I did a fantastic exercise this week where I visualized future me. As I’ve been writing about recently, I’m focusing more in my heart than my head right now, so this wasn’t one of those wish list type exercises where I think about who I’d like to be.

Instead it was more of a meditation to relax the mind, followed simply by trying to see what ideal future me looks like. It was refreshing to observe aspects that made absolute sense, though I doubt I’d have come up with them if I’d let my head take the lead.

Future me was relaxed, my skin looked soft and glowing, despite some fine lines that appeared to etch kindness and point to something inside that was very at one with life.  I felt love flowing to and from me, especially in my interactions with others. I could hear children’s laughter and life seemed lighter and more fun.

Trying to capture the feeling of that vision in words simply doesn’t do it justice, it was a moment of pure grace and it will stay with me for a long time. It’s my aim to imbue this feeling and breathe this ideal me into existence.

Had I have gone the other route and tried this exercise from my head, I’d likely have focused on what I was doing and achieving rather than who I was and how I felt. Yet I am acutely aware that anchoring myself in the feelings of that visualization couldn’t fail to attract all the things I would love to see in my future.

It conveyed great relationships, vibrant health and wellbeing, satisfaction with life. No worries or stresses, though that didn’t mean an absence of challenge, I was just able to trust in the moment that everything was unfolding exactly as it needed to.

It’s as I described the three main states of being in Building a Healthy Self Concept, this future ideal self had managed to integrate, through awareness and active healing work, the parts of myself that had fragmented through my early life.

It is fair to say that I am not there yet, I’m more in the second category I described in Building a Healthy Self Concept. While I am aware of my thoughts and feelings much of the time, I am still working through the patterns and their origins as I outlined in Do You Need to Cherish Yourself?

But the third state, which still seems to be the default path for the vast majority of people, is one that occurs in an unconscious mind; unaware of the effects of one’s thoughts and feelings. A friend of mine commented on a photo of a family member they knew. It was a photo of her earlier in life, and they were particularly struck by how attractive she had been compared to the lines of bitterness that now etch her face.

Who we are on the inside shows on the outside whether we like it or not. But awakening to your thoughts and feelings, and the role they have in what happens in your life, means the default is reset constantly.

I once heard a spiritual teacher talking about bygone days of mystics predicting our future. There was a time when a valid psychic reading would have been extremely accurate. However, with each passing moment, our life presents infinite possibilities to change and so the future possibilities can also change.

As more and more of us take charge of what we are thinking and how we are feeling, future forecasts like this are less reliable.

It helps me to think of an ideal future version of myself as one who is unencumbered by circumstances and experiences. Rather than trying to be something different, I am simply trying to lighten the load and heal those experiences in my life that created splits within me (between what I would have authentically liked to have said or done versus what others wanted from me).

I can’t change those experiences that have happened, but I can change my perspective of them.  Rather than have them dictate the values and beliefs I subconsciously hold and thus the way I feel about everything in my life, I can look at those fragments as stepping stones towards greater clarity and understanding and – most juicy of all – growth.

The truth was, my parents did the best they could with what they knew in the moment, as did my teachers. Yet, as a grown adult, I would often feel defensive and angry if things were not going well for me in life. Then I started to reclaim my own life, to become aware of my thoughts and feelings and take ownership of living my life authentically.

There were glorious moments of testing the waters, of living my truth, and the walls not crumbling down. Through each step, my parents may not always have understood or approved of my actions, but I no longer felt the need to be validated by that approval and our relationship became adult to adult.

When my mum died, I felt blessed for all that she had taught me. But things could have turned out differently, like so many parent-child relationships, she could have passed away before I had got my big girl undies on and grown up. As grownups, we have the opportunity to make our own choices, and that includes rediscovering what we think about and feel about things.

Visualising future ideal me gave me the gift of hindsight in the present. By embracing who I felt my less encumbered self to be, things already feel a little lighter and brighter.

Given that you were drawn to this article, and particularly if you are still reading, it would suggest you have already diverged from your default path. So are you ready to meet your future self?

If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

“One of your life lessons is to move from your head to your heart” I was told recently. It’s interesting, for someone as empathic as I am, who feels so much, to hear truth in a statement like that. In essence, while highly sensitive to others’ feelings, I tend to intellectualize my own.

