I thought I’d share some healing work I did recently using a process designed help me change how I feel about my past experiences. I’m not going to say that if someone suffered a terrible atrocity they could just do this and everything would be better, this is an example of a more chronic negative belief I have harboured.

The scenario was this: I was recently in a lot of pain as – unbeknown to me – I was in a long drawn out process that eventually led to the passing of a kidney stone.

Not receiving any compassion from those close to me when I shared I was in pain, I just repeated my life pattern of stoicism, pushing away that familiar dull ache that has a voice I have never dared listen to. Instead it unconsciously joined the manure pile of resentments.  

Once I had become aware of this (which is another story in itself, but the short version is I got upset about then being called emotionally withdrawn), I began to wonder why it was I was attracting a lack of compassion and kindness in my life.

More often than not, this trail leads back to childhood where early patterns begin before conscious awareness or memory even kicks in. One of the voices in my head about this issue pointed out that, even my mum (who I would describe as being often tense and controlling as a parent when I was younger) showed compassion when I got sick.

Then I realised, as often happens if unhealthy patterns remain unaddressed, it is a red flag when an even more unkind version of what I’d experienced as a child was showing up. That indicated to me I had a hurt part of me that was thriving like a cockroach on that manure pile of my unaddressed detrimental life experiences.

I decided I needed to take a good look in the shadows to figure out what was going on. I also noticed that, when I finally had some time and space in which to do this, I did my best to avoid getting started for quite some time.

My mind rationalised this by saying I was clearing the decks so I wouldn’t get distracted but, to be honest, it was probably trying to protect me. My mind usually thinks its job is to steer me away from anything that feels unsafe; which amounts to anything that might disrupt the safe patterns/stories that my head has been telling me for years.

Finally getting down to it, with a good hour or two of uninterrupted time still ahead of me, I began the process by getting comfortable and becoming aware of my body, and just identifying any aches and pains. 

I started with the recent memory of the kidney stone to trigger myself into the right emotional state, remembering how it had felt in my body to have the pain I was feeling unacknowledged. Everyone in the room was going about their business, not listening to me; it brought to mind a picture of me banging on the other side of a glass wall yelling for attention but no one gave it.  

Once I’d really sat with that feeling for a while, I let myself look at the video screen in my mind as I asked it to reveal the first time I had felt this way. As I’ve said, this is not about recalling conscious memories, it’s allowing your mind to create a vision of something it perceived through feelings.

I then found myself looking at a yellow sleeve on a chubby arm waving around beside me. It seemed I was a baby in a crib feeling little point in crying out. I could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner in the background, and the odd clanking sound that indicated my mum was in the house somewhere.

This correlates with something mum told me when my own kids were babies, about her putting on the vacuum when I wouldn’t stop crying to create white noise. Rather than soothed, what I was feeling was suppressed; I had already learned not to bother crying in this memory. I knew, therefore, I had to gently persist and go back further to the point this pattern began.

I went back too far, or perhaps my mind was still trying to get in on the act to help me avoid the real source of pain, as I found myself experiencing my mum as a baby. Although I knew this is undoubtedly an ancestral pattern and part of our collective consciousness, it was not where I needed to land in order to heal, I needed to find the source of my own physical experience of this pain.

I then found myself crying and crying as a tiny baby lying on my back in the crib again with my hands and feet tensed up towards the ceiling. The sound I was making was high pitched, repetitive and full of anguish, my throat was raw and I felt disoriented and confused. As I was experiencing this in the first-person perspective, I stayed with it for a while and assured myself that the way I was feeling was totally valid.

Once I had settled into that awareness fully, I sort of splintered my awareness and stepped into my adult self’s perspective. The first thing I did was pick up baby me, wearing a little cream coloured onesie. She felt so tiny, like a newborn, I’d forgotten babies could be so small and light in weight.

I leaned her against my shoulder, her little bum wrapped in a nappy fitted entirely in one of my palms, while my other palm rubbed her small back that was all sweaty and hot. Comforting her until she slowly calmed, I could smell that lovely baby smell on top of her head and acknowledged to her all the while how scared she must have felt and how totally normal it was to feel like that given the circumstances.

Once baby-me was calm, I asked her what she wanted. She wanted her dad as his energy felt good, but he was at work and mum’s energy felt tense and overwhelmed. Asking what she would like to happen, I suggested that we explain the trauma this behaviour was causing, and show them a video of me in the future, crippled in pain with a burgeoning kidney stone and unable to attract soothing from those who love me.

I then asked that both my parents be wrapped in the arms of love to heal their own wounds so they could give baby-me the kindness and compassion I needed.

Afterwards I sought my inner sanctum, a place in the forest surrounded by photons of light with dappled sunlight coming down through the leaves, where I can sink into my higher self for support. From this safe haven I asked that any fractured parts of baby-me return. These are essentially the aspects of me that I had suppressed, denied or disowned each time my distress had been ignored.

These I visualised as other carbon-copy babies, and as the older baby I had first experienced. In fact, at that point I saw a lady walking towards me, as if out of the mist. She was young and looked dressed in the 1940’s fashion, wearing a small velvet half hat with a veil and feather and short woollen trench-type coat pulled in at the waist and heading towards me with the many versions of baby-me.

I recognised her as my gran, as she would have looked in that era, and she was bringing back all those parts of me that had turned and fled back to their source, our source. My gran was a gentle woman who personified kindness, so it was a very fitting image.

As all these fractured parts of me returned and melded with tiny baby-me, we watched as the previous scene of the screaming, unattended baby floated away on a bubble that then popped.

From there I found we were in a warm sandy cove, surrounded by narrow horseshoe-shaped grassy cliffs, with a waterfall making its way from a height into a pool at the bottom. We all splashed and played in the water and I experienced great joy as baby-me lying on her back in the warm waters of that pool, gurgling and splashing in abandon.

I left the scene holding that feeling within me as I seemed to watch a montage of further scenes of me progressing through life, revisiting points in my history from this altered state of memory of joy and kindness and then returned to the present day feeling a good deal lighter than when I had begun.

There are other specific memories that I hold, related to this, which I will do shorter visualisations on too. Am I rewriting history? Yes, I’m rewriting my emotional history. Does it change what actually happened in the past? No, but it changes the way I feel inside.

I now know that someone does care enough about me to show kindness and compassion when I’m struggling in life, and that someone is me. Inside I have a real sense of the compassion I felt towards that tiny baby as I held her when she was crying and a real sense of the joy she felt when basking in that care.

Free of past hurts that I hadn’t even been particularly aware of, yet had defined my approach to certain situations, I can now fully embrace the present and future without being constantly dragged back into a state of stoicism.

There are many resources and practices out there that facilitate this change in the emotional signature of events within us; this particular one is Teal Swan’s Completion Process. But I have come across this type of technique (where the adult self revisits the child self) in many practices, and recommend finding one that fits for you.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why Resenting Your Parents is Healthy, How to Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, Heal Your Past Hurts To Help You Fulfill Your Potential and Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

​Image by Bhikku Amitha from Pixabay 

“Keep your feet on the fresh carpet of the earth, but raise your mind to the windows of the universe.” These were the words written from father to adopted daughter as his parting words in a novel I’m reading, and they really resonate with my soul.

This immediately reminded me of the analogy my homeopath uses when describing my constitution as “a tethered balloon that needs to regularly bob around in the heavens”. Nothing feels truer at the moment with the kids on school holidays; my soul wants me to take regular helicopter rides.

Yet being with people constantly, especially children I’m responsible for, often keeps my attention tethered in a way that makes me feel cut off from that broader perspective.

This heavy feeling was how I used to feel when I was in an office all day, with my attention tethered to people or a screen. But before I had children I could come home and take a big out-breath. With children there are too few out breaths, the tether to my attention seems all pervasive.

Just last week one of my kids was at her grandparents’ house and I dropped the other at a friends’ house for a play. This allowed me the brief time I needed to go and shake off the heavy feeling while swimming up and down the lane at a local pool for a half hour, my mind was free to wander.  

Literally, doing backstroke for some of the time, my mind could follow my eyes to the windows of the physical universe and its vastness, and then the fifteen minutes I had to meditate at home alone before collecting my daughter allowed me the time I needed to bring my awareness to the windows of the universe within.

I felt lighter, more connected and fuelled with energy.

It reminds me of a quote by Khalil Gibran “But let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you”.

I’m learning as I move through my journey to ask for what I need, and these micro breaks from being the person who is responsible for everyone in the moment is as necessary as breathing. But how I garner the support for that is also an interesting journey.

As a recovering people pleaser I have a pattern of keeping going, like a trouper, and resenting the heck of it while secretly harboring a hope that someone will notice how dreadful I feel and offer to help. If that doesn’t happen I eventually address my needs by getting angry (with my partner mainly); not really the healthiest way to assert my needs.

There is also a lot of guilt that comes with this particular scenario for me. It feels as if there is an assumption that, because I am a mother and I wanted children, I will enjoy motherhood. Well, I quickly discovered that is not the case, after all the trials and tribulations of just getting to the point of having a family, here it is and I do not enjoy all aspects of motherhood.

Like most parents I wouldn’t change it, because there are so many wonderful aspects to being a parent too. But, gosh, it is relentless and – I find – often tedious. Unlike the days where we (as humans) lived in communities and could spread the load somewhat across the extended family, the exclusion in which we live prohibits this on a day to day basis.

This makes it vital for me to organize micro breaks and honour my own needs. It is so intense that, if I don’t, I start to turn in on myself and get ill. That is why I think parenthood is an excellent personal development boot camp if I am paying attention to the areas I need to develop.

Of course, what happened in generations past, is we (the former kids) had to comply in order to fit in with the adult’s around us, hence I now have really bad ingrained habits, like being a people pleaser, that need addressed if I am to live my best life.

It seems to me all us adults are, to varying extents, a bunch of inwardly-injured kids walking around in adult bodies, which is what also makes the whole process of evolving past this even more fascinating (and difficult terrain). As I decide to step into awareness of my own bad habits and strive for healthier responses, I’m aware of the varying patterns in others too.

It often makes me think how, if we can evolve past this perpetual cycle of repression, by becoming more attuned to ourselves and others, won’t this world be an amazing place to live?

Evolving past it is the key, I have to keep my eye on the prize. If I continually sit here observing these same patterns I’m just keeping my energy attuned to what is, rather than could be. Instead I have to entrain my energy to that of the solution I’m seeking.

Which brings me back to the beautiful quote that resonated within me to keep my feet on the fresh carpet of the earth, but raise my mind to the windows of the universe. The real key is to give myself enough space to raise my mind to that place, and I now know what that takes for me to do that regularly.

​What does it take for you to raise your mind to the windows of the universe, and are you willing to gift that to yourself, to our world, on a regular basis?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Be at Ease With the World Around You and  I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I took my daughter and her friend to see a movie this week whose theme was Our Differences Make Us Stronger. I truly believe that our differences do make us stronger when they are embraced. This applies equally to my own differences as it does to that of others.

As I have listened to podcasts with people talking about diversifying our social circles in order to expand our hearts and minds it rings true. The point is well made that, if I interact with people only like me, I have a limited view of the world.

I also have come to understand that I only attract those on the same vibrational wavelength as me. And it has really opened my eyes these last few years, as I have shared my angst and insights on the journey to me, those of you who resonate with the vibe of my own life lessons come in an astonishingly wide range of forms and circumstances.

It seems to me that many of our similarities and differences are those that can only be seen and felt by the heart.

Interacting with people I don’t know is easier though, particularly if we have been drawn together through mutual trials and tribulations. Knowing more about someone seems to create more barriers, as per the old saying familiarity breeds contempt; more experience of someone (including myself) can make me so aware of my own or their faults I become scornful.

I remember hearing a story recalled from Jerry Hicks about his wife Esther, watching her having the most marvelous fun with another passenger at the airport trying to retrieve their luggage. He was chuckling to himself thinking “if only they each knew who the other was, the fun would soon turn sour.”  As I recall the man was a preacher of some sort and, when his adverts played, it would impel Esther to stand up and shout at the television set in indignation.

But until I can embrace my own differences and preferences, be relaxed enough to communicate them in a clear and calm way, I find it is hard to feel safe listening to other points of view; I often have this unspoken sense that my listening will indicate a tacit acceptance of their views as my own and am preparing for the attack on mine if I express them.

For the longest time I have had a quote from Stephen Covey displayed on my bookcase Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. Most people listen with the intent to reply. For me this is because I struggled growing up with my own differences and didn’t feel accepted.

Despite good intent to listen, I still seem to do far too much talking. With awareness, I have known it is because I don’t want anyone to attempt to steer me away from my truth, I often jump in and state my views to erect a barrier of protection; a throwback to my childhood when I was always told what I should be thinking, feeling or doing.

As I read Mona Miller’s words this week about conflict and confusion, in her book Invisible Warfare, that entanglement began to make more sense. She says “Most of our educational systems are set up to train us to provide answers, not to question. Many times these answers are created to please someone else, so we lose the capability to check-in with ourselves to see what we actually think or feel about the information we are getting.”

I’m finding it is particularly tricky at this point in my journey where I’m learning to heal my personal boundaries. With decades of defensive wiring, just getting a clear view of any particular scenario is oftentimes a challenge. However is it one steering me towards a win-win.

Certainly I have been challenged by a couple of conversations with people close to me this week. With all the awareness I could muster I traversed both conversations with trepidation and determination to honour my own boundaries while respecting theirs, for both these people are dear to me in their separate ways. 

What came up for me was the question of how I can listen, understand and respond to someone when their truth doesn’t resonate with my own and I feel, because of the way they are expressing it, I need to go into defence, attack or hiding.

This is where Mona’s writing on conflict and confusion helped clarify “whether someone is lying (it may be to you or to themselves) or telling the truth doesn’t matter. Lies can help you see the truth as you move towards understanding.” She explains “We are trained to either be know-it-alls or stupid; people who speak in statements or not at all. Yet a wise person knows there is always more to learn and this creates confusion and conflict.”

When I feel a twist in my gut as someone interacts with me, that is a signal from my body to let me know the views or desires they are expressing are not aligned with my own. This triggers the flight or fight centre (as per the childhood wiring) and my rational brain shuts down. Unless I can catch myself in a brief moment of awareness, the best I can manage is “boundaries… must defend”.

Yet whether someone is trying to persuade me to their view or not is no longer, in my adult life, an actual problem or danger to me in any way. As a good friend reminded me this week:

I am a sovereign being and an intelligent woman, no one’s words can influence me anywhere my soul doesn’t already want to go.

It feels to me that I’ve known the basics of good listening skills for a long time, certainly since the early years of personal development work over two decades ago. True listening is about asking open ended questions with only an attempt to understand another perspective rather than control the outcome. Yet in fear of another person trying to control me, I have often been unable to truly listen and shut down, making my position clear to create a defensive barrier.

While I want to feel understood and accepted, the cost of fitting someone else’s mould is too high, and the desire for authenticity from within is too strong.

What I’ve really taken to heart this week is that neither what I think, nor what another thinks of me, matters as much as the weight I give it. It might if I was in a job interview or something similar, but even then, why would I want to attract anything other than a vibrational match to my authentic self?

But in the normal course of day to day interactions with friends, family and those who are more acquaintances or part of my life in some other working relationship, there is no real reason to avoid understanding our differences.

Looking into this shadow I have seen that I had a propensity to seek sameness, for a subconscious fear that any differences would put me in danger. As a child this danger of not fitting in would have been too risky, the approval of my family and teachers as I grew was central to my survival as it is to us all. And, frankly, old habits die hard.

Seeking common ground is healthy, it helps me relate to others, but that is different from being the same. I imagine I could seek the whole world over and never find anyone the same, I could no doubt go back through the generations of the entire world’s population and never find anyone exactly the same. And I can project forward into the future and believe no one else has had or will have my unique combination of heritage, wiring and experiences.

Embracing differences, therefore, is necessary to thrive in this world. It starts with embracing my own differences without the need to defend them or even state them (unless I’m actually being asked about them and feel comfortable doing so). Getting relaxed with who I am in this way helps me open up to who others are and, of course, that is what will make us stronger.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Be at Ease With the World Around You and  I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Making the world a better place starts with making my personal world better.

I was listening to an interview with Dr Tiffany Jana this week, whose passion is teaching about embracing diversity, and she said “The idea that anyone has to edit themselves to conform to some kind of system or social construct is harmful. It is harmful to the collective because if you can’t be everything you were sent here to be then the entire human narrative is missing an essential piece.”

While Dr Jana was being asked about healing racism, she was recognising that any part of us that we have to shape in order to conform creates a disservice to the human race.   

And she reiterates advice I’d heard previously from Sean Korne about facing our own shadows before diving in to others’ shadows,. The best way we can help anyone is from a point of loving acceptance of who we are embodied authentically.

Herein lies the challenge, as far as I can see, most people don’t even recognise how their own hurts beget more hurt (no matter how long ago, how forgotten - or more accurately, buried - or how unintentional); I certainly didn’t.

If someone had asked me thirty years ago how tuned in I was to my own feelings, how did I value my own needs and desires, I’d have responded that I am very tuned in. Yet after decades my life did not seem to be joyful, even with traditional successes under my belt, I did not seem to feel healthy or fulfilled. So how tuned in was I really?

I was reading more this week about attunement, a developmental phase in humans that I first came across when reading Dr Gabor Mate’s work on the effects and causes of early childhood development on our lives. He says:

“Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional regulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain him/herself in a relatively non-stressed, non-anxious, non-depressed state of mind.”

If you are a parent you will likely know that this can be a huge ask. I am the first to admit that – if I was never aware of my shadows before – they certainly became rather obvious with young children to challenge me. Of all my relationships, the one with my children is the most intense, followed by the relationship with my partner.

And guess what lies at the heart of our relationships?  Attunement.

“Attunement is the process by which we form relationships” Dr Dan Siegel says. “When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

As Teal Swan points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience:

1. We learned that our survival depended on disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. We learned that our survival depended on being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tend to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs, neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Again this resonates with what I see and experience in life, most people are not good at taking care of their own needs. Even, says Teal, the narcissists who are “so busy resisting everyone else’s that, instead of experiencing strong authentic emotions, they are experiencing emotions related to suppression, avoidance, denial or defensiveness.”

So the bottom line is that, unless I learn how to attune (to myself being that I am hyper vigilant to others, but to my own and to others if I had gone into a narcissistic bubble) my relationships will be riddled with conflict and painful for everyone.

This isn’t something I find easy, and particularly when it is an ingrained pattern within existing relationships which, as mentioned above, are already imbued with painful associations on many levels.  True change is intrinsic though, is has to be self driven and nothing changes by following the same old patterns.

That is why I have been doing so much work on recognising and healing my own needs and boundaries, but it still requires practice and more practice.

Wanting to feel good about myself, and wanting to present that goodness to the world is the old defence mechanism, and it’s a strong one. Like everyone else I can fall into the trap of blaming others and my circumstances when, really, I’m no longer the trapped child, I’m a grown adult who can make her own decisions.

And, being hyper attuned to others more so than myself, I also have to watch out for the guilt trap. Those who have got themselves ensconced in a narcissistic bubble know how to play the blame game just as well as I do, but being sensitive to others means I can feel guilty just because someone else is feeling bad.

When Dr Tiffany Jana talks about people editing themselves to conform, the lack of attunement and the dynamics that arise from it are, I believe, one of the most pervasive and insidious among us edited humans. The worst thing about it is the lack of conscious awareness about this root cause issue.

Because, as Teal Swan remarks, “You cannot be attuned to someone and drop a bomb on them or shoot them. You cannot be attuned to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot be attuned to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality”.

This is our work, becoming attuned to our own authentic needs, and those of others. This will not only improve your own life significantly, but together we can make this world a better place.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances and Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.