I was reading a novel last week by Belinda Alexandra, about the Spanish Revolution, and there were some words in there that really spoke to me:

“No one life is wasted. No matter the sacrifices, no matter the appearance of defeat, it will add to the progress of the human race. In all of history there is one thing that repeats itself again and again: all honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail.

Out of darkness and suffering can come hope, joy and progress. The spirits of good people, even if they die in defeat, return through future generations to continue moving the human race forwards to higher and better things.”

In a world where I often feel like I’m talking a different language to those around me, these words gave me both hope and perspective. Thankfully I’m not suffering the dire circumstances of the people of that era, but I often feel isolated in my thoughts, feelings and ideas none the less.

There was another line in there that also spoke to me:

“Self righteousness is the greatest squanderer of time… time that you will never get back.”

These words reminded me of the futility of resting my gaze too long on what is and resenting, fighting or otherwise resisting it. Instead it is more fruitful to allow my gaze to open to alternate future possibilities and weave those into existence.

I experience deep pain and sadness when those around me can’t see the ordinary every day things that keep our true selves from fulfilling our potential. More frustrating is that so many either don’t see it or prefer to remain silent.

​This is because I am here on a mission, I feel the sovereignty of our being is the most important issue on this planet right now; I make no apology for saying this time and time again – in as many ways as I can express it.

Having kids of school age, I am constantly confronted by example after example of Western education and health systems’ dire need to evolve. But that doesn’t come close to the underlying and drastic need to change the fact that it’s big money - and not what is best overall for our people and planet (and all life that exists on it) - that drives our culture and choices today.

​Then there is the pain of watching people I know and love choosing suffering in ignorance of their real potential. I am surrounded by many who are completely identified with how they think and feel, playing out patterns that emanate from their childhood without any conscious observation of the lack of connection to a more authentic part of themselves and everything around them.

I have one editor who likes me to write only about my personal vantage point, using I/me, but we is my personal experience; I’m intrinsically connected to the whole, which is why the first person grammatically is I and we. Your pain is my pain.

Yet I know my perspective is mine alone, I understand this, it is the lens through which I experience the world. I also know my lens is most oftentimes obscured by my own early experiences in life. So I live in a committed routine of becoming aware of those and seeking to create a new, more authentic experience.

People who are educated in becoming consciously aware of their thoughts, feelings and actions, and the cause and effect between those things, will – I believe – make honourable choices about how to treat others; including our living, breathing planet and all of the life it contains.

However, I am aware that by pointing to the everyday things that are not in alignment with that, and complaining about them is only a starting point. It doesn’t create change, and may not even incite the need for it in others. How can I feel heard or respected when many around me don’t even hear or respect their own authentic selves?

The only way I know to reach that authentic part of each being is through inspiration, not exasperation. Therefore dwelling on whether I feel heard, respected, lonely or in pain is not in the least bit helpful.

Like the words that were scattered through the novel I read, or sometimes it’s just something I hear in a movie, or from the lips of someone in passing, I feel the universe is conspiring to light my fire. It lights my fire by helping me to see possibilities.

That too is my mission, to see the possibilities and to express those. I get glimpses of this, but each time I resist what is in front of me in self righteous indignation, the future alternative possibilities slip further from reach.

This is the process I am in right now, it is a quieter time of emptying out, letting go the impulses to act and react in defence, to allow the greater field of possibilities to come into view.

So if at times you do not feel heard or respected, perhaps it will help to think of Belinda Alexandra’s words “all honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail”. The drum beat will become louder as more and more of us join in conscious awareness of the new world we came here to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Evolve Our World. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

One of the things I found myself contemplating this week was the question “what are you most embarrassed about/ashamed of in your life?” I started to recall a night almost thirty years ago, when a younger, heartbroken me cried uncontrollably in front of my ex’s mates after we had all been out for the evening.

One of his friends said something like “It’s not the end of the world Shona” and I reacted by wailing a distraught response along the lines of “You have no idea what it feels like to have your heart broken!” I was completely mortified by my lack of emotional control in that situation.

There are probably things that are much more embarrassing I could dredge up from my past which – on the face of it – would rate more highly on the scale of shame than this, but I was deeply wounded by that break up, and exposing just how wounded was something I always regretted from the moment it left my lips. It left me feeling vulnerable and weak.

I think it’s also true that many people are uncomfortable witnessing a display of raw emotion like that. I was listening to a rare disclosure from Tami Simon (Founder and CEO of Sounds True) about her personal life. Tami admitted that she finds it extremely difficult to deal with her partner when she expresses her emotions; she wants to jump in and fix things as quickly as possible to get away from the intense, uncomfortable feelings.

In Psychology Today Leon Seltzer says “There are many reasons that we may endeavour to hide or disguise the emotional pain that comes in the wake of negative beliefs about ourselves, evoked by a particular person or situation. But what they have in common is that they are all fear based.”

On the journey to uncover my authentic self these last few years, I’ve discovered that tuning into my emotions is important – critical even - for these reasons:

1. They tend to be reliable indicators of my wellbeing and can lead to sickness, injury and harm if I don’t pay attention; if I do, they can lead me to my best life
2. Healthy relationships of any kind come from expressing my authentic feelings in a healthy way
3. Most of my negative beliefs about myself stem from my pretty normal childhood, raised by well meaning parents

Knowing this, when I was contemplating this moment of shame I had experienced after that break up way back when, I wondered when it was that I had first learned expressing my true feelings was not a safe thing to do.

I decided to go back in time meditatively to see what I could uncover, and sooth the memory by bringing in my more aware adult perspective (which tends to then take the sting out of any subsequent related memories).

After immersing myself for a while in the memories and feelings of that horrible night, I then asked when the first time I’d experienced those feelings was. This wasn’t a process of trying to go back through my memories, it’s more about looking into my mind’s eye as if it’s a video screen that is about to reveal to me something that my memories can’t consciously access.

What I saw and felt took me back to a time in my first year of life when I had contracted bronchial pneumonia. Here are some of the metaphysical meanings attached to that: stirred up emotions, wanting to get rid of the thought that you are not in charge, you want to cut contact with those irritating you but you dare not branch out on your own, and, feeling suffocated by a situation.

I can well imagine that, as a helpless young baby I may have indeed felt this way. Being a parent myself, I am also acutely aware how hard it is to know the right things to do for our children, especially in the face of contradicting advice from family, friends and healthcare workers.

One of the things I remember when my own kids were born was the vehemence with which the healthcare system promoted both natural birthing and breastfeeding, and methods such as attachment parenting. This would have been in stark contrast to the healthcare system into which I was born almost four decades earlier, which advocated pretty much the opposite.

I started off in a cot in my parents’ room, only to move into my own room after a few nights since my snuffling noises kept interrupting their sleep. I was breastfed initially but soon moved onto bottle feeding. Healthcare nurses of the time were obsessed about the volumes being drunk, with advice to keep feeding despite baby’s rejection and spilling (a pretty way of saying the milk comes back up from your stomach and out of your mouth). It is no wonder I was such a huge baby.

When I used to cry, I remember my mum telling me that she often used to switch on the vacuum when she had exhausted all the obvious avenues to soothe (Too cold/warm? Needing a diaper change? Needing a sleep? Needing burped? Teething? etc). She said the vacuum seemed to “do the trick”, no doubt I was terrified knowing what I know now about the effects of noises like that on burgeoning auditory systems.

When my own babies would cry and I could find no reason, I’d assume - after reading Aware Baby by Aletha Solter - they just needed to unload some emotions. A bit like Tami Simon’s reaction to her partner’s distress, I noticed most people around me were uncomfortable with my baby crying, even in her mum’s arms in her own home; everyone was always trying to fix this rather than seeing it as a natural way for the baby to de-stress.

What I sensed more in my meditative state than anything was how I used sleep as an escape mechanism. If I just shut my eyes and fell asleep I could forget the turmoil of this new world. Of course, looking back on it all through my adult eyes, I can see we were all just trying to do our best. At the same time, I can see how easy it was for me to pick up the belief that it was better to keep any emotional distress to myself.

Understanding how these ideas have come about is helpful, just as it is to acknowledge that all emotions are valid; we feel what we feel whether we understand why or not.

Tami Simon’s disclosure about her discomfort around intense emotions’ was while interviewing Dr Christian Conte, who is an expert in meeting people where they are, even when someone is in a state of intense emotional distress. In the podcast, Dr Conte talks about how to make yourself a safe space to receive another person, the keys to deep listening and how the primary purpose of validation is connection.

Dr Conte is clearly well practiced in dealing with people when they are highly emotional and has much to teach. This seems to me the real key – practice. Becoming comfortable with my own emotions, being vulnerable and becoming a safe space for other, these are all things that require practice.
In my former years in the corporate world I learned a lot about communications through leadership training and experience. All of that, though, was from a perspective of being wrapped up in layers of beliefs that truly did not originate from my authentic self, they originated from my upbringing in keeping me safe.

Since then, having discovered a lot more about my true feelings, and coming to a clear understanding that there is no right and wrong, only what is right or wrong for any given person in any given moment, I know that this is a better perspective from which to learn.

I completely agree with Dr Conte when he says “one of the biggest obstacles to meeting someone in emotional distress is thinking they shouldn’t be feeling whatever it is they are feeling”. He calls this living in a cartoon world, a world we make up from the beliefs and expectations we have about how we think people should or shouldn’t feel.

He says that once we stop trying to mold people to fit our cartoon world, we can enter the real world and meet people where they actually are (not where we think they should be). I think this is a great place to start with ourselves.

Accepting myself for the way I acted that night, seen in the light of compassion for the baby whose tears were drowned out by a vacuum cleaner, is a step in the right direction. Rather than going over and over that night, or other interactions with my kids (or others) that I think should have gone differently – especially if I’ve gotten emotional – it’s better to talk in retrospect about what was happening for me rather than not discuss it at all.

When I talk about emotions I’m also aware that words like blame, entitlement and deserve are ones to watch for. Caroline Myss says “if you could extricate those three words from your head you would have no idea how much better you would feel.”

Everything I feel is about me and my journey; my growth towards authenticity and service from that standpoint. Blaming others or feeling that I am entitled to or deserve something other than which I’m getting will only hold me back from that growth.

In time, and with practice and focus, talking about my emotions in real time will get easier and easier. I have already experienced a huge shift over the last few years in terms of what is happening on the inside. With a regular meditation practice, I’ve become more of an observer of these moments instead of being completely identified with them.

I do believe that expressing my true feelings in any situation is a great indicator of where I’ve gotten to in the journey for authenticity, especially when I’m not blaming anyone (myself included) or feeling entitled. And those situations where I’m avoiding that have great depths for me to plunge into and examine and learn more about who I am.

It’s not about just about what I express, but the way in which I express it; I’m driven to master the art of authentic, compassionate communication.

Imagine a world where each of us was aware enough of our own psyche to more objectively examine and understand what was triggering us, and be comfortable in expressing our true feelings without blame or shame? This, I believe, would be a more harmonious world in which we could work together to create a better future; now that is a world I’d like to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Get out of Your Head and into Your Heart, Change Unhealthy Reactions, Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation …Until You Take Responsibility to Heal. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was talking to someone about the retrieval process, the process involved in retrieving one’s authentic self, and they said “I like myself just as I am”.  Yet the vibe I got was very much one of defence, rather than a loving acceptance of themselves.

I totally get that disparity. Probably like you, I’m my own biggest critic. By very virtue of the fact I’m on a journey to retrieve my authentic self, it really means I was not happy in the skin of who I had become.

​In contrast, I yearn to be accepted just as I am; after all, I don’t want to feel like I have to change in order to satisfy someone else. The issue being, this is exactly what - again, probably like you - I had to do from the time I was born just in order to survive in (what is deemed) a normal upbringing.

It is no wonder why there is sensitivity to the slightest whiff of a suggestion of a need to change within that context. But I will admit, it is hard to look at others around me who say they like themselves just the way they are, and yet they are so obviously not happy.

The signs of unhappiness that I see in myself and others are things like chronic issues and illness, and habits like blaming others for their misfortune (for a witty and ever-insightful delve into this unhelpful behaviour, listen to this powerful excerpt from Brené Brown). Each of these holds such amazing opportunities for self empowerment and growth, so it is frustrating to stand by and watch as someone gives their power away.

Listening to Michael Beckwith talk last week, he reminded me of something very important though. He had been asked a question about a scenario where a loved one was ill and they were very resistant to any help that was being offered. His advice was “to simply love them, until they ask for your help, you are trespassing on their paradigm”.

In his response there were two things that really stood out for me. The first was the truth I felt in the premise that until someone asks for your help, they are not open to your suggestions. But the biggest impact was more around the first part “to simply love them”.

If I turn that statement around, the lesson I was hearing for myself was that I will find it easier to love someone where they are at, and withhold uninvited suggestions, once I am able to love myself.
That isn’t about me becoming this unattainable perfect self, it’s about learning to love who I am right now, and to listen to my inner champion rather than my inner critic.

But who is my inner champion? If my inner critic is really a morphed version of those who shaped my life when I was younger, like a record stuck on an earlier timeline, my inner champion can be the same. It can be the voices of those people who have cheered me on (read Who Showed You Unconditional Love?), Magic Happens When You Believe in People and Finding Your Purpose – the Magic of Those Who Believe in You).

But I think there is also another very important person in this, and that is the child that I once was; the one who got postponed and couldn’t fully bring herself into the world.

As Sarah Blondin says “It’s the tender heart inside; the you that was shooshed when you were young. The you that you shoved inside when you were told to act more appropriately or to be less truthful, to hide your feelings, or to more loveable by acting the way someone else wants you to. The you who is free from being someone others want you to be.”

To reconnect with that part of me, I was drawn to a visualization Robert Moss was doing the other day on Reclaiming Your Magical Child. He asked that I imagine a wall somewhere, and to then imagine that a door appears on the wall. Through the door was a world of my own creation; a magical garden filled with plants and animals and things that were beautiful and magical and fun.

Interestingly the wall I instantly imagined was in the neighbourhood I used to play as a young child, out on the street with my friends playing games like Hide and Seek, and Kick the Can. The visualization helped me to reconnect with those magical feelings of childhood when anything seemed possible; certainly anything seemed possible for adults.

Well, here I am, the adult; the only chains and limitations now are the ones in my mind.   

If I need a sharp reminder, I look at my daughter going through her first year at school. She is tired and angry much of the time, reeling against the legal requirement that she needs to attend and participate in an education system that is too rigid and unnatural for her to feel that she is going with her own flow. She is realising she can’t bring all of herself into the world at this point, that she has to postpone her full expression.

That is what makes me weep when someone tells me they like themselves just as they are in defence rather than loving acceptance. I’m weeping for their inner child, who postponed being the fullness of themselves, now trapped and forgotten inside and trying their best to communicate through aches and pains and anger and sadness and blame.

I hope my daughter doesn’t take another forty years (as I have) to realise what has happened and release the pause button to free the part of her that she has to push down right now. I hope she doesn’t settle for that part of her being imprisoned inside and tell people “she is happy as she is”.

I struggle to watch the process, knowing that I do have an option to home school. Simultaneously though I know my truth, I’m far enough down the road towards my authentic self to know it would be far from authentic for me to take on that role.

Instead I can only love and accept her for where she is at, knowing she is doing the best she can with what she has, as am I. Hopefully she will be led to liberate the wild and creative and free aspects of her nature she is holding in check every day from 9am to 3pm in every opportunity.

The best I can do is to lead by example, and to be honest about my own messy, stumbling journey to liberate my soul from the chains I had put it in, in order to please those around me. And to accept and love myself knowing I did the best I could with what I had.

Have you been able to accept and love yourself as you are?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation …Until You Take Responsibility to Heal. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“Every person needs to take one day away. Jobs, family, employers and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.” Maya Angelou

This week feels like I’ve been at the raw and ragged edge of life, where the rubber meets the road when it comes to walking this earth in my authentic shoes. On the face of it, nothing spectacular happened, and yet it feels like my whole world has imperceptibly changed.

I made a conscious shift at my core from anxiety to love, resetting my system so to speak. It was big work done in small segments of time.

It was just an ordinary week for this time of year. Spring has sprung in the Southern Hemisphere, the calendar, school, sports and work years are coming to a close, and with the festive season on the horizon social activities ramp up. I’m not one for a whole lot of social activity at this point in my life, and it’s also the time of year I birthed my two children, so everything always feels a bit pressured.

Then I got invited me to a weekend retreat and, as bizarre as it might sound, it tipped me over the edge. As much as a retreat from the world sounded very desirable, in fact almost as necessary as breathing at this point, it became another thing on my mental to do list. And since it required a four hour drive each way it sparked feelings of instant overwhelm.

So right in the middle of entertaining an out-of-town visitor at our house for the weekend, I was awoken one night at midnight with shooting pains coming from my right kidney. This made it impossible to sleep and the whole night was spent drifting in and out of a semi-conscious state as my kidney griped and wailed within me.

In a conversation the previous day, my mentor had said to me it didn’t sound as though I could really wait a few weeks to retreat from the world, and suggested doing it on the days the kids went back to school after the holiday weekend.

In the blink of an eye several thoughts had simultaneously flashed through my mind. The first was the mental list of what lay ahead in the short school week; which included a parent-teacher evening, a school Ceilidh (like a pagan version of Halloween) and – of course – Halloween itself, all among the usual rounds of domestic and business activities that just keep the wheel turning.

The second thought was of how, in a week like that (with no one else to pick up any of the responsibilities), I’d have to be really sick to feel I could retreat in any substantive way; my mind flashed back to the time I had a kidney stone and had to lay in bed for two days. Oops. Even although the very next thought that passed through my mind was one of discarding that notion, not wishing to relive that experience, my body had obviously decided it needed to take charge and that was the best option.

As I lay there through the night contemplating the message my body was giving me, it wasn’t any stroke of genius to join the dots. “Okay,” I relented, “it is time to withdraw from the world.”

Having a visitor, I did get out of bed a few times that day to make lunch and dinner, but it was pretty low key and I had a couple of naps. I will confess though, I’m not a complete martyr, I was in no pain by that point, just tired; rest assured had the kidney pain continued I would have stayed in bed.

The next day, as soon as I dropped the kids off at school, I came home, closed the curtains and put on my dressing gown and just sat and did nothing; literally. I didn’t crawl into bed and sleep, I’d done that the day before. What I wanted to get a sense of, consciously, was how my body was feeling.

There I sat for the next few hours just feeling the thrum and consternation of my nervous system.

There were times my body wanted to move in a subtly exaggerated way, occasionally it wanted to shake, I just let it do what it wanted and kept feeling into the points of pain and tension, to simply observe.

Thoughts came into my head (for example, I started to mentally plan a new guest room layout) and constantly kept trying to trick me back into action. Much like meditation, when I became aware I was thinking, I just let the thoughts go and went back to observing my body.

There was no other agenda that day; I just sat until it was time to pick up the kids again and domesticity returned. I did however serendipitously later listen to a soothing and uplifting talk at the Hay House Heal Summit by Michael Beckwith, on the topic of healing and resetting our authentic core.

The next day began the same way. After dropping off the kids I sat again and felt back into where my body was at. After an hour or so, I felt settled enough to begin the work that I knew was necessary to create a shift in my life away from anxiety and towards self love.

I felt intuitively that I needed a bit of structure, so with Michael Beckwith’s words still fresh in my memory and the broad structure of Teal Swan’s Completion Process in mind, I started to really focus in on the feelings of anxiety in the present and then asked myself when I first experienced these feelings?

This began the deep dive that took me back to the point of conception. I had this vision of a sperm meeting the egg and it looked like a micro universe in creation. While it was wondrous and magnificent to watch as an observer, it was also a cataclysmic event with so much pain and trauma inherited within those cells.

When my consciousness later stepped into the emerging fetus, the sensations of density were hard to bear and describe. Michael Beckwith’s analogy of the sun shrouded by dense clouds felt very real, I found myself in a darkly clouded cocoon just trying to survive, having lost all sense of the light, warmth and where I’d come from.

As I became aware of the other presences around me (mother, father etc) I started to cry and kept uttering “I was only trying to make them feel good”. This was the point of illumination, where it was obvious that my anxiety arises – as it does for so many – out of a propensity and desire to please others.

This is also the point that my adult consciousness was able to step in. This sapling version of me in the womb needed help to see the sun beyond the clouds, to know and feel there was support there for her and to be reminded that all she need be (or give to herself or anyone else) is love.

This is what I’m guessing Michael Beckwith refers to as a reset. How I understand this experience I took myself through, is that when I got back to the original point of trauma, and provided within that memory the help needed to integrate what was happening into my experience (rather than just react to it in a limiting way), I became more whole, stronger from my centre core.

Certainly I feel lighter, healthier and more positive. But I also recognise old habits die hard, and I recognise this as one piece of me, one fragment; there are many others, some retrieved and integrated, some still lurking in the shadows. What this has given me is awareness, now I need to practice putting this awareness into a new way of being in the world. Feelings of anxiety won’t disappear over night, but they will lessen, they already have.

Over time, after practice, the clouds will shift and the sun will appear more often. In the meantime, I know it is always there, always shining; I just need to let myself feel its warmth. Even a small step like this is huge in my life.

As the amazing Sarah Blondin says in her I Would Like to Give You Permission meditation “You are becoming aware of the division of selves, all the parts you’re not allowing to be true, how you are one thing but choosing another for fear of being received”

Then later she goes on to say “I’d like to give you permission to let go, to not hold it all together, to remind you that the you inside knows exactly what you must let go of in order to rise above the things that are holding you hostage. Rise above the things that are disturbing the peace of your core, follow the deep and unwavering wisdom that is yours within and enter into your intrinsic freedom.”

Now does that sound like it’s worth taking a small break from your life to explore?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation …Until You Take Responsibility to Heal. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog