ve gained valuable insights from my journey with pain as well. I’ve learned to find a place deep within myself, a clear place at my core that is resilient and eternal, a place I can draw on for strength and comfort in any situation. I’ve learned how to be kinder to myself and to others. I’ve learned how to find new appreciation and satisfaction in simple things and to celebrate the small joys in life.

    Pain, then, has become something of a spiritual mentor over time. It has, in the end, taught me how to live more deeply, more authentically, and more wisely. Living with pain has not only helped me understand what really matters most to me in life, but how much I matter to myself.

  • How Journaling Helped Me Heal from Grief and How It Can Help You Too

    How Journaling Helped Me Heal from Grief and How It Can Help You Too

    “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” ~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

    The day I was told that the man I loved was going to die from cancer, I did two things: I made a pact with myself never to have more than one bottle of wine in the house. I knew the risks of numbing pain and I knew that it didn’t work. Then I went to a stationery shop and bought a supply of fine moleskin journals.

    My journey through grief started the day the pea-sized lump behind my husband’s ear was given a name. Metastatic melanoma. Over the course of two years it spread to his lungs, then his brain. A brain tumor the size of a golf ball is what killed him.

    Four weeks after his death, a tightly sealed plastic box containing a dozen diaries was the first thing I grabbed when I had to evacuate my home ahead of a monster cyclone. Seven years after those events, the plastic container, which by now contains several dozen moleskins, is still the first thing I’ll grab at the next cyclone warning.

    Why? Because those journals were my lifesaver at a time when no therapist could help me. Grieving is a very long and lonely journey, and those journals were my most intimate, trusted friends during the most difficult time in my life.

    Grief comes in many forms. Divorce, being made redundant, a stillborn child, the list is long. We all have access to the world’s oldest and cheapest self-help tool.

    Here is how it helped me.

    1. Your journal is your best friend during the lonely process of grief.

    Grief turned me into a depressed mess, which made me feel like an outsider. It’s a common experience. As anybody who has been there will know, one of the most surprising things about grief is how alone it makes you feel. Only those who have grieved will be able to understand what you are going through.

    Your friends and loved ones will offer as much comfort as they can give, but they’ve got their own lives to live and nobody wants to hear your sad story over and over again.

    Writing provided comfort and relief at a time when nothing else did. I lived remotely and didn’t have access to a therapist. My journal became my lifesaver and my best friend. It was the only place where I could speak my truth and where I could safely express all of my emotions.

    My journal was always there for me to listen to the same story, over and over again, without judgment, until I was finally ready to let it go.

    2. Journaling allowed me to tell the story nobody wanted to hear.

    We live in a culture that is averse to grief. In the absence of proper grief rituals, people struggle for words and end up offering platitudes that diminish your grief. Before my bereavement, I too was ignorant about what to say to a grieving person.

    How many times did well-meaning friends, lost for words, offer meaningless platitudes? “He’ll be okay,” some would say, when it was clear that he was never going to be okay again.

    “You’ll be okay,” was just as hurtful. Of course I would be okay. I hadn’t died, even if it felt like part of me had. But I needed people to acknowledge my grief, not diminish it. Writing was a way of giving voice to the story nobody wanted to hear.

    I needed to say the things that I couldn’t say, that even the doctors wouldn’t say, as we desperately clung to hope.

    It was only in the pages of my journal that I could safely and without judgment write this messy story in the raw voice of pain. It helped me understand it and slowly craft a new narrative.

    I knew instinctively that my writing would lead me there, not my well-meaning friends who assumed to know what the appropriate timeframe for grief might be.

    3. Writing allowed me to hold on to memories.

    Journaling was also an effective way to hold on to the memory of him. I recorded the story as it was unfolding. The way he reacted to radiation treatment. The words he said when the word palliative care entered our conversation. The way he looked before and after each operation. The words he whispered into my ear, holding on to my hand as his strength faded during his last days.

    4. Journaling helped me find redemption after loss.

    For several years after my bereavement, the story I told about myself focused on the events that had burnt my life down. It was what defined me at that moment and I didn’t want it taken away from me.

    Writing about my pain allowed me to eventually gain a new perspective. Reading over my words, I became a detached witness of my story and I was able to see how my story is related to the universal narrative pattern of what Joseph Campbell calls “the hero’s journey.”

    Today I am able to tell my story as a narrative of redemption. I stumbled into the dark woods of grief and I came out of it transformed, stronger, and more aware of the preciousness of life. It’s a story I share with those who accept grief as an opportunity for deep transformation.

    5. Journal writing gave me the courage to venture into creative writing, which was healing in unexpected ways.

    Two years after my husband’s death, for my fiftieth birthday, I gave myself the gift of a year-long online creative writing course. I’d planned to write up my story as a memoir. But revisiting my pain in the pages of my journals felt like peeling the scab off a wound. It was still too raw.

    Writing creative fiction on the other hand, turned out to be incredibly liberating. I no longer had to write the story of how my life had exploded. I was free to write anything I wanted. I could create characters with red hair and freckles, I could make them Olympic swimmers or war correspondents. But deep down, the emotions I wrote into my characters were my own.

    By sorting the core of my personal grief story into a narrative arch, I could see how personal growth results from conflict and suffering. I could see how this is fundamental to the character’s journey and I could finally see redemption and envision a new ending for my story.

    I don’t know how I would have coped without my writing, it’s what guided me through my pain and showed me the way forward.

    Here are five suggestions on how to use journal writing during times of grief:

    1. Have your journal always with you.

    I found it incredibly comforting to have my journal always by my side. Sadness catches up with you in the back of a taxi or in the hospital waiting room. Being able to scribble in my journal provided relief.

    2. Do a brain and pain dump.

    On most days I’d do a simple brain and pain dump. I’d free write without editing or worrying about grammar for as long as it took to feel better. I found it helpful to record what was happening in detail and to name my emotions and reactions.

    By writing everything down, I felt like I was sharing my pain. It was liberating, even if it didn’t make the pain go away. It allowed me to see patterns in my thinking and to focus on the positive.

    3. Write a gratitude list.

    A gratitude list is a powerful way to focus on what is positive during a time when it seems that you will never find happiness again. By listing the things I was grateful for, I was able to momentarily reverse the feeling of overwhelming negativity.

    There was the bad test result, sure, but there was also the friend who brought a casserole around. It was always surprising and refreshing to acknowledge the things that made me feel grateful. It put my pain into perspective.

    4. Do timed writing exercises.

    If you are not naturally inclined to writing, you might find it useful to make journaling part of a routine and to set a timer. Timed writing exercises are surprisingly effective. Start small. Ten minutes of free writing every morning is a good start.

    5. Use writing prompts,

    Journal therapists will often use writing prompts. I personally feel too restricted by prompts, since my writing will naturally lead me towards the story that needs to be told. But when I am stuck, I find it helpful to pause and write “How I really feel is …” or “What I really want to say is …”.

    I also found great relief in writing unsent letters to my husband, both during his illness and after his death.

    Here are some writing prompts for you to try:

    I remember when …

    The first time we …

    My happiest memory of you is …

    What was good about today is …

    What I treasure is this …

    Today my grief feels like …

    —

    Back when I went through my grief, I didn’t know that expressive writing and journal therapy are recognized modalities for healing, widely used by psychologists and therapists, especially with trauma victims.

    I’ve always used reflective and personal writing as a way to make sense of the world and my place in it. Faced with my husband’s progressive illness, I’d instinctively reached for my journal to process what was happening. By naming the emotions I felt, I could make sense of what seemed ungraspable and find healing.

    Journal writing really is the cheapest form of self-care there is. I hope you’ll try it, using some of the suggestions above. Or maybe you already have a journal writing practice and have your own favorite prompts. Feel free to share in the comments.

  • Why I Stopped Trying to Fix Myself and How I Healed by Doing Nothing

    Why I Stopped Trying to Fix Myself and How I Healed by Doing Nothing

    “Everything in the universe is within you.” ~Rumi

    When I was twenty-three, I lost my job through chronic illness. I thought my life had ended, and I spent the next few years an anxious, panicky mess—often hysterical. Eventually, I took off to scour the globe for well-being techniques, and searched far and wide for the meaning of life and how to become well again.

    If you’re chronically ill, like I was, whether physically or emotionally, you’ve probably experienced the same misunderstanding, the same crazy-making “well, you look okay to me” comments, the same isolation, depression, and frustration that I felt.

    You’ve probably been on a bit of a quest for self-recovery. And so, you’ve probably also felt the same exasperation when trying to figure out which self-help theories actually work. It can be overwhelming, right? I thought so, too, but I came to find it was actually really simple!

    Searching the Globe for Self-Help Techniques

    So many people are full of advice: “Try CBT/ tai chi/ astrology/ vitamins/ rest more/ exercise more/ zap yourself with electricity/ eat better/ stop being lazy (always helpful!)/ do affirmations/ yoga/ meditation/ wear purple socks…” Okay, so no one ever actually recommended trying purple socks, but there were so many weird and wonderful recommendations that I found myself lost, which might explain why I went away to find myself!

    I traveled far and wide with my illness, training in every holistic therapy there was (which I loved; I’m curious, and well-being is my passion). But I was always searching for a ‘cure’ for my brokenness. I connected with yoga, meditation, and mindfulness on my journey, and I heard the very familiar Rumi quote: “Everything in the universe is within you.” This served only to confuse me even more as I struggled to analyze what it meant!

    In Bali, though, I felt I had found home in yoga, meditation, and mindfulness. I felt connected to myself. I felt like I understood that all I needed was within. My anxiety had gone, my panic had gone—and my chronic illness had gone, too! Then, I came home to the UK, and it immediately returned.

    I was disheartened. I still lived yoga and mindfulness—I loved it and I taught it at home—but the joy had gone from what I had once thought of as the answer. So, how was I absolutely okay in Bali and not at home? Was I a fraud? What was going on? There was so much thinking…

    What I Learned About Being Human

    It wasn’t until a year later that I discovered why, when I heard something differently. A colleague introduced me to a mentor who shared some profound insights about how the world really works.

    She explained the basic underlying reality of humanity: that underneath all of our thinking about “how to be happier” is a healthy wholeness and perfection that is already innate—without having to do anything. You see, the reason that I had felt any anxiety or panic at all was because I had just forgotten the truth of what it is to be human.

    The Power of Thought: All You Need Really Is Within

    Our human reality operates entirely through thought in the moment. Everything we feel is a result of our thinking. If we feel anxious, it’s because we are experiencing anxious thinking. If we feel happy, it’s because we are experiencing happy thinking. Our entire reality, therefore, really does come from within! It is an inside-out world.

    When we were born, we were perfect and whole, and not anxious. Then, when we gained the beautiful power of thought, we learned that the external comfort blanket was super comforting, because “it made us feel better,” right? Wrong. The blanket is an object, with no capacity to make us feel anything. One hundred percent of the comforted feeling came from our own thinking about the blanket. It’s the same with all of life.

    So, when I was in Bali, I thought I was okay because I was enjoying yoga and meditation, which I loved with all my heart. Thinking that the external could impact me, I felt 100% whole. I returned from Bali and my thinking about the external changed; it felt like I wasn’t happy, because I thought that I needed to be back in Bali. But the thinking came from me: the happiness or unhappiness was all dependent on my thinking in each moment.

    I didn’t remember this, so I attributed my happiness to the external. But it wasn’t, because we are always living in the feeling of our thinking in any moment. Everything comes from within.

    The Innate Wisdom Under Our Thinking

    The funny thing is that as much as this seemed profound to me when I heard it, it was also as if I already knew. It is innate wisdom that we just forget to tap into as we bustle through what feels a hectic pace of life.

    As I began to remember this wisdom, I found that I would start to notice my thinking; I’d become an observer of it, almost in a mindful, meditative kind of way, but I no longer needed to sit and meditate to be happy.

    New insights would come up as I stayed in the conversation about life, and more and more would drop away: the absolute reliance on meditation and affirmations in particular (though the joy returned for meditation when I realized there was less pressure to love it and just followed it because it was in my heart).

    Because under my thinking—under your thinking—is an innate wholeness that is always accessible to you in any moment, if you just see that your reality is entirely experienced through thought in each moment.

    Analysis Paralysis

    We spend hours of our lives analyzing how to be happy, how to stop being negative, how to meditate, how to be less attached, how to be more empowered, how to be more creative, how to be more whole. Don’t get me wrong, this can be interesting, if (like me) you have your own small self-help library! But it’s more important to drop out of your head and into your heart—like I did in Bali, and like I did when I allowed my thinking to just flow and stopped analyzing it.

    I still love yoga and meditation—I teach both and connect with them—but it’s to follow my heart, and I don’t need it. I’ve observed with clients, though, that sometimes it’s easy to misunderstand these concepts and get wrapped up in over-complication, analysis paralysis, denying true feelings, and forcing, trying to be ‘positive.’ This is why I ditched affirmations completely.

    Don’t Miss the Point: Clarity Through Trusting and Flowing, Not Forcing

    Some people miss the truthful essence of this beautiful wisdom. I’m a believer that we often try and force happiness and positivity through techniques like affirmations—and even in some meditation practices that suggest people need to “let go of thinking.”

    We can’t let go of thinking; it’s part of being human. And affirmations serve only to suppress our true feelings, which is dangerous. When we allow our thoughts to just flow through us instead, dancing with them through life, we create space where we would once have analyzed how to solve them; and it’s in this space where clarity can arise and we can see the truth.

    The truth is, we humans are a vessel of energy, and, I believe, part of something greater that has a plan for us—and through this human life, we are blessed with the amazingly abundant, creative power of thought. All we really need to do is let go and flow.

    All we really need to do is allow the feelings that arise from our thinking, conscious of the fact that our reality is constructed through thought. We just have to observe what comes up, embracing pleasant feelings and allowing the darkness without paying it much attention. Like an uninvited guest, it will eventually pass through, without you needing to do anything to get rid of it.

    These days, I laugh at the thoughts that come up and watch them with curiosity, marvelling at the creative capacity of beautiful brain, and knowing that underneath all of my thinking is the real truth: that I am entirely whole, perfect, and complete. Just like you. And you know what? I’ve not been anxious, panicked, or chronically ill ever since I remembered this truth of being a human living life through thought.

    I’m not suggesting that our illnesses are “all in our head” and that we can think (or stop thinking) our way to health. Everyone is different, and there are many different causes for the illnesses we experience, chronic or otherwise. But for me, everything changed when I allowed my thoughts to just flow.

  • You Cannot Heal in the Same Environment That Made You Sick

    You Cannot Heal in the Same Environment That Made You Sick

  • How I Healed My Strained Relationship with My Mother

    How I Healed My Strained Relationship with My Mother

    “Give without remembering. Receive without forgetting.” ~Unknown

    It was Sunday, April 12, 2015. I had just finished my grocery shopping and was about to leave the parking lot when I noticed a call from my dad.

    I called him back so we could talk for a few minutes. He said, “Troy died.” I thought of his friend Troy, who I’d met a couple years prior, and said I was sorry to hear his friend had passed. My dad realized I had not heard him correctly. He said “Troy, your stepdad, he died this morning.”

    I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. How could this be? He was only fifty-eight years old and no one had said he was ill. I spent the rest of the day feeling out of sorts, like I was walking around in a fog. I had not talked to him in seventeen months, mainly because I was angry with my mom. So his death left me with a big heap of regret and guilt.

    My mom and stepdad married when I was about fifteen years old. He had been part of my family for the better part of twenty years. He was a good guy and had a caring heart. Our family had its ups and downs, but he did a good job hanging in there.

    At the time of his death, Mom and I had not talked for seventeen months, as I’d reached an intense level of frustration with her. She had left me with some painful emotional wounds during my life.

    Looking back, she had suffered trauma during her childhood and it was likely playing a part in how she interacted with me. We never could see eye to eye. A phone call one evening resulted in her hanging up on me, so I decided to stop talking to her.

    So when my stepdad died, I felt uncomfortable about reaching out to her. Why should I reach out to a woman who left me with emotional scars? I felt serious panic about this whole situation and resolved to leave mom in the hands of my stepsiblings and brother; they could handle caring for her.

    Despite this, I went ahead and called Mom. As the phone rang I hoped she would not answer, but she did. I had not heard her voice in seventeen months. As expected, she was in shock and crying.

    I asked her what happened, and she told me how he was not feeling well that morning. She had tried to help him dress so they could go to the hospital. He suddenly fell to the floor and died right in front of her. She called 9-1-1 and emergency vehicles arrived shortly, but there was nothing anyone could do; he was gone.

    Mom said she had several people there with her; they were helping her navigate the next steps. It sounded like she had supports, so I let myself believe my presence was not necessary. She had always surrounded herself with people and left me feeling like I did not belong. It was easier to just go on not talking to her and enjoying the new life I was building for myself.

    One of my sisters-in-law reached out to me via text message the following day: “I know you’ve had your differences with your mom, but if you could find it in your heart to set those aside for a few days and be here for her, she really needs you right now. We are all here for her, but I know nothing would mean more to her than having you here too.”

    I suddenly felt obligated to make the hour drive to Mom’s house and see what was happening. Although I have excellent crisis management skills, I felt a little irritated at being the one who had to “fix everything” in my family. As I got closer, I felt like my stomach was going to turn inside out.

    I arrived at their house, a place I had never previously been to; they had moved there during the time we were not communicating. I went inside to find a sea of people milling about and panicked. My mind said “I can’t do this!!! I am leaving!”

    I saw my brother as I began to head for the front door. He told me our mom would be back in a few minutes. I still went to my car and prepared to drive away. She had not seen me, so I felt a quick escape was reasonable.

    Just as I was about to leave, Mom pulled in the driveway. I sat in my car watching in the rearview mirror. Someone had told her I was there and she was headed for my car. “Oh God, what should I do!” my brain screamed.

    Next thing I knew, as if under a hypnotic trance, I was getting out of the car and hugging her. She cried, I cried, we hugged and hugged and hugged. She said she was so glad to see me and we went inside the house. I spent the rest of the day on the back porch sitting next her and holding her hand.

    After my stepdad’s memorial service, family and friends began to disperse and left mom alone and feeling confused on how to proceed. For many the funeral is the final event and people go back to their homes and lives, but what happens to the person impacted by their partners death? They find themselves alone and unsure how to proceed.

    To me, it looked like being thrown out of a boat into the deepest, darkest water you ever encountered, and YOU CAN’T SWIM! Every. Single. Morning.

    For the next two years or so every day started with a phone call to Mom. I would check in on her and provide encouragement for the day ahead. We spent a great deal of time on the phone and doing things together. I never asked for anything of her and purely offered my time, no strings attached.

    It was not an easy journey to take, and it hurt to see her so pained and lost in the beginning. As time passed, it felt good to see her begin to engage in life again. I knew if we could survive the first year, it would be a huge milestone in the recovery process. Then the second year came and went, she was growing stronger and didn’t need me as much, but we still remained close, still having those morning calls and getting together to do fun things.

    During it all, we grew closer and had a better understanding of each other. The scars in my heart began to soften and fade. This experience had an outcome that no one could have predicted. By filling space with Mom, we had both benefitted and were healing the emptiness we had felt inside.

    We had never had this type of relationship before. Simply being there for her had opened the door. We did not have to drag up our painful past into the light of day and do battle over it. No screaming or arguing was necessary. I made a conscious effort to not bring up the past and put my emotional grief on her; she had enough on her plate.

    When we talked about the past, we tried to talk about happy memories—things that made us smile or laugh. The healing was occurring by simply being together and focusing on taking one day at a time.

    About ten months ago, mom retired from her job and moved out of state. She had rekindled a friendship with a high school acquaintance. They seem to be happy and are building a life together. She is also closer to some family she had been missing. I frequently miss her and wish we could do things together, like we used to do, but I also am glad she has found a joyful place in this world.

    Through this experience I realized that broken people often lash out at others in an attempt to lessen their own suffering; ever hear the saying “misery loves company”?

    I also began to understand that I had the power to put my anger aside for the greater good, because adding more darkness to our situation wouldn’t help. The goal was not to torture Mom; she was already defeated and did not need someone to kick her while down.

    I extended the love, kindness, and attention I had always wanted to her, and it began to have a profound healing effect on us both. I truly believe not dragging up the past helped us move forward; discussing it had no benefit in this situation. I think if we had started down that path, it would have pushed us further apart.

    I will forever treasure the time we embraced the darkness together, survived it, and emerged stronger women.

  • Why I No Longer Believe There’s Something Wrong with Me

    Why I No Longer Believe There’s Something Wrong with Me

    “Our thoughts create our beliefs, meaning if you think about yourself a certain way for a long enough period of time you will ultimately believe it.” ~Anonymous

    You’re ugly. You’re stupid. You’re a loser.

    Imagine thinking this way about yourself every day. No exaggeration. That was me.

    When a girl didn’t want to go on a second date with me, I told myself I was ugly. When I didn’t know what someone was talking about, I told myself I was stupid. When my Instagram post only received two likes, I told myself I was loser.

    I spoon-fed myself toxic thoughts like these on a daily basis for years. And what’s worse is I believed them.

    But why? Where do these toxic thoughts and beliefs even come from? Well, for most of us they come from our childhoods, and they are largely based on experiences with our caregivers.

    My belief system (which fuels those not-so-nice thoughts listed above) was formed by the tragic death of my mother when I was three-and-a-half years old and by my rageaholic cocaine-addict father. I internalized Mom’s death and Dad’s crazy behavior (trust me, it was bad) the only way I knew how to: I thought I was the problem.

    You see, my dad never sat me down and apologized for bursting into my room in the middle of the night high on cocaine and torturing me. He never apologized for not allowing me to celebrate my birthdays. He never apologized for making me get in front of my soccer team and tell them that I was a bad boy and couldn’t play in that week’s game.

    Since he never apologized to me, my growing little mind took it personally and figured I must be the problem. I thought I deserved to be punished and as such, a negative thought pattern was born.

    Like a kid at school writing on a chalkboard because he did something wrong, my thoughts wrote in my mind over and over again: I did something wrong. I did something wrong.

    This consistent negative self-talk eventually turned into a core belief: I am wrong. I am wrong.  

    Imagine growing up believing that your very existence is wrong. That was me. I was hard-wired by my parents to believe this. It was like being sentenced for a crime that I didn’t commit.

    As an adult I actively looked for validation in other people as a result of this belief. I became a people-pleaser, a yes man, a guy that would do anything for you to like me. Please like me, please tell me I’m okay.

    If you liked me, I felt less broken, but one person liking me was never enough. If I was in a room with 100 people and all of them but one liked me I would worry and fret, wondering what I had done to upset that one person.

    I also thought I had to be perfect in every area of my life. My hair had to be perfect. My clothes had to be perfect.

    I had to say the right things. Do the right things. Be the right thing.

    I also used each failed attempt for your validation as proof that I was broken. See!

    I would go to bed at night saying I was done with that kind of behavior, yet I would wake up in the morning and start it all over again. It was like the movie Groundhog Day. I was living the same day over and over again, and I couldn’t stop.

    I hit what I’ll call my rock bottom eight years ago when I was thirty-seven-years old. I hated myself and the life I had created and desperately wanted change.

    But how? How do we let go of deeply rooted false beliefs that no longer serve us? The same way we formed them.

    You begin by detaching from the individual thoughts that reinforce the negative belief, then you let go of the belief all together. I’ve heard them called illusions, false beliefs, and even lies. It took time for me to believe these lies and it took time for me to undo them.

    Henry David Thoreau said, “As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

    In order to let go of false beliefs, we have to practice observing our thoughts and recognize when we are acting on old stories about our worth. By repeatedly choosing not to get caught up in the old stories, we can begin to experience the world in a new way.

    You don’t go to the gym once and suddenly you’re in the best shape of your life. No, you go five to six times a week, eat healthy, and get plenty of rest. And you do this over and over again.

    The same goes for our minds. The more we work toward mindfulness and self-kindness, the quicker we will default to it. When you catch yourself having a negative thought, recognize that you don’t have to get attached to it and choose to let it pass. If you’re having trouble letting it go, tell yourself a new, more empowering story.

    And above all else, just remember, it had nothing to do with you. You did nothing wrong. You are not flawed.

    I didn’t commit a crime. I just absorbed the information given to me the only way my eight-year-old mind knew how to.

    So where do we start? It’s different for all of us, but if you’re reading this and relating to any of it then that in and of itself is a start. That’s the beginning of self-awareness.

    For me it was all about becoming self-aware. That was my first step toward personal change.

    I knew I couldn’t do things on my own (been there, tried that), so I started with a twelve-step program. Liberation would never be possible if I kept reaching for validation from other people, so I took a deep breath and courageously stepped into my first meeting and admitted that I had a problem.

    It was there that I opened up and allowed myself to be seen for who I was: a wounded man who sometimes still felt like a scared little boy. Eventually, little by little, I shared my childhood secrets and I was loved for doing so. It was an eye opening experience, which immediately changed my thought process to: I did nothing wrong.

    For the last eight years I’ve been letting go of false thoughts and beliefs, which in turn has created new possibilities for how I think and feel in relationships. I hope you can do the same.

  • Letting Go of the Victim Label: The Past Will Not Define Me

    Letting Go of the Victim Label: The Past Will Not Define Me

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of domestic violence and sexual abuse, and may be triggering to some people.

    “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” ~Unknown

    It wasn’t long ago that I lived my life as a professional victim.

    It wasn’t intentional, but somewhere along the way I had internalized the fact that my victimhood gave me an excuse to remain stuck. As long as I was a victim, I had a reason to wallow in sadness and self-pity, a reason to not move forward, and sympathy that was poured upon me like praise—because no one wants to shame the victim, right? So I put on my victim’s Badge of Honor and remained firmly planted in the past.

    The thing about being a victim is that it doesn’t end there. Resentment is not far behind, and I soon found myself immersed in resentment. After all, I never asked to be born into a household filled with domestic violence, nor did I ask be molested by someone I shared the same bloodline with, but it happened, and I resented it.

    In my mind, no one could understand what it was like to live in constant fear of the day that your mother would be murdered. No one could understand the hopelessness that comes with feeling unsafe day after day. But I did.

    I knew what it felt like to be awakened in the middle of the night by screaming voices, dishes crashing against walls, or the volume on the TV up as high as it could go, because if he was angry, no one was getting a good night’s sleep.

    I knew what it was like to wish for death, because death was better than terror.

    I knew what it felt like to live in a household where everyone walked on eggshells because the alternative was an encounter with rage.

    I knew what it felt like to have a dysfunctional childhood while others had what I thought to be a fairytale life, and I resented it.

    I could not reconcile why some children were born into wealth and privilege and I was not. I did not understand why my family, which should have been a safe haven, was the exact opposite. Why were some children loved and adored, and I molested and used? It wasn’t fair, and I wasn’t going to let life, or anyone who would listen, forget it.

    I didn’t ask for that life, I was a victim, and had earned the right to complain about it as much as I saw fit. I did not realize that I had the power to overcome everything I had experienced, and maybe there was a part of me that didn’t really want to. I knew who I was with my experiences, but what was my identity without those stories? It was time that I found out.

    It took a while for me to even realize that I needed to let go of the victim label, but thankfully the day came. It became too much effort to be sad and depressed about something that happened, and was not changing.

    I began to read every self-help book I could find in hopes that one of them held the key to my emotional relief. I began attending counseling sessions and put forth the necessary effort to get the most out of each session. Then, one day it happened. I woke up knowing enough was enough.

    No, life wasn’t fair, but this was the only life I had, and I had better make the most of it. I knew that in order for me to move forward, I had to accept this fact. My experience was my experience, and nothing was going to change what happened to me, but I could surely change how I responded to it.

    The first thing I did was remove toxic people from my life. I understood that as a child I had little control over the people I was exposed to, but as an adult, it was my responsibility to set strong boundaries, even if that meant removing some people.

    This was no easy task, and I immediately felt waves of fear and guilt. I was so used to not having boundaries, and being expected to accept bad behavior just because it came from family. Still, I followed through with my plan to set boundaries or to sever ties completely.

    Next, I began to follow the advice I had received from literally hundreds of self-help books. I began to retrain my mind from the mentality of a victim, to one of strength, poise, and success.

    Almost immediately, I stopped feeling sorry for myself and began to feel empowered and capable. Yes, I had bad experiences growing up, and yes, those experiences affected my life, but I did not have to let them define me.

    I worked diligently to change my self-talk and I was very intentional about ensuring that I would make the most of my life. I had wasted enough years existing, and I knew that it was time to start living.

    Retraining my mind became my full-time focus, as I knew that all success starts in the mind. I continued with counseling and was told that I had a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, which was evident from my having nightmares about the abuse in my home, even though I was an adult and in a safe place.

    I learned how witnessing domestic abuse and being molested affected my self-esteem, the way I viewed relationships, and the way I viewed the world.

    I learned that none of it was my fault, and that I did not have to continue to tell myself those stories. I had new stories to tell. We all do. You too, can move past the pain and hurt you have endured in this lifetime. You can forgive, even if you never forget, and you can move forward. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

    My transformation didn’t happen overnight, and neither will yours. I spent years studying the power of the mind, and being intentional in my desire to turn my life around.

    Today I am free of toxic relationships and toxic thoughts. I’ve replaced my victim badge with a crown of success, love, self-confidence, and peace. And I replaced self-pity and sadness with a fierce determination to live my best life, free of resentment.

    I recently met a man who told me he has found happiness all his life by learning to “play the hand he was dealt.” I smiled, because I had come into the wisdom that this is truly the only way to live, because “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” The choice is ours to make.

  • Making the Hurt Visible: How I Stopped Hating the Man and Learned to Listen to Myself

    Making the Hurt Visible: How I Stopped Hating the Man and Learned to Listen to Myself

    “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” ~Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

    We’ve just passed the year anniversary of an event that has greatly changed our country. The shock of the election results last year sent waves of powerful emotions rippling through our nation.

    Personally, I felt the effects as intense and immediate grief. It was as though I had just lost my dearest companion.

    I had days of shock, despair, feelings of intense cold with physical shaking and episodes of vomiting and nausea, followed by weeks of sleepless nights, spontaneous sweating, nightmares and feelings of imminent danger. Everything felt like a threat. Everything felt like an unbearable reminder. It was all so devastating… and so embarrassing.

    I was ashamed of how deeply I registered the experience and found it difficult to talk about even with those I loved. I was confused as to why it felt so intense, why I felt choked when I tried to speak of how I was feeling, and assumed it was something wrong with me. I was the living example of the liberal snowflake.

    As I began talking to others I realized that I was not alone in this experience, and I began to be curious as to why it registered so deeply with myself and some others, and yet did not in some of my friends who had similar political ideologies. They were still disappointed and disgusted with what had happened, but it did not register in such a visceral way.

    Personal and systematic abuse shaped us all in invisible ways. The answers I found to why I related so physically to the event go back very far into my personal history, and if you believe in such things, my ancestral history also.

    As a small child family gatherings held a sense of dread for my sister and me. While we enjoyed the food and presents usually involved, there was also the regular ritual of uncle Joe.

    Uncle Joe would call us floozies and comment that our legs were too skinny, our knees looked like washerwoman knees, and no one would find us attractive.

    There were also the sneak attacks of him grabbing us and holding us down and tickling us while we screamed for him to stop. It was always in the middle of the room with everyone watching, and him narrating the scene, saying how much we really loved it, how silly we sounded screaming stop because we were laughing, and everyone could see we enjoyed it.

    At the beginning and end of gatherings he would demand a hug and kiss; didn’t we love our uncle?

    I remember feeling helpless, humiliated, and ashamed for my tears. It was expected for us to swallow our feelings and put on a happy face. We needed to be polite.

    If any adult came to our aid or defense I do not recall it, and I’m sure if anyone did they would have also been told that they were being too sensitive. He was showing his love for us, and why didn’t they appreciate it? We should feel lucky to have an uncle who loved us so much.

    This kind of story is so commonplace, so ubiquitous, that many may read it and still question what was wrong with that situation. But this is how the very damaging abuse called gas lighting works.

    The perpetrator takes advantage of someone weak or vulnerable. They deny the victim from having a voice in the story, then re-center the story to be about themselves, about how great and wonderful they are or, conversely, how they themselves are being abused in the situation. And they mostly are not even aware that they are doing it.

    Even in writing this down I feel the tension in my body rise. I feel the tremors involuntarily start in my limbs, my breath gets shallow, and I have trouble even wrapping my head around the words to adequately explain the experience.

    In Psychological Harm is Physical Harm Nora Samaran writes of how this kind of abuse shapes the brain and how someone can react to this behavior for the rest of their life. The systematic silencing of one’s voice and denial of one’s reality can cause someone to become incapable of talking about it.

    Uncle Joe was not the only person in my life who behaved in this way. It was everywhere, from the doctor who told me that it didn’t hurt when he burned off my warts with dry ice, to my father who told me to quit crying or he would give me something to cry about, to the teachers who seemed to always ignore my correct answers, but hear the boy behind me who repeated what I just said as if it was his own idea. It was on television, in movies, in the music I heard on the radio.

    I internalized the patterns and found myself over and over in the same frustrations, the same endless arguments, the same feelings of invisibility.

    I sought out the dynamic in my relationships, sometimes in more obviously abusive partnerships, but often in the subtle and almost invisible forms of minimization. I felt like I was talking, but the people I was talking to didn’t seem to register what I was saying.

    It was like being caught in a nightmare, where you are trying to speak but what comes out of your mouth is unintelligible. You know what you are trying to say, but what my partners heard was something altogether different. It was crazy making.

    Because of the systemic normalization of minimizing and denying the feminine perspective, I came to deeply distrust my own mind.

    I did not have to even be told my perceptions were not important; it was done in the subtle shrugging off of my suggestions, the deep sigh that made me feel my words were ridiculous, the automatic response of the males in my life to say “yes, but…,” “ I don’t think you get what’s going on,” “you are misunderstanding,” even when I was describing my own feelings or experience.

    And the many years of work I did getting a handle on my own anger issues and automatic reactions made me super sensitive to the claims that I was the one being too aggressive, making too big a deal out of something, or just being mean.

    I automatically took on the blame and responsibility of any argument. I was being irrational, I was not being clear enough, the words I used were hurtful; therefore, they were invalid.

    Mathew Remski discusses this quite eloquently from the male perspective. He talks of the behavior of minimizing being so embedded in his make up that it takes continuous concentrated effort to even notice when it is happening. And that it also takes the help of his partner continuously pointing out when it happens.

    It is a lot of work to be constantly vigilant monitoring our behavior, and it can feel almost impossible to overcome. I know because I, and most other people who have had the experience of personal or systematic marginalization do this every day with our own behavior. The constant rewriting of our own experiences to fit within a system that cannot accept our true feelings, which center the collective narrative on a cis, white male perspective.

    When the campaign happened, the behaviors I had deep visceral reactions to became public. Instead of being hidden away in the most intimate relationships or invisible private conversations, they were being played out on a very public stage.

    I felt myself reacting to them all as if they had happened to me personally (because they had, just not by this particular person).

    When one of the most powerful positions in the world was given to a person who was so blatantly abusive and disrespectful, who openly mocked his victims, who rewrote every story so the blame was scattershot anywhere but his direction, who played out the usually hidden abuses so many of us feel intimately on a scale so huge it permeated the globe, it felt to me that the years of hard work I had done to reclaim my identity had been wiped out in a single night.

    It validated the claim of every person who had told me I didn’t know what I was talking about; if I was uncomfortable it was because my expectations were not reasonable; if I felt abused, hurt, ignored it was hurtful and unfair to the person I was accusing; that pointing out my pain or the pain of others was downright impolite and my behavior. The mere fact that I had a perspective of my own, was intolerable.

    I found relief through somatic therapy. Somatic therapy works directly with sensations of the body and translating them into the emotions that we may be storing there. It requires one to become present in the now, opening to the deeply buried layers that bubble up from the subconscious when we have knee-jerk reactions and strong emotions.

    Translating the subconscious reactions we have into conscious and conscientious actions creates the space to make our hurt, and the hurt of others visible. To do this I had to dive into the depth of the grief to see where it stemmed from, not just place it was most recently triggered. This was a place that made every fiber of my being long to run away, numb out, cease to exist.

    But the leaning into the pain instead of running away allowed me to recognize and accept my own feelings and reactions as tools of learning. I had to relearn to trust my instincts and see myself as a reliable source of information. I learned that I am valid, my feelings are important, and I have a right to be heard and to take up space.

    I saw the ways I was complicit in my own harm. I had given up the right to my own perspective, internalized the doubt that my experiences are real, automatically responded to my strong emotions as unreasonable, and I had agreed that the feelings and needs of others were more important than my own.

    When I saw that I had agreed to these things subconsciously, I was finally able to decide for myself that I did not want to do these things and could make the choice to stop.

    It was and continues to be hard work. But now I listen when strong reactions come up, and instead of automatically silencing them I ask, what they are here to tell me? My anger, fear, guilt, depression, despair, all have a message they are desperately trying to get me to hear.

    With deep listening my reactions can be transformed into conscious actions. Actions that let my voice be heard, centering my own story and needs, and allowing others to express what they need to express as well. It also gives me a very low BS tolerance threshold.

    In claiming my own story I suddenly found it intolerable having it minimized in any way and could no longer be silent when it was.

    This is a deeply inconvenient perspective to have. Going against the grain of society and allowing myself to be impolite while remaining as compassionate as I can muster leads to many awkward and uncomfortable conversations. It leads to conversations where I have to put my personal safety on the line in order to stand up for my personal integrity.

    There is also the need for great delicacy and diplomacy. You cannot hope for others behavior to change when you make them the enemy.

    We all have the capacity to hurt; we all have the capacity to heal. I am the victim of abuse in cases related to my gender, and at times, my age, but have also been the perpetrator in cases where my privilege, be it from my white skin, my middle class upbringing, my citizenship etc. have blinded me to the ways I have contributed to the minimization and abuse of others.

    Learning to have compassion for myself and my own tender emotions also requires me to have compassion for those who have harmed me. In the cases of my intimate circle, these are people I love and respect, and I want to be able to still love myself and need to allow for others to love themselves. I see the great hurt many of the people who have treated me this way carry around, you do not abuse without having first been abused yourself.

    Unfortunately the abuse of toxic masculinity (the culture of oppression, patriarchal values, or the many names this behavior is known by) has become so embedded in our culture that we do not even recognize it as abuse. It is the norm; it’s just the way it is.

    It is invisible to the unconscious eye, until we make it visible. We are all damaged by it, but some are made to pay a dearer price, and some are allowed to gain privilege.

    Those that gain privilege may have less of a motivation to change the patterns and a harder time seeing the ways they do harm and the ways it benefits them. It takes a lot of self-awareness and the ability to make yourself vulnerable. Accepting the responsibility of having harmed others and making amends is a very painful truth to accept, and so many will avoid this at all costs.

    And this responsibility is passed down through the generations. If one generation cannot make amends for the harm they caused, the pain, guilt, and responsibility are handed down to the next; only the further it goes from its origins, the more subconscious it becomes, and the more difficult it is to bring the surface and recognize it.

    But this is also the way it is healed, once and for all. It is not appealing work to dig deep into the ugliest depth of our suffering, to name the ways we have suffered, the ways we have caused suffering, the ways we have allowed both things to happen. But not doing it makes those parts of ourselves most in need of tender care the least visible.

    So in this year when all I really wanted was for this guy, who made all my alarm bells go off, to shut the hell up, I was moved to look at all the ways I had let this weak and damaged person, and so many others like him, convince me I had to shut the hell up. I lovingly listened to my own story and convinced myself to speak up instead.

  • License to Hurt: What We Really Need When We’re in Pain

    License to Hurt: What We Really Need When We’re in Pain

    “We’ll light the candle together when she’s ready. For now I’ll trust the darkness for us both.” ~Terri St. Cloud

    Over breakfast one morning recently, Jeff and I started reminiscing about past years, and something was said that brought back a painful memory for me. My boss at the time had been unimaginably small-minded. He had hung me out to dry. “I still can’t understand why he did that,” I said.

    Jeff looked at me levelly. “You need to get over it, Jan,” he said. “It was years ago.”

    Wise advice, without question. The only problem was that I didn’t want it just then.

    Why is it that we are so seldom allowed a few moments just to hurt? After a serious heartbreak like the death of a loved one, sure, we’re given all the leeway we need. But the run-of-the-mill slights and small, persistent sorrows are treated as something we should quickly move past, even when they’re deeply painful.

    Jeff, poor guy, was just trying to help. I couldn’t fault him. I knew I was being a bit ridiculous. But what I longed for was someone to acknowledge my outrage, let me sit with it, live into it for a few moments—and then gently remind me that it’s time to get over it.

    A few hours later, after I’d licked my wounds and was feeling better, I began to wonder: Might I also be failing to honor the sorrows of others?

    Everything I’ve learned in the past eight years, since the death of our son, has pointed me to the same lesson: The most important thing we can give each other in times of pain is compassion, a simple, “Oh, I bet that’s really hard.” We should offer that before—or instead of—advice on how to cope.

    Even worse are the times when we immediately turn the conversation to ourselves: “I know just what you mean. I’m going through something like that too.”

    I catch myself doing this way too often. My intent is to signal to the person that we’re partners in pain and can support each other. But the comment shifts the focus away from my companion’s heartache to mine.

    Or we may inadvertently belittle our friend’s sorrow with stories of how we’ve overcome the same challenge.

    Recently I overheard a conversation between two elderly women. One was talking about how emotionally wrenching she was finding it to give up her home and move to a retirement facility.

    “Oh, you won’t miss it a bit once you get settled,” the other woman said.

    She had already been through the experience and knew without question what lay ahead. I wanted to break in and hug the first woman. When we are in pain, the last thing we need is someone who knows without question what lies ahead.

    Many of us find it deeply uncomfortable to be in the presence of suffering. And no wonder. We live in a culture where we’re taught from childhood to hide our hurts, to buck up and get over them. We don’t want to display them, and we don’t want to see them in others. Yet unspoken pain is all around us.

    I’m talking here about a way of caring for each other that hews a fine line, because I in no way want to encourage my friends and loved ones to wallow in their sorrow. I want to honor it for what it is but never give it the power to rule my life.

    It’s true that others may be able to benefit from what I’ve learned—but not immediately after suffering the same kind of hurt. And it’s entirely up to them whether or not they want to learn from me.

    To show love for another in sorrow asks more of us than empathetic gestures. It asks us to try and understand exactly what the other is feeling, and even to risk getting a taste of that pain.

    At a retreat in Maui in 2001, Ram Dass drew a clear distinction between empathy and compassion.

    “Compassion for somebody else is that you are one with them and you hurt with them. That compassion comes out of the oneness of your heart, the oneness with all beings . . . ” He continued, “It’s not just empathy. It’s not one person feels empathy for another person. It’s got to be one person.”

    How will I ever reach the point where I can feel as one with someone who’s hurting? In this I’m like a child learning to walk; I can only stumble and try again.

    I’ve lived most of my life cultivating the image of myself as a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need anyone’s help. Reid’s death showed me how wrong I was. My task now, I think, is to be present for others who are hurting, because I know what suffering means. This knowledge is a bittersweet gift that’s been given to me by life. I’m trying as hard as I can to use it.

    I do not always succeed.

    This is what I know for certain: I can’t tell others how to heal. All I can do is sit with them—and when they’re ready, help them light a candle to find their way out of the dark. Doing this kindly, without giving voice to how I think they should move forward, is a practice I will struggle to follow the rest of my life.

    One last thing: A few weeks ago, when I had another setback with work, my dear Jeff came to me and enveloped me in a hug. He held me close, hurting with me. And only then, after several minutes, did he remind me that it wasn’t all that important—that in fact I had plenty of reasons to let it go.

    I responded by giving him the biggest, longest kiss I’ve given him in years.

    Photo by mhx

  • How a 10-Day Silent Retreat Helped Heal My Grieving Heart

    How a 10-Day Silent Retreat Helped Heal My Grieving Heart

    “In a retreat situation, you are forced to come face to face with yourself, to see yourself in depth, to meet yourself.” ~Lama Zopa Rinpoche

    When I was at university, doing a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat was considered a hardcore rite of passage only the toughest among us attempted. Those who lasted the distance referred to it as a “mind-blowing” and “life-changing” experience.

    “Think of how you feel after an orgasm,” a friend said when I considered finally doing a Vipassana meditation retreat to reconnect with myself after a decade in full time employment. “Imagine feeling for two months like you’ve just had the most powerful orgasm.”

    I couldn’t. I really couldn’t imagine how ten days of enforced intimacy with my own messy mind would result in two months of post-coital bliss. Nor could I imagine sitting still and keeping silent for ten days. Nor was I prepared to sacrifice half of my annual leave to find out.

    What finally got me to commit to the meditation cushion for a ten-day marathon of silence was a shattered heart. I needed a radical act of self-care.

    I had just spent two long years caring for my terminally ill husband. His funeral was followed three weeks later by the largest cyclone in Australia’s living memory. It made landfall within meters of my veranda, destroying an entire community. In the confusion that followed, I found things out about my husband that would have been best buried with him.

    I was shell-shocked, as if a bomb had detonated inside me and ripped my heart to shreds. A psychologist suggested happy pills. But I wasn’t interested in medicated happiness. I didn’t even want the post-coital bliss my friend had spoken of.

    I just wanted to feel whole again. The psychologist advised against a ten-day silent meditation retreat. It was too dangerous, she said. There wouldn’t be anybody there to catch me should I crash hard.

    But I knew that only I could pull myself up from the abyss. Avoiding my grief was not an option. I needed to confront my pain head on.

    Two months after my bereavement, I took myself off to an austere meditation center in Sri Lanka to follow the teachings of S. N. Goenka.

    Here is what I learned:

    Impermanence is the foundation of everything.

    When I showed up at my first ten-day silent meditation retreat, I had just witnessed the impermanence of everything, and it had left me devastated.

    Sitting in meditation for ten hours a day, continuously scanning my body, becoming aware of the rising and falling of my physical discomfort, I learned to accept that everything in life is constantly changing.

    In the afternoons, when the meditation hall turned into a sun-drenched hothouse, the physical discomfort of sitting still became almost unbearable. Resisting the urge to shift my legs or scratch my sweaty head taught me to become a detached observer.

    Every day a cool evening breeze would follow the intense afternoon heat. The tickling of my scalp, the tingling in my legs, the stiffness in my hips, all of it fell away as day turned into night and I stretched out on my rock hard mattress.

    By observing what was happening to my physical body, I learned to trust that emotional discomfort and pain rises and falls in the same way as physical pain does.

    Meditation teaches you how to become a detached observer.

    I learned to focus on my breath, to feel it rising and falling. I practiced watching my mind fill with dark clouds, like a lake with storm clouds reflected on it. I glimpsed brief moments of clarity as I allowed the clouds to drift by. I learned to label my emotions and set them free rather than stay attached to the pain.

    I learned to train my mind to be in control of those dark storm clouds that kept on brewing. They didn’t magically disappear as I sat in meditation ten hours each day. But I learned not to chase after them and become swept up in every little tempest that flared up.

    I learned to simply watch what was going on in my mind. It felt like watching a giant movie screen from the back row of a cinema.

    Meditation teaches us that we can control our emotional pain. By focusing on the breath, we are able to step back, assume the position of a witness, so that it doesn’t overwhelm us.

    It’s a lesson I’ve taken with me into everyday life. When a friend says something hurtful or when someone cuts me off in traffic, I know how not to be reactive.

    Meditation gives you a new perspective on who you are.

    As I sat and listened to the constant chatter in my head for ten days, I realized that our identities are a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

    Old stories from the past showed up. The tortured narrative of my dysfunctional family suddenly made sense. My parents had remained attached to the narrative of their suffering as deprived war children. Unable to craft new stories for themselves, this victim narrative defined them in adulthood.

    Sifting through the details of the aftermath of my husband’s death, trying to make sense of his unfaithfulness, I understood that I had been given the tools to rewrite that story.

    I couldn’t undo what had happened. I’d never be able to have another conversation with him to set the record straight. I couldn’t give our story a happy ending. But I had the tools to use what I had learned to craft a new narrative for myself.

    One stifling hot afternoon, focusing on the beads of sweat forming on my forehead, my focus became laser sharp.  I understood that if I didn’t want to live my life by the victim narrative, if I wanted to be in charge of myself again, if I didn’t want to turn into a bitter woman with a prematurely aged face, I needed to forgive those who had compounded my suffering.

    Writing to the women whom I had considered my worst enemies was profoundly liberating, both for me and them. We were able to make peace with ourselves and with my philandering husband.

    Suffering is an inevitable part of life.

    All of life is suffering. It’s one of the key principles of Buddhism. Human nature is imperfect as is the world we live in. The Pali word Dukkha means suffering, discontent, unsatisfactoriness. We all experience varying degrees of suffering all the time.

    Some of us had come to the retreat feeling stuck in life, stressed by our jobs, frustrated in our relationships, directionless and ready for some kind of transformation. I wasn’t the only who had brought a deep feeling of grief to the retreat.

    I was the only one who had lost a loved one, but grief has many faces. Some of us were grieving collapsed marriages or failed relationships. It made me aware that we will all experience deep sadness in our lives, not once, but many times. It made sense to learn how to deal with it.

    Life had just dealt me an overdose of suffering as if to hammer home this important point. Sitting with my physical and emotional pain for ten seemingly interminable days forced me to make friends with it.

    I was able to put it into a new perspective. I hadn’t died, I hadn’t lost a limb, I had no permanent battle scars. My adopted hometown would recover, the ravaged landscape would heal, and so would I.

    I realized that being able to hold my husband in death, to comfort him on the journey through his terminal illness, had been a chance for deep transformation. I understood that we are in charge of how we respond to suffering.

    Suffering arises from attachment.

    Burying my husband and sorting through the debris after a category five cyclone had shredded my hometown to bits, I had glimpsed how suffering is linked to attachment. Sitting on my meditation cushion for ten days, I grasped the core of the Second Noble Truth that all suffering arises from attachment.

    We are all driven by our desires and cravings. Our unhappiness is a result of our tendency to cling to or grasp at what is unattainable. We become attached to material things; we want to hold onto happiness; we chase after pleasure and we are in denial about the impermanence of everything.

    As expected, I didn’t explode in multiple orgasms, nor did I crash into the bottom of the abyss, both of which would have been a form of attachment.

    On the last day of the retreat, when we were at last released from our vow of silence, everybody was experiencing some kind of high. Something fundamental had shifted for all of us.

    Endless chatter quickly replaced our noble silence. Having sat side by side, experiencing the full rainbow of emotions, we were keen to share our experiences.

    A small group gathered around a self-confessed retreat junkie, who glowed like a 3D postcard version of the Buddha, sitting in full lotus pose for most of the retreat. He had made it his life’s purpose, he explained, to go from retreat to retreat so that he could stay permanently within that blissed out sate.

    I was tempted to quote one of our teachers that it’s just as dangerous to get attached to bliss as it is to get attached to pain and suffering. The aim of meditation is to let go of any form of attachment. But I bit my tongue, because I knew that he would need to find that out for himself.

    Meditation is a personal self-care tool we all have access to.

    Of course the ten-day meditation retreat didn’t magically cure my pain. It took many more weeks, months in fact, on the meditation cushion to heal my heart. But with every retreat I was inching a little further away from the abyss.

    Six years on, I have found love again. My house has been repaired and my garden has grown back into a lush jungle. Life continues to ebb and flow, oscillating between moments of happiness and suffering.

    You don’t have to be at your personal rock bottom to experience the life-changing benefits of a silent meditation retreat. What I learned has stayed with me. Meditation remains my personal self-care tool that allows me to negotiate the inevitable ups and downs of life, from the trivial to the tough stuff.

  • A Powerful Technique That Can Help Heal the Pain of Regret

    A Powerful Technique That Can Help Heal the Pain of Regret

    “We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.” ~Rick Warren

    Regret—whether for things that you have done or things that you had no control over—can keep you frozen in the past, unable to move forward. Sadly, there are no magic wands that can turn back the hands of time and change what has happened, but despite this I believe we’re not entirely powerless to affect the past, after all.

    I first began thinking of this subject when my daughter was young and having serious ongoing problems with fear. She wasn’t able to go to school or to be separated from me for any length of time at all.

    I really could sympathize with her. As an adoptee from Korea, I knew that she had been relinquished by her mother at birth, placed in an orphanage, then with a foster mother, and ultimately taken from that woman to make the long journey to America and her “forever” family—but not without a whole lot of emotional baggage onboard.

    I wished with all my heart that I could have been with her through those first months so that she would have known that she was safe and loved. I was sure that was the root of her troubles now, but no amount of safety in the present seemed to make up for the lack of it in her past. It seemed there was nothing I could do about her rocky start in life. Or was there?

    Being a meditator, and someone who is comfortable with visualizations, one day I had the brilliant idea to try simply “re-writing” her past.

    I visualized myself in the birthing room with Lia, taking her tiny body into my arms and telling her how much I loved her, that she was safe, and that I was waiting for her. I also whispered in her birth mother’s ear that I would take good care of her daughter, and that everything was going to be all right.

    The visualization felt wonderful, and I repeated it many times, going on to visualize myself at my daughter’s side through all of the other changes she went through in those scary first months of her life.

    Whether or not I was actually impacting my daughter, I certainly found these visualizations helpful to me! I felt I was somehow able to make up for what she had missed out on and, over time, I really think it did help Lia to overcome her fear (although I’d never be able to prove it).

    Perhaps it was only because my energy had changed, which affected her in turn. At any rate, she gradually seemed to relax and gain the confidence that had eluded us through so many years and so many other attempts to help her feel safe.

    Since then, I’ve used my “time travel” meditation in many other circumstances. For instance, I think every parent has had lapses of control that we deeply regret in hindsight. I vividly remember once losing my temper with Lia as a toddler, for breaking an item that was precious to me. As she grew older and seemed so intent on always being perfect, I wondered sadly how much I had contributed to her fear of “messing up.”

    So again, I went back to that remembered situation in a visualization. Obviously, I couldn’t change the fact that I had yelled at her, but I visualized surrounding her in love and whispering that everything was okay—she hadn’t done anything wrong.

    In my imagination, we watched my earlier self yelling, and I told her, “She’s just tired, poor thing. She’s not really mad at you, she’s mad at herself. Let’s just send her some love.” And we did.

    As before, I have no idea whether my visualization actually had an impact on Lia’s perfectionism (I hope it did), but it certainly helped me feel more compassion and less shame regarding my past actions.

    On yet another occasion, I mentally placed a retroactive bubble of love and protection around Lia when she was facing a scary situation that I hadn’t known about at the time. There are literally endless scenarios for tweaking things in the past, so don’t go too crazy with this! Save it for the situations that really weigh on your heart.

    These techniques work equally well even if you aren’t a parent. You can mentally send the adult version of yourself back into your childhood to provide love and support to your earlier self.

    Children are especially vulnerable, since they have so little understanding of the true context of what is happening. We all remember times when we felt alone and frightened—how wonderful to take that scared child in your arms and let her know it will all be okay, that she isn’t truly alone.

    Although it’s tempting to imagine different outcomes for those painful times, I try to always stay true to what actually happened and simply provide whatever energetic support seems best. For better or worse, we are the product of these experiences; they are a part of who we are. But it may be possible to heal some of the wounds they left behind, even many years down the road.

    Does it really work? We know so little about time, but quantum physics gives us some understanding of how slippery a concept it is. At the very minimum, these techniques bring present comfort and a sense of being able to help what previously seemed beyond help.

    The feeling of powerlessness to change the past is one of the most corrosive aspects of regret. Even if it is only “imaginary,” the sense of efficacy we get from taking some retroactive action is priceless.

    For very traumatic situations, especially ones that you have not already explored in therapy, I would definitely recommend first trying these techniques with a therapist. However, most of us have a long list of more garden-variety regrets we could safely use “time travel” meditation to address.

    To begin, simply relax and breathe deeply, gently allowing the situation to come into your awareness. Let your intuition be the guide, and use any words, color, light or other visualizations that occur to you. (As a general rule, you can never go wrong by simply blanketing the experience with love and compassion.)

    Don’t force yourself to feel forgiveness if that isn’t what you feel—if there is some antagonist involved, you can safely just ignore them and concentrate on providing comfort to the one who needs it. Remember that you are the “wise adult” in this scene, there to provide perspective and support, not justice or retribution.

    Continue to breathe deeply and notice whatever emotions come up. Close the meditation when it feels complete, and return as often as you like! Sometimes once will be enough; sometimes (as with Lia’s birth) it will take many sessions to feel complete. Again, let your intuition be your guide.

    Be respectful if you use the technique on other people or situations that you didn’t personally experience. I felt close enough to Lia to insert myself into that scene, but I would hesitate to do so in most other situations. I also shared with her what I was doing and, even though she was still fairly young at the time, I think she loved the idea that her mommy was there, at least in spirit, at her birth.

    Although it’s true that “what’s passed is past,” it may be possible that we don’t need to leave it at that. I believe we can send our love and our energy through time and, in the process, perhaps heal ourselves of painful regret.

  • You Deserve to Chill: How to Create Space to Heal and De-stress

    You Deserve to Chill: How to Create Space to Heal and De-stress

    “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Why do we stress ourselves out? Why is it that being productive and getting tasks done is more important than healing and taking the time to feel calm?

    Stress and anxiety can affect our lives in so many different ways. A few years ago, it manifested itself in me physically, in a pretty gross way.

    There was a time I had a plantar wart on the bottom of my left foot, and it was very painful. When the pain got to the point that I couldn’t walk normally, I went to the dermatologist to get it burned off.

    I did this repeatedly for months on end, as it kept coming back. The wart was so sore that I walked differently, causing my knees to swell and my hips to become inflamed. This whole time, I didn’t think of myself as sick and needing to heal. I just took it. In both mind and body, I surrendered to the wart.

    In the meantime, I would always talk about how blessed I was to be so healthy.

    I mean, a wart doesn’t count, right?

    Then, it dawned on me. This was a question of deserving. Since I “wasn’t sick” I didn’t deserve sympathy for my pain, I didn’t deserve help around the house while I healed, nor did I deserve to stop doing everything for everyone else so I could focus on getting myself better. If I didn’t deserve to heal, did that mean I deserved to have the wart?

    This was crazy! I sat down in meditation and asked my inner wisdom what having this wart meant. It told me that I walked around all day serving everybody else, but I had to take care of myself, too.

    The wart was trying to get me to stop being everybody’s maid, waitress, nurse, teacher, and office manager by making it too painful to walk. 

    I was so ready to get rid of the wart that I listened. My inner dialogue became more soothing. Again, in meditation, I told myself silently that I was committed to taking care of me. I stuck to that commitment by delegating chores, making plans with girlfriends, and going to bed earlier. After two weeks of this, the wart was completely gone.

    The first step in addressing this “not-deserving wall” was to show myself some compassion—to give myself some understanding for the pain and suffering I experienced. This meant that instead of judging myself for being weak and stupid, I could acknowledge myself by saying, “I get it.”

    What an incredible relief this was to my psyche!

    Saying, “I get it,” changes the game. We’re validated and can lay down the cross (the “negative self-judgment”) and rest. Then, we can get up and—with that more loving relationship with ourselves—start to get better faster.

    I realized that suffering was suffering. No one, not even me, deserved to suffer. And everyone, even me, deserved help to get rid of it. So I practiced being easier on myself, stopped beating myself up about my anxiety, and I looked to my inner wisdom for help.

    This self-compassion helped me to like and trust myself and begin to see glimpses of the good skills I used to cope with life. Quickly, I felt less vulnerable and more empowered to make the change I so desired—to get better.

    So, back to the questions at the beginning of this article…

    Why do we stress ourselves out? Why is it that being productive and getting tasks done is more important than healing and taking the time to feel calm?

    The answer? Because healing isn’t tangible. You can’t check it off a list. It takes time and commitment.

    The next step was realizing that in order to make my healing a priority, I needed one very important thing: respite.

    Respite became part of my day. I transformed a corner of my home into a sacred place of contemplation, and I decided to spend time there everyday to breathe, meditate, and pray. In addition to taking time for stillness, I added a walk into my daily schedule to move my body and get out of my head.

    I also started going on retreats. This was an incredible source of solace for me. It allowed me to take a break from my usual daily grind and focus solely on myself and my healing. The memories I cultivated from these retreats have become touchstones for me when my life starts to get chaotic.

    We deserve to chill. We deserve to take a break from our lives. We deserve to heal. We deserve respite.

    Here is your invitation to chill. I hope you accept.

    You are cordially invited to heal from past and present hurts.

    You are invited to let go of worries, because you now know that you can handle whatever comes your way. You can gain confidence in your skills in managing yourself and you can be proud of your response.

    You are respectfully invited to connect with people. See relationships and situations from the big picture where things are not so personal, and not as “against you” as you thought. You see that everyone is going through their own stuff.

    You are invited to stop taking yourself so seriously. Ease up. Relax.

    I invite you to breathe easy since no matter what situation you are in, you are not alone.

    I invite you to have more fun, more silliness, more love.

    Humans have at least eighteen distinct types of smiles. I invite you to use one.

    I invite you to share. Do you need more time to just chill?

  • You Cannot Heal a Lifetime of Pain Overnight

    You Cannot Heal a Lifetime of Pain Overnight

  • Conscious Breathing: A Simple Way to Heal Your Pain and Be Present

    Conscious Breathing: A Simple Way to Heal Your Pain and Be Present

    “Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    I never gave much thought to my breath unless I was submerged under water for long periods without any.

    Today I rely on it for more than the obvious function of keeping me alive.

    Breathing has become my biggest tool and best friend.

    It has become a foundation for living with conscious presence and awareness.

    Breathing consciously has helped me overcome anxiety and has provided a gateway into peace.

    The breath has helped me move through long-buried emotions and trauma.

    When I try to exert control over outside conditions, my mind speeds up, I feel anxious and fearful, and I create false scenarios of doom and destruction.

    My biggest savior in this downward spiral has been breathing. Lying down, putting on some music, and beginning to breathe. Breathing in and out of my mouth. Taking in as much oxygen as possible, with no gaps between the inhalation and the exhalation.

    In the past, I have resorted to other means of dealing with this anxiety of my mind. Alcohol, drugs, and excessive exercising were some of my favorites.

    Today I have given all these other methods up, as they didn’t really work.

    What are some of the methods you use to quiet the mind? Do they serve you? Do they actually help or make things worse?

    In the past I was running away from feelings, trying to avoid the internal chaos.

    Breathing helps me move through the feelings and chaos.

    It sounds so simple, and it is.

    Through breathwork, my life has transformed.

    I used to be ready to defend myself at any moment. Really.

    Inside my body, I felt surges of adrenaline, as if an attacker was about to kill me. I was always on high alert, ready to pounce into action.

    The excessive exercise kept this adrenaline rolling at high levels all the time. I was addicted to it and almost felt like I needed it to survive.

    Eighteen months ago I began conscious connected breathwork. From my very first session, I was hooked. This was better than drugs.

    As a result of my breathing, all of my unconscious, buried cellular emotion started to surface. Unpleasant blacked-out memories from childhood, traumatic experiences—they all came rushing back.

    It became very clear then what I had been running from. I didn’t want to face those painful feelings.

    I made a commitment to myself, however, that I would continue to show up. I dropped the story. I dropped any goal of “fixing” myself and just let go.

    I decided I would be willing to lie down for an hour and breathe. Whatever happened from there was what needed to happen. I dropped the “poor me” drama that this horrible trauma had happened to me, and instead, I felt it.

    The terror, the anger, and the pain became my companions. Welcoming them in with open arms, I breathed through them—and they passed.

    I stopped, turned around, looked straight at these feelings, and took my power back.

    Today, I am not on the run anymore. My body doesn’t shake like it used to, and my legs aren’t constantly twitching up and down.

    I can sit still.

    I know now that when my mind starts to create drama, I can lie down and breathe.

    The clarity comes, the peace comes, and the feelings pass. I allow them, without trying to make them be any different.

    Is there something you are on the run from? Childhood abuse? A traumatic incident? Relationship heartbreak? What would happen if you faced it?

    What if the resistance to facing and feeling what you are avoiding is actually worse than going through it?

    What if under the mental obsession is fear, and under the fear is freedom?

    The obsessions of the mind are not real.

    They are fantasies created to take up mental space. Like watching a soap opera on TV, it takes us out of reality. It is a distraction.

    What if you decided to turn off the TV in your mind that is creating false dramas to keep it entertained and distracted?

    What would be in the space without the constant stream of mental soap operas?

    What I have found in this space is presence, peace, and grace. The feeling that everything is okay right here and now.

    Right here and now is all there is.

    I live in Bali and have an early morning 4:00am routine that consists of making a cup of coffee, writing, breathing, meditating, and praying. I honor the ancestors, then I drive on my motorbike to yoga and practice being present in the moment as I drive.

    Breathing with awareness helps me to be here now. It snaps me back into the moment.

    I notice and watch the sunrise.

    The early morning Balinese action is all happening on my way to yoga. The women making their offerings on the street, the children on their way to school, the dogs and chickens in the road, the men on their way to work in the rice paddies, and the local market buzzing with action—I take all this in as I drive.

    These moments matter. This is what I love about my life here in Bali. The everyday moments of life as they unfold.

    When in the present, gratitude erupts. Smiling inside, I feel whole and complete, and nothing else really matters.

    Breathing on my scooter, on a bus, while waiting in a line, I take five conscious breaths. Sometimes I count to five on the inhalation and count to five on the exhalation.

    This breathing practice comes with me everywhere I go.

    We all have the gift of breath. Use it. Become conscious of it.

    Turn off the mental TV and see what is truly there: A stunning sunset. Colorful flowers. Birds soaring. A happy child smiling.

    These moments are like snapshots that will never again be repeated. Missing these moments is missing life.

    Today we have a conscious choice to wake up out of the fog, wipe off the lenses, and see through the haze.

    The breath is our anchor. Use it to connect, to breathe through feelings without having to change them.

    Breathe into the emotions that scare you and allow them to come. Welcome them with open arms, and they will pass.

    The only way out is through, opening the doorway to presence and freedom.

    Breathing is our ticket into the present, our passage through the buried trauma of the past, and our vehicle to process difficult emotions.

    Conscious breathing is a life changer, accessible to all, and you can begin right now.

  • We Do Not Heal the Past by Dwelling There

    We Do Not Heal the Past by Dwelling There

    Heal the past

  • Why We Should Stop Trying to “Fix” Other People’s Pain

    Why We Should Stop Trying to “Fix” Other People’s Pain

    Depressed young crying woman - victim

    “There is such a deeply rooted belief that we must do something with intense surges of feeling and emotion as they wash through: understand them, determine their cause, link them to some life circumstance or person, transform them, transmute them, or even ‘heal’ them.” ~Matt Licata

    A few years ago, when I first started working for my current organization, one of my colleagues asked me what role I would most enjoy on the team.

    I quickly said, “I like making things happen.”

    That was so clear to me—I’m a natural do-er, organizer, and planner. It’s easy for me to take action on manifesting things in the world.

    While that has been useful for creating a sense of security in the material world, it has been less helpful for navigating the inner world.

    My same orientation toward the outside world, I brought to my emotions and how I met other people’s feelings.

    “You always try to fix the situation,” my husband said on the car ride home as grief was arising from visiting his ill mom. “Like, you know a process that works for you, and it feels as if you try to draft me into it.”

    That was hard to hear. I was defensive at first, “What? No I’m not. I really care about you, and am trying to help you…”

    As I sat with what he said and reflected on our conversation from a moment earlier, I realized that I was asking him over and over about how he was feeling, giving him suggestions and tools that have worked for me, that I thought might work for him too.

    When I peeled back another layer of my intention, I recognized it was mostly out of my own angst—the discomfort of just sitting there with him in presence, listening, with uncertainty. This nagging feeling of “needing to know” and “needing to make better” kept tugging at me.

    And so, finally, I gave in and asked several questions back to back that he was not yet ready to answer, followed by several uninvited suggestions.

    Over the next day, I continued to reflect on how to be with others and found there was a lot for me to learn from this situation with my husband.

    It’s true, when things are hard my mind perks up and goes into doing mode. I think, “What can I do? How do we make this better? What can be done to fix this situation and make it a bit more pleasant?”

    Anything to not linger in uncertainty and the discomfort of “unresolved” emotion.

    In that layer beneath the really good intention to help and make better, there is a more subtle motivation that says, “To stay with the vulnerability of this pain is really hard. It’s scary to be with the unknown. What can we do to make it go away and begin moving forward from this?”

    To sit with difficult emotions and not try to fix or make something better has been a huge learning curve for me over the past years, especially with emotional pain—both for myself and with those who are closest to me.

    Recently, when I see someone else in pain, I’ve been practicing “being with” and “witnessing,” and just deeply listening. It’s not an easy practice, as I’ve had thirty-three years of a conditioned, habitual impulse to “fix” and “move on” and “make better.”

    And yet, I see that the longer that I can stay with difficult emotions (my own and others’), the more I experience moments of deep peace, held with compassion.

    In fact, I often find that nothing needed fixing or to be “done.” Presence and being with is enough.

    Here are three lessons I’ve learned on how to be with others when faced with difficult emotions:

    1. Be with.

    This has been my mantra for the past six months. In fact, I even wear a bracelet daily with that phrase engraved.

    “Be with” reminds me to show up in a way that fully meets the present moment. Usually, that translates into deeply listening the best I can, remembering to breathe, coming back to the body, and not getting caught up in my mind.

    It reminds me to witness and not go down that path of fixing and making better.

    2. Do nothing.

    “This ‘doing nothing’ is not a cold, passive resignation, but is an alive, sacred activity, infused with the light of awareness and a wild, relentless sort of compassion. To do nothing in this way is a radical act of kindness and love, filled with qualities of earth and warmth, and a holy gift that you can offer yourself and others.” ~Matt Licata

    A friend of mine shared that when she was in psychology school, many of the therapists often asked, “But what I can I do to help my client?” Because doing nothing didn’t feel like enough.

    Each time this question came up, the teacher would always say the same thing: “Just be with his/her process. As that’s the only thing that creates lasting change.”

    There is a difference between powerlessness and helplessness. To surrender, which is to be powerlessness and to do nothing, does not equate to being helpless. When we are able to surrender and accept our powerlessness over others’ emotional pain and circumstance, we can wake up to deeper wisdom.

    Simply being present for the other exactly as he/she is—doing nothing—can be the most loving, powerful gift.

    3. Loving-kindness.

    During the moments when being with or doing nothing is too challenging, a loving-kindness mantra has always been helpful for me. It can bring a momentary peace during difficult situations when the mind might otherwise run along with thinking, planning, or engaging in fear-based stories to distract from the present moment.

    It goes like this: You say the below quietly inside, with an open heart.

    “May I be safe. May I be free from fear. May I be free from suffering.“ And, “May you be safe. May you be free from fear. May you be free from suffering.”

    What do you find helpful when those close to you are in emotional pain or in challenging situations? How do you meet yourself during difficult emotions?

  • How to Reconnect with the Inner Light Below Your Pain

    How to Reconnect with the Inner Light Below Your Pain

    Carefree woman

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of physical abuse and may be triggering to some people.

    “What hurts you blesses you, darkness is your candle.” ~Rumi

    We are all born with it. The beautiful bright light in our soul, filled with love and happiness.

    I remember having that feeling of being so alive and free and untouched by fear or worry.

    This is who we are at the core of our being. This is our true authentic self, from before the world told us who we needed to be and negative outside circumstances started to tear down our self-worth and self-esteem.

    I can tell you exactly what age I was when the light inside of me started to fade. I was seven years old and there was physical abuse at home with belts and hangers.

    From the very first moment it happened, I remember being in my bed and hugging my Snoopy doll, questioning what love and trust really meant.

    Worst of all, I started to believe that I was not worthy of safety and security, and decided I must be a really unlovable girl.

    Having this negative belief about myself, I could no longer hear anything positive from anyone. No matter what compliment someone offered or how much someone would try to show me love, I would go back to this now instilled belief: “You are not worth it. No one will love you. You are supposed to feel pain if love is involved.”

    This false self-perception led me down many dark paths into self-destruction and self-sabotage, and my world in my mind became very small.

    I was attracting circumstances and people in my life that would reaffirm my low self-worth so that I could tell myself, each and every time I was abandoned, rejected, or broken up with, “See, what you think is true—you are not worth it.”

    This eventually turned into a huge black abyss in my soul, and there was no light in sight.

    I tried to fill it with alcohol, drugs, relationships, sleeping pills, and whatever I thought might help me escape this deep darkness that was now my everyday existence, but nothing helped.

    After many years of struggling, running, and numbing, I saw a quote by the great poet Rumi that read, “What hurts you blesses you. Darkness is your candle.” That was it!

    I realized that my pain was not a punishment, and that I could see all this pain as a candle, a guide to bring me back to who I was before I decided I wasn’t worthy or lovable.

    My journey into spirituality began, and I was able to come up with a process that allowed me to heal from each painful incident, no matter how bad it was.

    Here are the steps that I have taken to heal some of my deepest wounds:

    Identify what, exactly, is causing the pain.

    I needed to go back to the beginning, before fear took the place of love in my heart, and remember the specific events that I allowed to negatively affect me. I created a timeline and wrote down everything that had ever hurt me up until my current age.

    Take a quiet moment and sit in a place where you won’t be interrupted. Take out your journal or a piece of paper, and then sit with your eyes closed.

    Bring yourself back to your past and try to recall a time when you felt hurt, scared, or fearful. Write down what happened and how you felt. This process is not an easy one, but the only way we can heal it is to reveal it.

    Acknowledge the pain in the present.

    After allowing myself to get clear about what had hurt me and caused me great suffering, I needed to fully acknowledge how each incident was affecting me in the present.

    Once you retrieve the memory of what caused you this pain, sit with it and visualize yourself saying, “Okay, I am in fear/distress/pain/extreme sadness, and I am going to be okay.”

    You are now acknowledging your feelings in this moment because you felt very alone and helpless before. This allows you to comfort yourself, which will bring you a feeling of peace.

    Accept the pain.

    What I was resisting, numbing, and avoiding was causing my suffering. My detour away from my light happened because I refused to accept that these incidents had so much power over me. I didn’t realize then that acceptance can set you free. I didn’t have to condone or like what happened; I just needed to accept it. 

    It will be a freeing exercise for you to now write, “I fully accept this situation as being exactly how it was supposed to be. I am a stronger person because of this.”

    This will alleviate the hold the pain has on you because you’ll be shifting your belief about what you experienced. Instead of feeling victimized, and consequently hurt or ashamed, you’ll feel empowered for having gained strength and wisdom through your experience. You can do this any time you feel you are holding on to something that is upsetting you.

    Release, forgive, and let go of the pain.

    Before I acknowledged the pain and brought it to consciousness, I didn’t think I had a choice, so the pain became part of my identity. Now I can release it. If I decide to visit it again and identify with it, I know that will be choosing to suffer.

    Now is the time when you can release the situation and the hold it has had on you. In order to do this, you need to forgive yourself for carrying around the dark and heavy emotions.

    You also need to forgive anyone who hurt you. It might help to consider that they, too, were hurting, and that’s why they did what they did. Recognizing that hurt people cause others pain, you now have an even stronger motivation to do this work to heal your own.

    Envision yourself in the situation(s) you revisited with a beautiful white light surrounding you, protecting you, and allowing you to see that you are safe.

    Picture yourself telling the fearful you that it’s okay to let this go because you are not there anymore. You are free from what you hurt you in the past, and it doesn’t mean anything about you or your worth. What happened wasn’t your fault, and you don’t deserve to live a life defined by that pain and shame.

    This is where you detach from your story and choose not to identify with the painful situations.

    You can now write out, “Universe, I am now fully releasing this situation and forgiving (whoever was involved) and myself. I am free from this pain. Thank you for taking this from me.”

    The good news is that once we make the courageous decision to bring these painful memories and emotions into the open, and decide we need to confront the pain head on, we can start this healing process.

    This is not a process that you will only do one time. This is something you will do over and over again until you feel the heaviness lifted from your heart and a sense of inner peace wash over you.

    By shining light on our deepest and darkest wounds, we allow them to come to the surface so we can go through the necessary steps to turn our greatest pain into our greatest power and strength.

    If your goal is to reconnect with your inner light and realign with who you truly are, I invite you on this healing journey that has forever changed my life.

  • How to Release the Painful Memories and Emotions Stored in Your Body

    How to Release the Painful Memories and Emotions Stored in Your Body

    “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” ~Rumi

    Your body keeps a physical memory of all of your experiences.

    You have lots of memories stored in your brain that you can recount at any given moment. You can recall names, faces, where the event took place, what it smelled like. But over time, these memories fade or change as time passes and we mature. However, even when the memory begins to fade from your brain, it lives on in your body in the form of physical sensations and behavior patterns.

    The body doesn’t forget.

    The events of our lives leave physiological imprints in our bodies, especially when we experience trauma or situations of extreme stress that cause the body to fight, flee, or freeze in order to cope.

    In a perfect world, we would be able to release the trauma or soothe the stress response soon after it was triggered. But we don’t live in a perfect world, so we’re all walking around with physical imprints of past experiences (good and bad) stored in our bodies. Most of us don’t know how to release them because we don’t even realize they exist!

    You may feel your body tense up when you have to ask for help or borrow money, or your face may get hot when you’re asked to speak in front of a crowd. The sensation is your body remembering.

    It’s remembering a past experience when you asked for help and it didn’t go well. Maybe someone made you feel ashamed because you “should be able to handle it yourself.” Perhaps you were called to the front of your third grade class and asked a question you didn’t know the answer to, so you felt embarrassed and humiliated.

    The body doesn’t have words to express itself, so it responds with physical sensations.

    You can forget, block, or intellectualize the memories that are stored in our brains, but how do you work through the memories being stored in your body?

    Animals shake when they experience trauma or anxiety. Think of a dog who’s been in a fight with another dog: Once the fight is over, both dogs will shake to calm their nervous systems and quiet the fight, flight, or freeze response. This enables them to move on without the physical memory of the situation.

    Humans, however, don’t naturally do this. Instead we carry our stress, anxiety, and trauma around with us every day and use food and other addictive behaviors to soothe ourselves and quiet the emotional discomfort.

    There’s nothing wrong with turning to food or other means to soothe yourself, but typically habitual behaviors provide a short-term solution, and you’ll continue to feel the discomfort until you release the memory from your body.

    I am a recovering sugar addict. I used to stuff myself with cake, cookies, and ice cream any time I felt sad, angry, or alone. The sugar high helped me cope with difficult emotions and soothed the pain of a childhood marred with stress and abuse.

    It was a behavior that eventually made me sick. Chronic yeast infections, migraines, and fatigue were the norm for ten years before I realized sugar was making me sick. I eliminated it from my diet, but the changes in my physical health were minimal.

    In order to truly heal my body, I had to address the emotional issues that caused me to self-medicate with food. I did this by creating an emotional tool-kit.

    In order to release the emotions and create a more peaceful state of being, it’s important to create an emotional tool-kit to help regulate your nervous system and soothe the discomfort.

    The first tool to put in your emotional tool-kit: non-judgment

    When you feel emotionally triggered and tempted to turn to food or other addictive behaviors for comfort, try not to judge the reaction. Our bodies are programmed to seek pleasure, not discomfort, so it’s natural to try and find something to soothe the pain and make yourself feel better.

    The need to soothe yourself with food or other means doesn’t make you a bad person—it makes you human.

    The second tool in your emotional tool-kit: permission

    Give yourself permission to feel—you have to feel it to heal it.

    Often the reason we feel the need to numb what we’re feeling is because we believe that the emotion we’re feeling isn’t allowed. We think we’re not allowed to be angry or we’re supposed to be strong, so we can’t cry.

    Giving yourself permission to feel allows you to have power over it—you control it instead of allowing it to control you, and in the process you create the space to heal.

    The healing process will bring up lots of different feelings and emotions; many will be uncomfortable. When these uncomfortable emotions come up, allow them to come up without becoming attached to them; notice them for what they are and know that there is a natural ebb and flow to them.

    It may be horribly uncomfortable initially, but allow yourself to witness them without judgment or reaction. This will allow you to respond objectively. Feelings aren’t forever. They come and go, if you let them.

    The third tool in your emotional tool-kit: release

    Now that you’ve allowed yourself to feel, it’s time to release the emotion from your body.

    You can do this by gently shaking. Start with your feet and work your way up, one body part at a time, or you can turn on a song that mirrors the way you’re feeling and sing, dance, or cry until you feel physically and emotionally satisfied. All of these things will help give the emotion a voice and move the emotion out of your body.

    Not quite ready to move your body? Grab a journal and write. No filter, no editing; leave the anger, frustration, sadness, and anything else you’re feeling on the page. Feel free to tear or safely burn the pages when you’re done as a symbolic release.

    There isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to release. There will be times when moving your body helps, and other times singing or writing will feel more effective. Choose the method that feels best to you in the moment.

    The fourth tool in your emotional tool-kit: forgiveness

    This is the most important tool in your tool-kit. In order to truly heal, you have to be able to forgive yourself.

    Beating yourself up for past transgressions isn’t productive, and certainly doesn’t make you feel good about yourself.

    Understand that no matter what situation(s) led you to numb yourself with food, drugs, sex, or your self-soothing mechanism of choice, you did the best you could with the information you had on a physical, mental, and emotional level. You dealt with your emotions in the best way that you knew how.

    Hindsight is 20/20, and it’s easy to get caught up in the “shoulda, coulda, woulda” spiral of shame when looking back on a situation. But when we’re in a state of discomfort, we don’t always have the capacity to think logically or rationally. Your brain and body respond to discomfort based on what feels like the safest option in the moment, and sometimes that means turning to habitual or addictive behaviors.

    Forgive yourself because you did the best you could at the time, and move on knowing that you have the knowledge and tools to think differently next time.

    Finally: time.

    We have a tendency to look for the quick fix, but there’s no six-hour healing elixir that can magically erase the pain and discomfort from old wounds. Healing takes time.

    Give yourself time to fill your emotional tool-kit and understand that healing is a journey—one that lasts a lifetime.

    Of course, practice makes the journey easier, but there is no perfection. There will be times when you fall back on old patterns and behaviors, when that happens reach into your emotional tool-kit and take what you need. You are equipped. You can do this.