Conversely, when I was reading about Attention Deficit Disorder recently, I became aware for the first time that someone who is insensitive to the feelings of others can be highly sensitive in their own experiences. I think I’d sort of pegged people as either sensitive or insensitive, including myself, in a much more universal way. So this new lens opens up a fresh perspective.

That said, I’m not oblivious to the pattern I’ve played out in my own life many times, experiencing strong emotions in private while presenting a mask to the world, then talking about it with others only in retrospect once I’ve reached a place of calm or resilience.

While that isn’t necessarily unhealthy, especially in the context of the infinite intelligence and love I’ve discovered within these last few years, what is unhealthy is the role I assume in taking on blame for these emotions. I am guilty of looking at what is wrong with me or what I did that was wrong, instead of treating myself with the same compassion I’d show others.

Back in the days when I was much less conscious of my thoughts and feelings, if I experienced trauma like a relationship breakup, or a run-in with a colleague at work, I would just chew myself up with thoughts about it all. I’d experience feelings about the lack of fairness, I’d get angry and defensive and I’d negatively obsess about the whole thing for days, weeks months or even years.

As I’ve become more consciously aware of my thoughts and feelings, and of the way our world works in terms of attracting our own experiences and why we attract them, I’ve become kinder to myself in the sense of trusting it’s all part of a broader picture and that everything always works out. Yet I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m compassionate towards myself.

Compassion would require working more in my feelings, my heart, and I’m acutely aware that is not where I’m generally focused. I like to work my way out of any negative feelings as soon as I can, distract myself from them, rather than actually take the time to feel them; especially those that have really triggered old hurts.

But I am finding myself drawn towards the healing that occurs by integrating all parts of the self, including those parts I view negatively, and it is time for me to take a more compassionate approach. I understand that everything I feel is serving me in some way and I want to dive deeper into that. 
To be truthful, I tend to gloss over positive experiences too, playing it cool instead of milking the feelings for all they are worth.

That is why it’s important to me to have more experiences where I’m not in my head.  Have you ever noticed that you are driving or walking somewhere and you suddenly realise you have not been paying attention? That is an example of being distracted, lost in thoughts, being in our head.

What I’m talking about here though is about being present to my internal environment; specifically being with my feelings rather than my thoughts and noticing the relationships between the two.

Instead of getting into the narrative that goes along with certain feelings, and getting bogged down in the right and wrong of the here and now thoughts, I am more interested in gaining a new perspective on the feelings themselves. It might sound cliché, but everything that triggers us has its roots in our childhood somewhere. I can’t change the past, but rather than replaying an old tape, I can record a new one.

For example, probably like most of you, there are many times in my childhood I felt powerless. My life depended on adults in my home, at school and in the various other activities I was involved in, so I often had to do as I was told with or without question or debate. As I became an adult and got a job, the same thing applied.

Now that I am free of those things, I still have to contend with my own children’s school and that brings up a lot of those old feelings. Life continues to present situations that make me feel powerless, as I wrote about in Build a Healthy Self Concept, so I am diving into those feelings and starting to understand them and their origins from a more mature and empowered perspective.

I’m finding myself practicing more and more the process I wrote about in Change Unhealthy Reactions. Being with my feelings is a tricky thing to do without wanting to fix how I’m feeling. Yet I know if I can just sit with them, in next to no time at all, their intensity seems to lessen. I find it really is the case that the more I try to push something away the more it persists.

It’s not that I even want to observe the feelings, which also feels like a distraction, I want to feel them. I want to remember – rather than bury – where I first felt the feelings and gain a fresh perspective on the pattern that has played out since. I want to learn and to grow into a more whole human; that being what it’s all about of course.

Whether your journey is to get more into your heart and out your head like me, or vice versa, it’s all part of our expansion and growth. And as we are expanding and growing, so is our collective experience enriching and expanding in ways we couldn’t anticipate. That is what I want to experience while centred in my heart, what about you?

For those who are heart centred, you may want to read Why the Big Questions Are Important. If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Last year I was gifted an affirmation bracelet and was asked to select what it said. There were lots of great choices, but the one that struck a chord with me was “I Am Cherished”. I’d like to say right upfront, it was not because I felt that way; it was because I innately felt like this was something I wanted to learn how to feel.

Since I’m a person who doesn’t wear jewellery, I’ll admit it’s been packed away with all my sentimental things and so that affirmation has sat ignored. However, this week I’ve been doing some really interesting work on my life purpose and it’s surfaced again.

The work I was doing was based on the premise that in order for us to fully experience whatever our core intention was for coming into this life we must first experience its opposite. This resonates with me, ever since I was a child I have realised that I can’t really appreciate the good in life without having had bad experiences.

Further, since what we experience in this world is largely through our closest relationships, I was asked to look back on all the significant relationships I’d had in my life and tune into how they felt each time they had turned sour. I didn’t really need a facilitator to point out the commonality, I have long since recognised that the faces, names and circumstances might change, but life keeps presenting the same lessons until we learn them.

What I realised as I sat with each of these scenes in my head, was how abandoned I felt. It wasn’t that people had left me, though that did happen on occasion, it was more that it felt I became too difficult to deal with and they simply didn’t know what to say or how to be with me. I was an old head on young shoulders and, nowhere more so than in those intimate relationships, I would reveal my innermost thoughts about life.

I’ve always felt that no one really understood me. Things that seem so obvious to me – like the premises I’ve outlined above about our core intention and the role of relationships – just can’t be understood by people who are totally identified with the thoughts in their head and the reality around them, they don’t see the innate link between cause and effect.

As is normal in our society, conforming often feels safer than expressing who we truly are. Since I felt my ideas didn’t really conform to the norm, I had grown up expecting that the safest place to express who I truly was would be within my intimate relationships. Consequently, as these relationships broke down, the core feeling that kept repeating was of my needs and my thoughts being rejected and me being abandoned.

Beyond those relationships it was easy to reflect on how common and pervasive these feelings still are in many areas of my life. For example, if I’ve shared an innermost thought with a good friend and they don’t respond, that familiar feeling crops up, or if I express my ideas and expectations to an organisation and get a template response or no response, it all feels like I’m just too hard to deal with, they don’t have the words for things that just seem so obvious to me.

So over the years I had abandoned myself, retreated within, so much so I had no idea who I even was, it just felt that the inside and outside were not a match. I was careful about who I spoke to what about, all the while finding the shallow and irrational (to me) conversations dissatisfying and soul destroying.

Until four years ago that was pretty much my life’s story. Though, since you are now reading my innermost thoughts you can see I did make dramatic changes. I stopped denying myself at that point and decided to just go ahead and publish what I wanted to say into the wider world and see what happened.

Guess what? The walls didn’t fall in, nothing terrible happened, in fact, I’ve had some great feedback and helped quite a few people over that time. There are still those in my life that think I’m nuts, but those that matter haven’t stopped loving me as a result. That, however, doesn’t mean I feel cherished.

Nor can I ever feel that way unless I start to cherish myself. That is the bit that needs work.

It took a while to land on the words to feel cherished as my core intention for this life. For someone who has felt like my needs and thoughts have been rejected, abandoned and stonewalled all my life, getting into a place where I can believe these can be cherished almost seems out of reach.

However, I can quite clearly appreciate the logic. In order to fully experience feeling cherished, and in order to help others feel cherished, I had to firstly have an opposite and fully immersed experience of not feeling that way. So I decided I need to go deeper and do some healing work.

Up until this point in my life, I haven’t really taken many steps in the direction of healing past simply becoming aware of how many of my thoughts and beliefs have affected my life experiences. However, I have noticed that the echoes of their related feelings are still stuck in my body. I can’t change the things I have experienced, but I can change my perspective of them, and thus how I feel about them.

The principle behind this healing is to go back to the time when I first experienced the feelings that have become so familiar, feeling abandoned, and to look at the whole scene through fresh eyes. Honestly this wasn’t an easy exercise. I was thinking I’d land back in the hospital waiting room, alone at age three, while my dad was taken to see my mum and new baby brother; young children were not allowed inside the ward in those days.

Instead, in my self induced meditative state, where I’d set an intention to go back to the first experience of feeling that way, I found myself in the womb experiencing what I assume the fetal version of me experienced many years ago.

My heart kept dropping into my stomach as I was absorbing waves of panic. This was not labour, I got the sense it was likely mum panicking about my survival after a previous loss she’d had. The feeling was suffocating and it made me withdraw inside, and go completely still and quiet.

I just kept getting wave after wave and, by the time I felt it lessening, I was practically in the fetal position on the chair I’d chosen to sit in during my meditation. I got the sense that fetal me felt that if I could just absorb these waves of panic, it would help create calm around me. I had shut off and retreated inwards, feeling alone and just focused on survival.

Of course, as an adult now observing this, there was a compulsion to want to sooth fetal me. I was wondering what would have helped in that situation. I felt myself fending off outside help, instead drawing in light with each heartbeat, filling up from the inside – it pumped me up like a balloon; so much so that adult me was now sitting up in the chair again. The calm and peace was a relief. I was still aware of the waves of panic, but I was no longer absorbing them.

Instead it felt like I was anchored inside, calling on my inner resources to fill me up and deflect (rather than absorb) what was coming at me. As I I felt that sense of calm and peace within I realized that would have radiated out towards mum and eased her panic. It changed the feeling of the whole scene. By absorbing the panic previously, going quiet and still, it would have further perpetuated her panic. However, when what is being reflected back is calm and peace, it would have calmed things down a whole lot quicker.

In my primitive and relatively helpless form all those years ago, I had inadvertently cut myself off from the source of my own power by absorbing someone else’s energy rather than reflecting it back to them. This is something I’ve learned how to do recently, as I wrote about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling.

By sensing this scene, in what is not even a conscious memory, and by changing the feeling at the root, it changes the way I feel about the things that have happened in my life that led to me feeling abandoned; they each take on a new light. This means that I am less likely to attract situations in which I feel abandoned, because I now no longer abandon myself.

In fact, as I experienced breathing in light, I felt that I was breathing in the very essence of who I am. In that moment, I remembered just how cherished we all are, and how cherished this experience called life is. I didn’t mentally note any of it, I just felt it.

To cherish is defined as protecting and caring for someone or something lovingly. As I wrote in Embrace Your Sensitivity Rather than Have to Protect Yourself from the World, protection isn’t a word that conjures the right images for me. Instead I see it as operating from a strong centre core, the inner knowing and honouring of my true self rather than defense or armor.

But fundamentally, what I take from my experience is the complete contrast between absorbing someone’s negative energy and then amplifying it back to them, a highly toxic feeling, versus the negative energy instead being deflected in the process of cherishing myself; this allows the possibility for love to reverberate instead.

To feel cherished, you first have to cherish yourself. Your thoughts, your feelings, your creative expression are all important, vital to your life experience and to the broader evolution of life here on Earth. Is it time for you to care for yourself as lovingly as you care for others?

If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Our self concept is about whom we believe ourselves to be. There are three main states I observe around this:
​

1. If someone is mostly unaware of their thoughts and emotions at any point in time their self concept will usually align with whatever they were shaped to be by their upbringing. The voice in their head will be full of things they should do, and others should or should not do.
2. If you are becoming aware of your thoughts and emotions, and how they impact on your life, you are likely feeling somewhere between enlightened and confused many times in each day. You will now be more aware of the should and should not’s, but not necessarily sure how to react to those, or how to act differently without anger, guilt, fear or shame.
3. Then there are those who are not only conscious of their thoughts and feelings, but have actively worked to heal many of the fragments of their inner being that arose in those early years when compliance and pleasing others meant survival. These people are able to self determine with more ease.

A healthy self concept, I believe, is in that third state. It is one where who we believe ourselves to be is as a result of the awareness and work involved in integrating all the parts of ourselves that fragmented in those early childhood years.

For example, just yesterday I was talking to a friend about my own mum’s labour when she birthed me. I know very few details about the labour itself, but I do remember her telling me a story about the nurses offering her a cup of tea. Mum didn’t drink tea, and didn’t want any, but they gave it to her anyway, and she drank it anyway. Then she threw up.

As my friend pointed out, the fact that they ignored her initially and brought her a cup of tea anyway, and then she drank it, indicates a dis-ease right there. It was a sign of the times perhaps, back in the 1970’s authority knew better and you did what you were told, and certainly you were polite. Maybe.

On the same topic I was reflecting on how much I must have eaten as a baby in those early months of my life as I was a huge infant going by the unflattering photos. We were recalling the approach to feeding at that time, it certainly wasn’t about being child-led, it was about drinking and eating all I was served. That carried on throughout childhood.

So I would have drank some milk, pushed it away, and then been encouraged to drink more. Sensing mum’s fear and determination, I would have drank some more and spilled (a nice word for throwing up), then, in line with the times, been fed more. Over time I would have spilled less.

I’m not sure if or how times have changed in regard to the expectation that others know better, certainly in birthing my own kids it was clear the health system still imposes its beliefs (albeit they have changed dramatically), but it’s a huge disrespect to a person’s boundaries. For me it’s a surefire arrow that points to a big clue about why I hear many thoughts in my head about what I should be doing in order to please others.

Sure, I’ve flushed that voice out, and I make sure I’m honouring my own needs and boundaries nowadays, but it doesn’t mean I’ve yet moved past feeling defensive about it, or feeling guilt, fear or shame. I still have some deep work to do in healing these traumas.

For that is what they are, the trauma of going against our natural inclinations when we were too little to do anything else, we had to survive. As we get older, those neural pathways are well and truly worn, as are the thoughts and emotions tied to them.

While I care what other people think, I want it to be because they may have perspectives that are useful for my happiness, growth or success in life rather than because my whole self concept is riding on it. There is a huge difference between those things.

There are times I find myself defending something and what I’m really seeking is validation. I don’t need someone to tell me I’m right, in fact I’ve come to believe there are no absolutes in this regard, just to recognise that my perception is right for me in that moment.

While I know that caring what others think is a trigger for me, and a relatively common one among our population, there are many more triggers we might have in relation to our entire self concept. It can be about productivity, looks, money, relationships, personality, the list is endless. It’s really more about the things that were important to those people who brought you up and the society you lived within.

So how can I go about integrating this part of me that wants to please others with the part of me that wants to do exactly as I please? I believe conscious awareness of the pattern itself goes a long way towards achieving this. But really, the only way to really unify these parts of me is with love, patience and practice.

Instead of imagining how disapproving others might be of me I can imagine instead pushing away my milk and that being the end of it, or not being made to eat everything on my plate when I didn’t want to. I can recall the many desires I’ve had and decisions I’ve made that have been questioned and compromised, instead imagining what it feels like to be validated.

I can even imagine a replay of the scene where mum declined the tea and that was unconditionally accepted.

Most importantly, when I sense that a desire I have or a decision I am making will be frowned upon, or perhaps even challenged, I can instead imagine the other person or people saying “it sounds as though you’ve put a lot of thought into this, you should trust your own judgment”. I can imagine people not thinking less of me, in fact thinking more of me for standing squarely in my own ground.

It’s not something that is likely to change overnight, I know to build a healthy self concept around this issue of pleasing others I am going to have to practice regularly silently standing my own ground without defence or justification, letting time and experience prove me right, or not. It doesn’t matter, what matters is embracing the freedom to make my own choices and to feel love regardless.

If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

“The choice point is to step back and swallow your anger while getting busy in the doing of proving your point to people who will inevitably only just smile and nod and have rolling eye sessions behind your back for as long as you continue to attempt to engage with them on a level they are utterly closed off to now and forever, amen.

Or…

Become aware that your inner guidance has stepped you up to the platform again because you are a vibrational match for something far far greater than what’s being sought within, which is permission and validation.

You are so much bigger than this.

If it’s not now, life will continue to put things like this in your path until the day comes where you have no other choice but to claim the space you take up in the world and let that be a problem for others if they so chose.

The higher path…

Your higher purpose is not, nor will it ever be, in alignment with what you are receiving at this moment.
Your higher purpose is a calling forward of your own sovereignty, your own truth, your own adult ability to make decisions that you trust. That’s your higher ground. Higher ground is never about not offending someone else.

How how how are you going to be in service to a new paradigm if you cannot even put your toe over the lines let alone challenge and erase them all together?

Too many lines in your sand.

Here is an opportunity, to stand in your space and claim your light, or allow others to reinforce that you aren’t ready for the reigns to your own life.....

In here, are the shining beacons of light that fill you with your truth. You mustn’t and simply cannot any longer continue to give your power away. In doing so, you will not attain the level of enlightenment you seek.

I encourage you to put your energy and attention to the you who will show up when the old paradigm shows up in attempt to clip those beautiful new wings of yours.

It’s not your fault that their own light isn’t a match for yours.

I wait and watch with all the love in my heart.”

Ever wish someone who cared enough to tell you this? While these were the words given to me by a dear friend, for which I’m deeply grateful, I am sharing them here with her permission because it’s time for us all to step up.

You know how I know?

You read this.

​With eternal thanks to Rachelle Mann of Echo Valley Retreats (Family Constellations and Trauma Therapy), the kind of friend I wish for everyone.
 
If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog