Over the last few weeks I’ve been contending with facial neuralgia. Often described as one of the most painful human conditions, I can attest that it is up there on the scale with childbirth and kidney stones, as it comes in waves of debilitating and excruciating pain.

This is the story of how it led me to an inner truth I’d not seen clearly at all until now: that I was still seeking respect for my decisions from other people.

So, starting with the pain, once I was confident my life wasn’t in any immediate danger, I moved pretty quickly into detective mode on what was causing it. Physically it seems likely it’s caused by a post virus that got activated when my immune system was low, a bit like shingles without the rash.

I’m skipping past a whole bunch of stuff here about the process of healing and healthcare that I will dive into in some later blogs, for now I’ll just share what was relevant to this particular nougat of authenticity revealing itself.

Whenever something physical arises I know it’s my inner being communicating that it’s been trying to get my attention and I’ve missed all the clues, so I was interested in what was going on beneath the surface.

My chiropractor said the feeling of being stuck is often associated with a post-virus. I also had a good look through my go-to books on what the body is telling me when illness arises and pinned this down to the emotion of anger.

No surprises there you might think, since it’s an area that I’ve been feeling called to look at lately (you may have read Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master). That is what surprised me though; I’d done a lot of work on it and thought I’d released anything stuck.

My body, obviously fed up with me having missed subtle and not so subtle communication, was being quite painful in its insistence. So off I went to the local pool to contemplate just what I might be feeling stuck on. As I was swimming up and down the thing that kept coming back to mind was how stuck I was on the issue of the lack of respect I feel from my kids’ school.

Having switched tack on my communications with the school earlier in the year, there was this old thought pattern (sitting like a devil on my shoulder) just relishing the possibility of being able to unleash itself in an intelligently worded tirade. Yet I knew that doesn’t work for me, but without having expressed my anger to the people at the school who had so offended me, I was at a loss about what to do.

I feel such gratitude to have some good and insightful friends and a safe place to throw all this stuff in the arena to tussle with it. A lot of conversation flowed, but here are the pieces that hit the nail on the head, as we flushed it out:

Friend: “Do not waste your grace and self respect on opening your wounds to people who are unsafe to open them up to. The school clearly doesn’t care, so don’t ask them to give something they never will. Dare I ask, in ten words or less, what is the hot button here with the school?”

Me: “It's about honoring our innate intelligence”

Friend: “I feel for you, I see the stickiness and the loop. I also see that it’s so strong that it can’t just be about the school, this has to be something more that is here to propel you into a higher perspective. It’s literally playing small on purpose so you don’t have to face something much bigger..?

It’s at this point a whole history of writing long, articulate letters to those who have offended my innate intelligence flashed before my eyes. In fact, earlier this week I came across the very first of those, a letter I wrote over twenty five years ago to a doctor. The story of how it came about can be paraphrased simply as a response to being passed around multiple practitioners, given repeated unsatisfactory diagnoses and a series of unhelpful treatments, along with a huge dose of condescension.

My friend said “While I totally get where you were coming from, I’m really interested that you felt so under attack by the world (or a psychiatrist) at such a young age, that you felt the need to pen a 5-page letter to correct his incorrect assumptions. That’s pretty intense and a lot of active indignation.”

Then the grand slam of observations “Is this about self validation, internal acceptance and a deep knowing of your worth and value, without seeking approval from anyone or anywhere else?”

At that point a light went on, something I heard often when growing up “for someone so intelligent, I’m amazed at how much rubbish you believe.” Bingo!

I’d hear this and associate it with a lack of respect, and I’d work harder to connect the conventional wisdom into how I’d arrived at my decision.

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge, whereas innate intelligence is, by definition, inborn. Aside of the obvious intellect that is at play in every aspect of the natural world, I’ve always felt that I did not arrive here like an empty vessel waiting to be filled up; nor did you.

Right from the first moments, babies show both an inherent awareness and an ability to apply and acquire knowledge. Yet the world into which I grew commonly considered that I had nothing of value to offer unless I got it from a conventionally recognized expert or had become one myself.

In short, I knew my own mind, I did and do know what is best for me (as I believe we all do), and balked every time I heard “Shona knows best” delivered in sarcastic tones and with rolling eyes.

As an adult this has led to a world of frustration and a pattern of writing long, intelligently worded letters or emails in defence of something or other – usually the right to have my own opinion about my own life.

Most aspects of our society – the health, education, finance and legal systems and professions - have rattled my chain at one time or another. It may just be the very reason I have gone wide and deep in my learning, in order to defend my own decisions. I now recognise that my knowledge and my ability to articulate it can be quite intimidating to people, especially when directed at them as a personal complaint.

Rather than intending to intimidate, really I’ve just been seeking validation and respect for the choices I’ve made. Yet none of that will happen unless it happens within me first. Certainly, with every letter, every line of every email I’ve constructed, it’s brought me back to knowing what I already knew, I do know what is best for me.

You may not be surprised to know that this revelation has brought about a relief of the painful symptoms on many levels. And I continue to be fascinated be just how much of who I am and what drives my everyday actions and outcomes is so often unseen and misunderstood, yet standing in plain sight.

So what is standing in your plain sight just waiting for you to notice it? Learn to value your unique traits and insights and know that you did not come to help this world stagnate and crumble, you came to evolve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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Anger, I’ve found, is a double edged sword. On one side it has the ability to damage and destroy relationships, on the other it has the ability to open wounds and allow deep healing and understanding to take place.

Behind this sits the other important double aspect of anger. There is the part that demands action as the feeling of it flows through the body, triggering it into flight of fight mode; it is this aspect that can destroy lives and, to avoid this, I must master my response to its call.

Then there is the other aspect that is pointing to deeper learning. “The emotion arises in direct response to a perception that a personal (often subconscious) boundary is being challenged” says Teal Swan, “whether it’s physical, mental or emotional”. Anger is essentially the fear of pain, which is why it triggers our flight or fight response.

Uncovering and challenging both my fears and boundaries has much to teach in the quest for self awareness, growth and authenticity. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Gary Zukov relates “Authentic power is the ability to distinguish within you the difference between love and fear, and choose love no matter what it happening inside of you or outside of you.”

I find this can be pretty challenging when it comes to anger, because that adrenaline coursing through my veins wants me to act in defense of my fears. To enable me to act with authentic power, I think there are three steps:

• Set myself up for success
• Use the urge to act in my favour
• Look for the lessons

 
Set Myself up for Success

Anger is an emotion that has cropped up in all aspects of my life, particularly in relationships and the workplace, but nothing has made things clearer to me than becoming a parent because nothing has confronted me as much.

I’m with Alfie Kohn when he says “Even before I had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn’t really know. I didn’t know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope”.

I was sharing with some friends one of those moments where I ran out of rope and started yelling at my daughter for her refusal to get in the car this week. We started talking about the things that trigger us into yelling at our kids. One said straight away: sibling fighting, having to repeat herself endlessly to get simple tasks done, and people (not just the kids) not tidying up after themselves. That seemed like a pretty familiar list to me.

But as I thought about it, I was also aware that I generally only lose it if I’m not putting my whole attention on what is happening in front of me. So to Eckhart Tolle’s point, presence helps calm the emotional seas, stopping these situations of overwhelm building to start with.

Then I realised it’s not always possible to be fully present when I’m looking after the kids. Food needs prepared, clothes need washed and there are a whole host of other tasks that need to be attended to aside of the “mum, can you just…” demands.

A practice that I have used before, that helps tremendously though, is to give my unadulterated presence to each of my kids for ten to fifteen minutes each day, in the same way I do for myself when I do my daily meditation. I figure if I make this a regular thing it should have the same cumulative effect as meditation and help me to become more mindful in the difficult moments.

But while I can set myself up for success more often, there will be moments of anger in my life because my personal boundaries are still likely to get triggered or overstepped; both by little people who have limited awareness that others also have needs and wants and by adults who, frankly, have a somewhat traumatic relationship with their own.

Use the Urge to Act in My Favour
 
So how best to deal with that anger in the moment so as not to damage my relationships? Strategies I’ve tried - like counting to ten, screaming to let go of the energy, pounding a pillow - were ineffective. I’d always revert to yelling – and often it would get misdirected to those in the home if I’d had to suppress it elsewhere.
 
Recently, watching the docu-series Transcendence I was reminded about the mechanics of our flight or fight system, and how amazing it is when we are actually in mortal danger. But by constantly triggering it when the threat is not imminent or mortal, it stands in the way of my ability to look objectively at what is happening and live my best life.
 
Dr Libby Weaver’s advice is, as soon as we become aware of being in flight or fight mode, start to focus on our breathing. Slow it down, take belly breaths in and extend our exhalation. This is an effective way to calm our system and invoke the parasympathetic nervous system, from where we can operate more effectively. Here are some other methods that also work to soothe the nervous system.

Look for the Lessons

Once I’ve done that, I can take a real look at the anger and what it has to teach.

The first thing to notice is my own relationship with anger itself. I acknowledge that, despite my own disgust at the way I’ve expressed it on many an occasion, it did once serve a purpose. As a little girl taunted by classmates all the way home one day, when ignoring them hadn’t worked, exploding in verbal response and shoving a girl out of my personal space brokered no further issues.

Hearing my mother yelling in our house was a daily occurrence when I was growing up, and talking back a punishable offence. Finally, at fifteen, the dam broke and I retaliated after being slapped on my face and called a name. It served me to slap her right back and correct her, it stopped any further physical punishment (normal in those days) but there were many years of yelling and arguments that followed.

Having never really learned a more healthy way to express my anger, I have often felt disgusted at myself for not being able to express it better. And yet I also feel resistance within me to letting go of the part of me that expresses my anger in this way because the only experience I have of that is to accept powerlessness and let others walk all over me, something the child within vowed would never be an option again.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “it’s always darkest just before dawn”, my dawning has arrived with the new awareness that I am not that child any more, and if I don’t want to perpetuate the same cycle with my own kids (which I don’t), it’s time to adopt a new strategy.

And aside of my awareness about the relationship with anger itself, this has also given me a fresh perspective on any issues that trigger my anger. There is always a lesson within that helps to understand and get to know the more authentic me.

So what is your relationship with anger? How do you express it and could you use it to fuel you towards a more authentic life?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear and What Can Your Anger Teach You About Your Gifts? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

There is a common perception that women tend to share their feelings more than men, but I’m not sure I agree. If anything, I’d say we tend to share what we think is socially acceptable, rather than even acknowledge our true feelings.

Acknowledging how I actually feel puts me in a position of vulnerability, and that often seems unwise in our society. Given that I grew up learning what I wanted was really not relevant to my survival, it has taken me a long time to realise the purpose of that survival was to get me to a place where I was then in a position to thrive.

I’m probably two to three decades beyond where that could have first occurred, but early survival meant taking on a lot of concepts that weren’t mine, like – for example - despising people who behave in a lazy, selfish, non-committal, unresponsive or inconsiderate way, and it really obscured my view.

It’s taken quite a few relationships and roles to begin to see patterns that make me look in the mirror and really question my own beliefs about things. I’ve had to start to own my true desires and figure out how to do that without feeling like a bad person.

If I take my little list of despised behaviours, while these were not things I was particularly berated as being, certainly I heard judgments about those around home; condemning them in others. This left me in no doubt I did not want to become those things.  

Taking lazy as an example, I’d look at lazy people in disdain. Yet what was my definition of lazy? Really it was someone who was less busy or productive than me. So in a work environment, if your diary wasn’t as full as mine I’d think I was working harder than you. Of course I may have been right, but the other person may just have been working smarter.

When I really look at the word lazy, and take out the judgments, what I felt was “why do you have more down time than me? I want to relax and recharge too”. But I didn’t really feel I could do that because I’m a chronic overachiever, always trying to stay one step ahead of those expectations about who I should be in order to avoid trouble.

There’s the root of my true feelings on most of those things. I didn’t want to be the bad girl, so I became the perfectionist, the over achiever. Those are some hard habits to break as they were also highly prized and regarded with praise and positive attention.

When I suffered a fourth failed pregnancy and a colleague suggested going to see a therapist I was offended. What I felt he was saying was “you are over emotional and it’s affecting your work, you need fixed.” When I went to see the therapist (I really felt I had no choice as work paid for it and it was in work time) he said “do you think you could be a perfectionist?” and I felt insulted.

Being a perfectionist carries the same sort of stigma as being lazy, they are both adjectives used to describe behaviours that are usually associated with weaknesses in our society. I feel one indicates I’m spending too much time and attention on something, the other indicates I’m not spending enough time and attention on it.

Weak is not something I want to feel, I like to feel strong – as we all do. Strength and vitality are, I believe, our true nature and that is the issue. Not having had any real opportunity to explore my true nature as a young infant and child, I was instead cast into a mould of what was deemed good and strong in order to survive in our family and society.

Said another way, instead of being fortified from the inside out, I stepped inside a suit of armour. While that presented a strong front, it lacked inner strength and resilience, it lacked vitality.

To figure out who I was beneath that armour, I had to use my feelings to guide me. Having strong feelings about things didn’t tell me what I liked and disliked, as I first assumed, it taught me about what I’d never really owned in myself.

The things that I despised in others were really a list of things I had within me, but the same is true of things I admired about others. Both are hard to accept in their own way. Owning both creates anxiety around feeling worthy because of all the feelings I’d attached to them.

I remember back in my early thirties, I used to watch all the Trinny and Susannah What Not to Wear programmes. I used to really admire those people who knew how to dress with style.  I didn’t have a bad body image particularly, but I really had no experience in dressing well. Growing up we had only enough money for essentials, so I was often dressed in what was sensible and available at the time.

Moving into my teenage years it was all about fashion. How I laugh now to look at photos of the dangly fry pan earrings (with tiny fried eggs in them), the short cropped hair slicked up to one side, the bat-winged jersey and baggy trousers; finished off with a pink neon studded belt. Fabulous.

But when I learned about dressing to suit my body shape and colouring, well, it tapped into a part of me that I’d never really explored. I had great fun creating a new wardrobe and new image. At first I felt really vulnerable dressing differently, instead of the stock standard pleat skirt and blouse I’d usually wear to work, I started to wear things like a wrap dress and knee high boots.

I was worried people would think or say things like “who does she think she is? Mutton dressed as lamb”. But I took a deep breath and did it anyway and quickly became confident in my new look.

Owning the things I despised in others took longer – another decade – and was just as uncomfortable. But if I take my little list (lazy, selfish, non-committal, unresponsive and inconsiderate) and turn those into attributes I admire it becomes self evident that those are concepts I want and need to adopt:

• taking time to restore your energy
• putting your own needs first
• taking a position without feeling the need to explain it
•  saying yes to things that fuel you, no to things that don’t

Again, at first I was worried that I’d be attacked or thought less of as a result of adopting some of these concepts, they were uncomfortable. But they felt positive, I could sense that my vitality and wellbeing – my inner strength - depended on me practicing these new behaviours.

Like anything new, it just requires focus and persistence. I’m not saying I’m there yet, but I’m consciously aware of what I’m feeling about most things on most days, and that helps guide me towards things I might need to look at or focus on in order to keep fortifying myself from the inside out.

So what are your feelings towards others and situations telling you? What do you admire or despise in others? Imagine a world full of people becoming conscious of their true nature in this way, a world full of more authentic people would mean we could take put all that armour in the melting pot and use it as fuel towards a better life.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Let’s start with something more normal, here is an example of a scenario that demonstrates the opposite of unencumbered and work on how to release it…

It’s Sunday morning here, a beautiful sunny (but cold) Winter’s day in the Southern Hemisphere.

Having been at home for ten days straight with sick kids, who are now recovering from a nasty flu virus (and as any parent knows the only thing worse than sick kids are kids on the mend but not back to full strength), I headed out to the pool for a swim this morning before my partner left for work.

As the sun was coming up, it was four degrees and the (outdoor) pool looked very atmospheric with steam coming off the top. I chuckled as I noticed two ladies doing aqua jogging were both wearing big matching woolly hats as they chatted and waded.

Swimming up and down I found my bliss, and returned home feeling refreshed and ready for the day.

My six-year-old was laid on the couch and immediately started asking if she could watch TV. In our house, device time is limited to late afternoon/early evening on a weekend. But with having been sick the kids have watched a lot of TV this last week. “Later” I said and tried to distract her by focusing on what she might want for breakfast.

This was an ineffective strategy, my daughter – who her teacher had just described as “a ray of radiant sunshine” in her end of term report – looked like an incoming storm that quickly whipped up into a tornado.

Soon that tornado was hurling abuse and objects in my direction. And as Dr Gabor Maté reminds us “it is not our children’s behaviour but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates the greatest difficulties.” Indeed.

My response wasn’t pretty, what was already in play was somewhere in the region of a category two (extremely dangerous) hurricane, my inner child was more than a match for that storm, she was whipping up that scale and turning this thing into a category three or four.

Here’s the thing, being on the journey to me – the reclamation of my soul –means recognizing all the junk in my trunk so to speak.

This junk identified itself very clearly as I heard myself scream “I had to put up with being yelled at and hit my whole childhood, I will not put up with the same aggression as a parent, it’s not going to happen.”

Simultaneously I’m recognizing that in reaction to my trauma, I’m now traumatising my daughter, so immediately remorse set in. The thing I could find instant gratitude for however is that I recognise it, I’m not unconsciously repeating a pattern, I’m aware of it – I am aware of something that is weighing me down.

As I often say, there was nothing particularly remarkable about my childhood, as a child of the seventies in western Scotland, it was a normal thing to be yelled at, to be smacked if I did something bad and to be punished in the same way in the school system. It was normal so I don’t think of it as abuse and I don’t blame my parents for the way they acted as they were doing what they thought was best.

What I do remember from my childhood was suppressing my anger, I used to often stomp up to my room (after being told what to do or told off) and I’d be saying under my breath all the things I really wanted to say to my parents. Then I’d look around for things to throw but, after quickly determining that anything broken would cause me even more pain, I’d often just punch the concrete wall.

And even though I don’t remember feeling traumatized (though I probably did when this pattern began as infant me started to fiddle with the buttons on the washing machine and get my knuckles rapped), there is absolutely no doubt trauma occurred.

Do you know how I know? The force of my reaction to my daughter is how I know, I could literally feel the force of the sound and shock waves moving through me and hurtling towards her. The trauma I can feel from that reaction is still reverberating in my body, so how do I get rid of it?

It’s got nothing to do with the other person, my daughter has already forgiven me and moved on, she knows violence towards me triggers me and she knows why, she also knows that I want and encourage her to express (rather than suppress) her feelings, but it’s not okay to express them violently.

Getting rid of an activated emotion that has years of momentum probably requires a multipronged approach. As I said in Change Unhealthy Reactions there is a moment, it is fleeting but it’s pivotal, it’s my choice point. If I can catch myself in the act, I can change my response. Equally there has to be compassion for myself.

I understand why my patience was worn thin; it’s been a stressful week. I’m not proud of my reaction, but it’s not going to serve me to beat myself up either – that is like further beating the inner child who wanted to be heard in that moment.

There are lots of approaches to inner child work, and its’ become so clichéd over the years. It made me laugh when social scientist Brené Brown was talking about her own journey in being vulnerable and brave, and telling her counselor that she was there to do the work but “can we skip all that childhood stuff”.

There is no skipping it; it’s been hardwired in there. In the docu-series Transcendence Josh Axe talks about how most people aren’t aware certain emotions cause disease in specific organs. For example, emotions of fear affect the reproductive organs, the kidneys and adrenals. Think about a child getting really scared and they wet themselves. Why? Fear directly affects the bladder and the kidneys.

As I could feel those emotions ripping through my system this morning, I am left in no doubt there decades of junk still in the trunk to clear out. Inner child work is essential in order to give my inner child her time to speak her truth, to be heard, understood and held. Then it’s time to speak my now truth, as an adult that does not need to tolerate violence of any kind towards me, nor to project it back to others in defence. I deserve kindness and so do you.

What is also interesting is the amount of blockages in my system that relates to old stuff that is not even mine any more. My chiropractor/applied kinesiologist/nutritionalist/emotional therapist (she is even more holistic than all of that), in pursuit of the cause of my shoulder pain, uncovered that my lymph system wasn’t functioning well due to a blockage in my ileocecal value in the digestive system.

The emotions that were creating this blockage were feelings of powerlessness: lacking strength, resigned to fate, no longer caring, expecting to fail, feeling alone, misunderstood and distant. These are not emotions currently activated within me, in fact I’d say based on the location (where my mum had a tumour) they are not even my emotions as I have never resigned myself to fate in anything other than a positive way, but I recognise the feelings from the year mum slipped away from us.

All I can tell you is that, after releasing these emotions with some Bach remedies and physical work on that area around my colon, my shoulder now feels freer than it has in a long time.

It’s also like the example I mentioned in Value Your Uniqueness of becoming aware of all the judgmental thoughts in my head and recognizing them as belonging to my mum when I was a child.

One of my enduring memories was the mortification I used to feel taking public transport with mum who used to loudly disapprove of various people’s behaviour without actually addressing them directly. What I used to do was think of all the reasons why they may, in fact, be behaving like that. That is my true voice, the one who sees a broader picture and understands that what I perceive may not be the truth. In fairness, it wasn’t even my mum’s voice as she matured; it was a moment in time that has gotten stuck in a loop in my head.

​Releasing these thoughts and emotions and finding kinder thoughts is really the route to becoming unencumbered. It’s an active process that requires awareness and persistence.

Imagine the feeling of being free of all fear, anger, anxiety, grief and worries? That is the sovereignty of your soul. Imagine a world of people who are in the pursuit of that? I believe that is where we are headed, and it starts with the likes of you and I setting a goal to be unencumbered and live our best life.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog