Tag: wisdom
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How to Release the Fear That Keeps Our Lives Small
“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.” ~Gabor Mate
It was late at night, and I couldn’t sleep. I could almost hear the thudding of fear that was exploding in my chest. I tried to identify the singular cause of the fear, but it didn’t feel like there was just one thing.
There were so many things.
It was the world at large and problems in it; it was how my kid was feeling this morning when they got home from school. It was the rift between my husband and me, feeling so much like I couldn’t reach him to build a connection again. It was work and the state of my health. I was eating too much, always unexercised, ever stressed.
And I could feel that night the icy fear that liked to crawl up my spine and fill me with abject horror.
I just wanted my life to change in so many ways, so I could rid myself of this fear and be over it already.
After this night, and the hundreds of other nights like it where I lay awake unable to sleep, feeling so very bad about my life, I learned something very important. That the fear that existed inside of me was actually very, very old, and it was the same fear that was simply playing on repeat, over all my life. Instead of dealing with the hundreds of things that scared me, I had to go to the source of the fear.
Fear had embedded itself into my bones at an early age, passed on from my parents, and exacerbated by terrifying experiences that I’d had. And it had stayed locked in my body like a confined animal lying in wait, because I had never received enough emotional safety to allow it to release from my body.
Oh, how I hated this fear.
The list of things I was terrified about was overwhelming, and it filled me with such deep shame about who I was now—a grown adult with children, a business, and a husband. That I could be someone who was almost afraid of their own shadow repulsed me.
When I reflect back and think now about that woman, that poor, terrified woman, looking out at the world and feeling so alone in her fear, I feel so much sadness. Not so much about how scared I was—I understand now why I had so much fear in my body and why it stayed there—but because I felt so much shame for feeling that way.
It was like a double whammy of emotional pain—fear in itself is a big, hard, tough emotion to experience day in and day out. And it requires compassion and understanding. Adding deep feelings of shame that, somehow, I was wrong to feel like this, made the fear so much harder to handle.
I yearn to scoop up that woman and hold her and say, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
What made the difference to that woman lying in perpetual fear and to the woman I am now was that I learned about how emotions actually work. And I learned how to work with emotions so they didn’t stay trapped inside my body, growing ever bigger by the decade, creating a life that kept getting smaller as the fear seemed to have seeped out and tainted so much of it.
I no longer have a growing list of things that scare me. In fact, I have an ever-shortening list of things that scare me, as I have learned how to not just work with the emotion of fear in the present, but to release the gigantic weight of the past fear that I had been carrying.
Decades of fear that had stayed in my body, unable to release and coloring my world view so dramatically.
What really helped me make a huge shift was when I learned to support myself through feeling the emotion of fear. To build a feeling of safety to hold these feelings in my body. To allow them, the sensations they create, in order to be fully present. Feel them and then they have the chance to release.
And this is because our emotions want to be seen, felt, and heard. It may sound illogical, but just because we are feeling emotional doesn’t mean we are actually feeling our feelings.
Most of us, to be honest, are resisting our feelings—trying to move away from them as fast as possible, thinking our way out of them, trying to talk our way out of our feelings or fix the situation/our lives/the people we feel are to blame.
We aren’t accepting them, welcoming them, and allowing them—which is what our emotions want.
When emotions arise, the first thing we need to do, instead of staying on the runaway train of thoughts—the endless cascade of thoughts that all humans have all of the time—is move our attention to our bodies.
We notice: How is the emotion showing up in my body?
What does it look like or feel like?
What sensations am I noticing? Heat, heaviness, tension, constriction?
And when we notice the sensations, maybe the sensations get stronger. I like to think of it like it’s relieved that, finally, we are paying attention to it.
When we aren’t used to paying attention and staying with the sensations of, say, fiery anger or nauseating fear, it can feel like a lot. So we want to be gentle with ourselves, taking baby steps to learn how to tolerate the sensations the feeling is creating in our body. Taking tiny sips of the emotion until we can hold more.
Emotions love to be met with empathy and understanding, so this is my next step. For many of us we have gotten so used to feeling aggrieved or scared by our feelings that we will feel judgment about the feeling being here.
I shouldn’t feel like this!
What’s wrong with me that I get so angry / sad / scared all the time?
Why can’t I just stop feeling so ashamed?!So, if that’s you, if you load on judgment when you notice your feelings, try this instead.
Offer a pause and some empathy.
Oh, look, fear is here. That’s a tough one for me.
It makes sense that I feel like this.
It’s hard to be with this emotion, but I am going to support myself to feel this.We can then see what happens when we turn toward that feeling with an attitude of acceptance, understanding, and empathy. How does it respond? What does it feel like to be allowed to have that feeling in your body?
All emotions are natural. All emotions are valid. What makes us human and able to live such rich and rewarding lives and relationships is that we have feelings. When we learn how to fully feel our emotions, we get to become aware of their purpose, their ability to guide us to living and being more authentic in our lives.
Most of us don’t know how to be with the sensations our feelings create, so we get tangled up in how badly we feel about them.
Now, we don’t want to pour our feelings onto people; we don’t want to shout or scare people. But we do want to fully acknowledge our feelings with compassion.
When we can be curious about how we feel, it helps us open up to the possibilities of supporting ourselves through the feelings we are having. And when we offer ourselves compassion, it helps us develop a more trusting, loving, and gentle relationship with ourselves.
Instead of trying to push through or ignore our feelings, when we turn toward them with compassion and empathy, it actually helps us to move through the feeling so much faster.
Once the feeling has been fully felt, when we’ve been able to stay with the sensations that it creates, it will then release.
And when we’ve released that feeling from our body, wow, we feel so much lighter, calmer, with a renewed sense of possibility.
As an added bonus, once our feelings have been seen, felt, and heard, we get to access the part of us that is awesomely productive. The part that’s great at coming up with ideas and solutions, feels confident, and enjoys life. And we have a lot more energy.
When we are able to be with our feelings, understand them, hold them with a feeling of safety and possibility in our body—and once we start doing this over and over again—this is where we get to reduce the amount of fear we hold in our body. And wow, that is a beautiful sensation!
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My Husband Left Me for Another Woman: How Forgiveness Set Me Free
“Allow yourself to be proud of yourself and all the progress you’ve made. Especially the progress no one else can see.” ~Unknown
I watched my then-four-month-old daughter wiggle around on the floor on her belly, arms flailed out to the side in her pink-footed pajamas, giggling hysterically. Her brother, four years old at the time, was launching himself from our king size bed onto a pile of pillows next to her, over and over. He’d land with a thud and a loud “oof,” cracking himself up,and she would break out in hysterics right with him.
I heard my voice in the background of the video, light-hearted and sweet, encouraging them both: “Look at you two! Look at you making her laugh. Isn’t he such a great big brother, cutie. Look at you!”
I didn’t sound like me. I sounded like an actress in a movie playing a part.
I was playing a part.
I went down the rabbit hole of watching video after video of my kids when they were just babies, which was housed on an old hard-drive I kept in a drawer hidden away. I hadn’t taken that drive out in a long time.
Too many memories. A time in my life I try to forget.
But there it was, beckoning me back. Inviting me to take a painful trip down memory lane, which I now feel was no accident because sometimes we have to look backward to see how far we’ve come.
My kids are now almost fourteen and ten years old. They still play the same roles as in that old video. My son often doing something idiotic and funny to make his sister laugh out loud. Her looking at him with adoration and love.
If someone could hear my voice now when I talk to them, though nobody is here anymore to hear it, it would sound light-hearted and sweet, laughing along with the two of them most days when they aren’t driving me crazy. I’m no longer playing a part, but still I secretly guard the story around what happened at that time in our lives that forced me to ever pretend at all.
I wept watching those videos that night, a profound sadness I hadn’t felt in a long time working its way up the hidden chamber of my soul. Friends who carried me through that period of time will often say, “Oh my God, that was awful. You were a mess.”
My friend Patrick, who came into my life not long after those videos were taken, said, “Dina, you were not well during that time. I mean, it was painful to watch. You’re a completely different woman today because of what you went through. I think you should talk about it.”
“No,” I said emphatically. “I don’t need to talk about it. That’s in the past. I’m different now. Why dredge it up?”
Except we don’t help each other when we don’t share our experiences. We can’t heal or give others hope that they too can heal when we’re not willing to go to the dark places; the ones that may be in the past but have left a scar reminding us of how far we’ve come.
Scars are just reminders of the wound. They don’t define us.
So, rewind the video… I had just had my second child, a baby girl I’d longed for. We were the perfect family, parents to a boy and a girl, both of us working glamorous jobs at movie studios in Los Angeles. With a nice house in the burbs. I was wildly in love with my husband at the time. Life was perfect.
Until it wasn’t. I found out just a few months before my daughter was born that he was having an affair. Some gorgeous blonde at the office. Younger than me, everything I wasn’t. All the cliché things.
I thought I could hold our perfect life together. Nobody had to know. I didn’t tell my family. I confided only in my closest friends, who became the army who carried me through the unbearable days, talked me through the panic attacks when I was hyperventilating on the floor, then came to sleep at my home and carry on a round-the-clock vigil when he moved out to be with her on my son’s fourth birthday.
I felt decimated. I was decimated. Here I was with a new baby only four months old and a four year old. My family lived across the country. My life in pieces. It felt like my heart had stopped beating.
It was a long road to healing and forgiveness. There are people I know who never get there, who allow the wound to stay open, bleeding; in pain, stuck, and feeling they can’t forgive and move on.
But I wanted to forgive. I wanted my peace, my power, and my own happiness more than I wanted to be right. I wasn’t going to let one person take everything away from me or allow one moment in time to define my life and my future happiness. But boy, did I want to stay in my story for a period of time.
The victim story.
The scorned wife story.
The cliché of believing he left because she was younger and prettier than me and that I wasn’t enough. Thinking his leaving meant I would never be enough for anyone.
That was a bullshit story that wasn’t true, and if anyone is in it now, I promise you that someone leaving you is an invitation to rise up and become everything you already are but don’t know you can be.
It took years for me to truly move on in a way that felt real. Because I did all the things within the first few years that made me look like I was doing just fine but wasn’t. I dated and had a few relationships. I continued to succeed at work, building my own business, and accepted every social invitation that came my way, all while taking care of two kids.
I pretended that when I saw him with her, I was doing just fine.
But I wasn’t. I hated him for what he did to me, and I loathed her. I was jealous, angry, and depressed. I hid my struggles and real feelings behind a fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence I didn’t really feel and filled my days with distractions from morning till night so I would never feel alone.
It wasn’t until I got honest with myself and really did the work that I started to thrive. My end game was forgiveness. Without it, I was locked in a prison of anger, resentment, and pain. I knew I needed to forgive myself first for not seeing what was right in front of me, my ex for not loving me the way he promised when we exchanged vows, and the other woman who I blamed for the ending of my marriage.
I found a great therapist, dove deep into my spirituality, worked with sacred plant medicine, and traveled to Costa Rica and Peru, where I took part in ayahuasca ceremonies. It was Mother Ayahuasca, as we call her in the shaman community, who showed me our soul contract together, which was to bring our children into the world, and also showed me his deep pain and regret for hurting me.
It was through all of the healing modalities I embarked on that I found compassion for the woman he was now with and a forgiveness I didn’t know was possible that set me free.
Flash forward ten years. My ex and I have a healthy co-parenting relationship. We’re not besties, but we have mutual respect for each other and bring our families together to celebrate the kids’ big milestones, whether it be their birthdays, holidays, dance recitals, or graduation.
I forgave and made peace with the woman he left me for. She and I stay in touch, although they are no longer together. She loved my kids for four years, and for that I’ll always be grateful to her. I cheer her on from a distance and pray for her happiness and that she finds love again.
I’m raising my kids solo, having moved them from LA where their dad still lives to the east coast to be closer to our families. It’s hard co-parenting long distance, but when it feels really hard, I remind myself that I’m surrounded by so much love and have a ton of support. There’s not one shred of me that feels not enough or unlovable or that something was done to me.
It was an invitation to grow. It was a bigger invitation to learn how to forgive.
We all make mistakes and do things we wish we could go back and undo.
We’re a messy, sometimes complicated family, just like every other family. Nobody has the perfect life, the perfect family, or the perfect relationship. I have to remind myself every day I scroll through my social media feed and see happy families smiling on the outside, that there is a story behind the smiles we aren’t always privy to.
My smile is real most days. Other days, there are tears of overwhelm or sadness or just mourning a life I thought I should have. There are also days when I am still angry with him for what he did to my heart and to me. But I am incredibly proud of the life I’ve created for myself and my children. They will never know the progress I’ve made in the last decade, nor will people who didn’t know me back then, but me… I’ll always know.
We can survive anything if we make the conscious decision to not let that thing take us down. We can not just survive but thrive if we allow forgiveness for ourselves and others who have hurt us to always be our endgame.
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How I Went from Approval Seeking to Authentic Living
“My life transformed when I stopped caring what people in the stands thought.” ~Brené Brown
One afternoon, I had coffee with a friend who told me that she and her family all have a garden campfire every Friday night and toast marshmallows. It sounded so rustically idyllic compared to our normal frozen pizza and movie tradition that I asked my husband if we could do the same that evening.
He sat down to pick up the remote control and casually replied that he was too tired to build a fire, then thought nothing more of it. But I felt devastated and stormed out for my evening run.
As I pounded the pavement, the ranting in my head about my selfish husband grew, and so did my anger. As I prepared to return home, full of rage, I became aware of the suffering I was creating in myself and realized I was sick of feeling resentful toward my husband when we weren’t doing what I thought we “should” do.
When I walked through the door, rather than give my husband the silent treatment, I decided to sit and reflect on my anger. At the time, I was a trainee therapist, and I remember being told that anger was a secondary emotion.
So I asked myself, “What’s underneath my anger?” “Fear” was my response. I inquired further, “What am I scared of?” I knew my husband loved me, so it wasn’t about that, and then it hit me. I was scared of disapproval from others. My anger toward my husband was related to my need for approval from everyone else.
Something about his refusal to light that fire made me worry that people would think we were boring. Particularly my friend!
But why did I need approval so much? The awareness was like waking from a trance. I had zero self-worth.
I realized that my lack of self-worth and need for approval had impacted my entire life, with extreme consequences.
For example, I’d ditched nice friends for the cool ones at school only to be bullied by the “cool” ones later on. I pretended I liked certain music and nights out to get boys to like me in my teens, only to end up alone anyway. I spent my twenties and thirties never knowing who I was, always adapting my opinions and lifestyle (even what to wear and eat) depending on who I was with at the time.
The self-criticism never went away, and my inability to be myself left me isolated and struggling with depression. Meditation and exercise have all been useful in improving my mental health, but before that experience with my husband, I’d never been able to shake the feeling of not being good enough.
As I had just entered my forties, I was determined things would be different. I embarked on my own “self-worth boot camp.”
Before I explain the steps I took to improve self-worth and stop seeking approval, it’s helpful to be aware that we all need approval to some degree, as we are evolutionarily designed to seek it.
In prehistoric times, we relied on being accepted by our tribe for survival, so we have a part of the brain that scans for how we are perceived in the eyes of others. The problem is that if we also struggle with low self-worth, usually due to experiences in childhood, that need to fit in with others takes over and prevents us from knowing ourselves. Until we do the work to get past this, we will lead inauthentic lives and be prone to depression and anxiety.
Excessive approval seeking is a survival skill you have learned as a means to cope with feeling (not being!) unlovable. Unraveling this means building your self-worth and loving yourself.
Taking the First Step: Radically Accept Yourself
My journey to self-worth started with the acknowledgment that constantly putting myself down and changing myself to feel loved hadn’t worked so far. I never felt good enough, as it was a slippery pole I couldn’t get to the top of.
Something radical was needed, and the phrase “radical acceptance” popped into my head. I thought I had come up with that phrase all by myself, but I later discovered it’s the title of an amazing book on self-compassion by Tara Brach. (I like to think I channeled it through collective consciousness, but I probably just noticed it in my local bookstore and forgot.)
However, my take on radical acceptance at that time (which is slightly different from the book) was no matter what I was doing, thinking, wearing, being, etc., I 100% accepted myself.
If I found myself scrolling social media, comparing myself to friends, and thinking I should have done more with my weekend, I paused and said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m still good enough.”
If I caught myself analyzing social interactions, wondering how I came across, I paused and said, “I don’t care what people think. I’m loveable.”
If I got upset that a friend had not texted back or I felt excluded from the different cliques in mummy land, I would take a deep breath and say, “It’s okay…you are loveable.”
Change Your Feelings: Loving Kindness Meditation for Self-Worth
Obviously, deciding to radically accept yourself is easier said than done, so I supplemented this mindset shift with a powerful self-loving meditation. This was a game changer and made a big difference to how I felt about myself.
Loving-kindness meditation is an ancient Buddhist practice that involves cultivating well-wishing toward people (including yourself) with certain thoughts and phrases (i.e., “may you be well, happy, and free of suffering”). First you say it to yourself, then a close friend, a stranger, and an enemy before finally expanding the sentiment to the rest of the world.
I’d dabbled in this before but felt something more intense was needed for my self-worth boot camp.
I first thought of someone I truly loved, and my kids came to mind. I thought of how much I loved them; that they weren’t perfect, but I knew they were loveable. But crucially, I also made an effort to connect to the effect these thoughts and feelings had in my body.
My body felt warm, pleasant, and tingly as I mentally offered this unconditional love to them.
Still holding on to the physical sensations of unconditional love in my body, I replaced this with a vision of myself. I reminded myself that I, too, was imperfect but worthy of love. I felt love toward myself and told myself that I was okay, doing the best I could, and was good enough as I was. I even told myself I loved myself.
I made sure I practiced this every day, and after about three to four weeks I noticed an internal shift, and my need to please started to fall away.
Find Out Who You Are: What Would You Do If…
Another sign of low self-worth was my chronic indecisiveness and self-doubt. I felt on the fence about so many things. Was I into running or yoga? A vegan, vegetarian, or carnivore? Did I love museums or mountains? Whenever I tried to decide something, the white noise of “how would that come across?” clouded my judgment.
Trying to please people all your life means you’re already disconnected from how you feel about things, but then if each decision continues to be based on what others will think, that path gets well-trodden, leading to inauthenticity and unhappiness.
Being all things to all people got more stressful as I got older. For example, as a working mum with limited time, I stretched myself thin thinking I should also be a mum who home baked, did crafts, and planned perfect birthday parties. Nobody could be all those things, but God, did I try. This just increased my stress and irritability and, ironically, worsened my presence as a mum.
My new approach meant that when I found myself stuck in indecision or feeling overwhelmed, I paused and said, “What would I do if I already felt good enough?”
This led to so many breakthroughs as I let go of the things I thought I should do and did what I wanted and needed instead. Yes, I was interested in yoga, but as I loved running and meditation, I didn’t have time. I accepted I was rubbish at kiddy crafts and would rather take my kids up a hill instead. I also discovered, amongst other things, I loved time on my own, with early nights and herbal tea rather than hangovers and a big social circle.
I discovered myself, and it felt fantastic.
Letting Go and Being Courageous: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion
Moving toward new, authentic living involves letting go of what you think other people want and having the guts to be true to yourself. This is where mindfulness and self-compassion are your friends.
However, my self-imposed “self-worth” boot camp may not have been possible unless I’d already been practicing mindfulness and self-compassion for a while. In my early thirties, I fell in love with mindfulness and became a teacher after it helped me stop self-critical thoughts from spiraling into depression. But it hadn’t really changed how I felt about myself until I combined it with the steps above.
When I decided to radically accept myself, mindfulness helped me to pause and notice my automatic thoughts about other people’s (imagined!) opinions long enough to generate some alternatives. The self-compassion practices I’d gained as a mindfulness teacher helped me tune into and accept the uncomfortable feelings that came with fear of rejection and offer myself kindness instead.
To get started with mindfulness and self-compassion meditations, it’s important to remember you are not trying to clear your mind but rather increasing your ability to notice your thoughts and feelings arising with non-judgmental awareness.
If you have time for a daily practice, you may notice changes after a few weeks, and an app can help you stay on track. Self-compassion means reminding yourself that you cannot help how you feel while cultivating the courage to respond to your feelings differently. Look up Tara Brach and Kristen Neff for some self-compassion practices to try.
Self-Worth Is a Journey: How I Feel Now
Waking up to (what Tara Brach calls) the trance of unworthiness really has been life-changing for me. Ultimately, recognizing that only I can decide I am loveable was key, and then making an effort to believe that myself rather than seeking validation.
It’s always a work in progress, and although I noticed changes quickly, I continue to use the steps on a regular basis when I notice falling back into old habits.
