There is a Scots expression about making a “helluva caffudle” which translates as “a lot of confusion” that sprung to mind this week when dealing with the corporate office of the online grocery supplier I’d used for many years.

The conflicting replies I received were indeed confusing, on one hand sympathetic and responsive, on the other contradictory, uncaring and disingenuous, which pointed to a culture that isn’t exactly customer driven, the experience depending entirely on the individual who I happened to be interfacing with.

Not much different to most places right?

To be fair, it’s one of the key reasons I exited the corporate world. It gave me a bit of a litmus test of where the customer experience has evolved to (or not) since I last worked in that field. And I realised that, after all my study and experience of human potential, psychology and dysfunction, if I were to liken most organisations to a personality, it would be a narcissistic one.

To explain what I mean by this, I’ll quote from a few sources to explain what lies at the heart of most dysfunction among humans, and thus at the heart of most organisations of humans – lack of attunement.

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

One of my all-time favourite articles happens to be on this topic, and the crux of the issue is summed up exquisitely by Teal Swan:

“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?”

When our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or
2. 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 (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

She goes on to explain that neither state is healthy. “It is not a fulfilling life to spend all your energy obsessively trying to keep yourself safe by attuning to other people at the expense of tuning out to yourself.

But the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble...You cannot attune to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality.”

So let me tell you the story about strawberry jam, and you can judge for yourself how much a lack of attunement contributed to my online grocery company losing around $25,000 per annum of our business...

I’d been having trouble with my online grocery shop for the last year and things seemed to be getting worse, with more and more items appearing to be in stock at the order stage and then not getting delivered because they were out of stock on a regular basis. This was resulting in regular trips to other stores to get what was needed, far from ideal.

While it is plausible that, between me ordering, and the store picking my order from the shelves, other customers may have come off the street and purchased those items each week, it seemed to me that it was happening with such regularity that something wasn’t right. Somehow, behind the scenes, the demand didn’t seem to be informing the supply.

Calls to Customer Service, and discussions with people at the store directly, resulted in no change. So I did what I’ve learned is most effective when I want to get to the bottom of root cause issues, and I contacted the Managing Director. This is usually an excellent entry point to find the person in the organisation who can investigate and help fix the cause of chronic issues.

All I really wanted to know was whether the company had some management, process or systems issues it could easily fix, or whether this was a good as it gets for now.

It was a disappointing start, having contacted the Acting-top-bod (whose day job is looking after the online offer, which I thought fortuitous at the time) but having had no acknowledgement after week, I had to follow this up. This, however, led to a phonecall from one of the online managers, who assured me this was not the level of service that I should be receiving.

She investigated and found some process issues and she also mentioned that the area’s online store should be the one offering the widest variety to customers, which makes absolute sense to me. She asked if I had any other issues aside of the ones I’d mentioned so I brought up the topic of the strawberry jam.

I buy a particular brand that has no refined sugars added and, about a year ago, the online store mysteriously stopped supplying the strawberry option. It still offered the raspberry, blueberry and apricot, but no strawberry.

However, the same company have another store a couple of kilometres away who offer a much wider variety but don’t do online deliveries (begging the question “why not?” apparently it’s something to do with loading bays, though it’s not entirely clear to me). However, what they do have is stock of the strawberry jam. So this told me – and the online manager - the company itself is obviously not having supply issues around this particular product.

So I allowed a number of weeks to pass to see whether the process issues would be sorted and I could rely more on stock levels. This was a bit hit and miss, but certainly there was no reappearance of the strawberry jam.

So I decided, last ditch attempt, to go to the newly appointed top-bod and see whether this could be resolved. This was delegated to another digital manager who replied:

“The size of the store means that unfortunately the full range is not available. Unfortunately the review of the spreads range won’t take place until March next year (i.e 10 months away), but we’ve made a note of your feedback... It’s always our intention to provide our customers with a great online shopping delivery experience – feedback like yours will ensure we can continue to improve this service.”

Then there was the matter of their other store, the bigger one with more variety, not being the online store. Aside of loading bays, the response cited “the location of the store is in relation to the suburb demand to keep our carbon footprint small.” While this might seem sensible, I should point out one store is 6.7 kilometres away, while the other is only 6.8 kilometres from our suburb.

I will confess this response tipped me over the edge, eliciting from me frustrated expressions like “Seriously?”, “Give me a break”, “Shame on you” and “Utter utter garbage, what a complete waste of my time”.

By this point, I’d come to the conclusion that this was the best I was going to get from my online shopping experience with this company. While in some ways it would be awesome to have a one-stop-shop for all our consumable needs, it is a bit like saying it would be awesome to have a partner who meets all my emotional needs. Neither is really realistic nor, actually, desirable since life would then likely lack variety, growth and expansion.

So I decided the best way forward was to register with another online grocery company and split our business between the two, thus insuring a wider variety of product availability. Despite the time consuming process of registering and filling that first virtual trolley, it was worth it to have options.

I will say that my spluttering response, while not actually eliciting a response from the Managing Director directly, did result in a response from their leadership team; the person who is in charge of the company’s public relations. Those of you not familiar with corporate set ups might not know that this is the person usually responsible for a company’s reputation via the media; it’s quite a different field from those who deal directly with customers.

For someone who has worked in both fields, I would have preferred and appreciated an authentic response from someone directly involved in the leadership of the day-to-day operations and customer supply chain.  I then received two crates of strawberry jam, some cereal and the promise of a discount voucher for my inconvenience. Despite the generosity and immediate follow up, I would have just preferred an explanation for the disparity in previous responses if I’m honest, and clarity on the real issues.

While I’m not wedded to the idea of a response directly from the person I’d written to, I would have expected an answer coming from, or being delegated by, a leader to be an honest reflection of the shortcomings. As I concluded on this question of character last week, people who own up to their faults and weaknesses are to be admired, and so it is with business.

I will never forget when I left the railway industry in the UK, one of the extremely frustrated customers I had spoken to many times over the years said “while I will probably never like the service (since it was prone to delays and failures on occasion due to infrastructure issues that were not quick fixes nor within the direct control of the company), your honesty has made it tolerable and I have felt that at least the issues were tabled and someone cared”.

It is my experience that behind the customer interface of most well established companies, quite aside of political agendas, is a veritable feast of legacy systems and spaghetti junctions of often cumbersome processes to manage, the archetypal swan on water. Knowing the limitations and being able to articulate them goes a long way.

There is no doubt that, on my wish list for online grocery shopping,  I’d want a reliable system to capture not only the customer demand failures of the stock the company does offer, but which products the company does not and customers’ buy elsewhere (i.e. opportunity). While that seems a long way off based on my recent experiences, it would certainly create more loyalty.

What I had come to realise though in the years I did work in the field of customer experience was, whether the customer is on the agenda (from a universal experiential perspective, rather than the individual hit-and-miss interactions) entirely comes down to whether its leader is attuned to the customer needs.

By leader I mean the person who actually determines a company’s culture, which is not always obvious. It can be the local Managing Director or Chief Executive, or a Group Executive or at Board level – and that not only changes from company to company, but at different points in time within companies as well. For example, I’ve found its pretty common for many local chiefs to be left alone so long as they are meeting Shareholder expectations. In times of economic or political turbulence the screws come on.

Having worked behind the scenes in a few large organisations, and had exposure to many more inside views of corporate structures, systems and processes through colleagues and consultants in the field of customer experience over the years, I came to the conclusion that organisational dysfunction will only resolve and evolve once people – in particular the leaders of organisations - start to do their own personal work to evolve beyond the dysfunctional patterns of behaviour learned in childhood.

And, so, it seems on the face of it, that this is where society remains still. That said, I have great hopes as we move forward with initiatives like the Inner MBA Programme (a Sounds True collaboration with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0 and Mindful NYU) leading the way.

And how do those of us who are not the true culture leaders of these organisations make a difference? How will we get organisations to meet our needs?  Get healthy. By recognising and rinsing out our dysfunctional ways of relating to others, attuning to ourselves and each other, developing healthy boundaries, and learning to communicate them and holding others accountable with grace, it is inevitable that organisations will start to attune more to those whose needs they serve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In this climate of polarization, do you have the strength of character to look at where your own beliefs come from and really do your own research before dismissing others’ seemingly strange and wild beliefs?

I’ve been noticing extremes as they cross my path this week.

Before I begin, I will say this is not an article about pro or anti any subject except:

• maintaining freedom of choice
• using critical thinking and
• thinking for oneself.

The first extreme I noticed was a pro vaccine post titled “Why I vaccinate”. It included statements like“I choose to accept the consensus of science, not focus on one discredited study in isolation”,”I value evidence, not anecdote”, and “I make a choice from clear rational thinking, not unfounded fear or conspiracy theories”.

All that sounds great but since the post lacked any of the science it mentioned, nor any evidence
of rational thinking having been applied, it sounded more to me like a very deliberate dig at those who choose not to vaccinate.

I can understand where this groundswell of opinion arises from though. In fact, another post credited to Linda Gamble Spadaro, a licensed mental health counselor in Florida, sums it up well:

“Please stop saying you researched it.

You didn’t research anything and it is highly probable you don’t know how to do so.

Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on the reported results? No?

Did you at least take each article one by one and look into the source (that would be the author, publisher and funder), then critique the writing for logical fallacies, cognitive distortions and plain inaccuracies?

Did you ask yourself why this source might publish these particular results? Did you follow the trail of references and apply the same source of scrutiny to them?

No? Then you didn’t f*cking research anything. You read or watched a video, most likely with little or no objectivity. You came across something in your algorithm manipulated feed, something that jived with your implicit biases and served your confirmation bias, and subconsciously applied your emotional filters and called it proof.

Scary”

In some ways, yes, I agree. However, I have to step back and ask myself where my own opinions have arisen from. As I grew up in the world I accepted a number of truths. In the case of vaccines, that really came from the government literature and medical professionals I was exposed to, and the adults around me readily accepting those as truths, and so I formed an implicit bias towards them; I didn’t compile a literature review from a random sample of sources and apply any of the rigor Linda points to.

A friend of mine was talking to a family member about the roll out of COVID19 vaccines here in New Zealand, and she was questioning the efficacy of them. His view was “why would they lie to us?” This is precisely the sort of question that is useful to ask if used to examine motives. In this case though it was an indication of blind faith placed in a system of power, not dissimilar to my own when I was growing up.

When I relook at the original post I read on pro vaccines, I do know there is not just “one discredited study” that challenges the efficacy of vaccines in general, there are mountains of literature out there both pro and against. That kind of glib statement, to my mind, discredits the point it’s trying to promote. Yes, sure, as it says, there are thousands of safety studies looking at vaccines from all angles, but who is the author, publisher and funder of those?

My own journey with health issues in the last few decades of my life has caused me to question many aspects of the government and medical views I was fed as a matter of course.

I covered this journey in a series of articles back in 2019 (Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress and You Have Amazing Options When it comes to Healthcare) but the one thing that I can’t deny is pharmaceuticals are extremely profitable, and who stands to make from those profits? And what power (direct and indirect) does that give pharmaceutical companies?

On the other hand I don’t see the same incentives for health. Yet I know how astonishingly well my immune system works when supported by the right mindset, diet and lifestyle. I feel that the fact my kids had twenty routine vaccines by the age of four, essentially intentionally infecting burgeoning immune systems twenty times, should be something I’m encouraged to investigate and question.

I have another friend who is most definitely in that corner of having no trust in what the powers-that-be tell us and questions everything. She feels “the programming that occurs is not okay, and that we should not allow ourselves and our children to be fed bullsh!t and be kept in the dark in order to control us”.

Certainly British politician, writer and diarist Tony Benn concurred in his interview with Michael Moore in the documentary Sicko, looking at America’s healthcare crisis, when he said “An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern”.

Someone who had been diving into the world of Flat Earthers encouraged me to listen to a series that apparently gave lots of scientific data. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it beyond the first part though as there was no ownership of who the commentator and director was and I like transparency so I can delve more into the credibility of a source.

While it sounded extremely scientific in some of its language (to the extent I’d need to be or have access to experts in the field of physics and so forth to be able to corroborate or refute the points made), there were also a couple of things questioned that, to my mind, were no real mysteries at all.  
I agree it’s important to question things, but I try to limit that, particularly to things I'm interested in or I can control and have a direct impact on me. Whether the Earth is a disk that is essentially a platform for a hologram is an idea I’m merely intrigued by, and why it’s of such importance to so many.

But I also think we need a shared understanding of reality in order to remain stable. As Tristan Harris says in The Social Dilemma “Imagine a world where no one believes anything that was once held true, and everyone believes that the government is lying to them about everything, and everything is a conspiracy theory. We need a shared understanding of reality in order to remain stable”. 

That's what is great and simultaneously unsettling about the online world these days. On one hand there is much greater access to information than ever before. On the other hand the artificial intelligence does not know the truth and is wired for popularity.

So its ability to bring out the worst in society, create polarisation, outrage, instability, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, election hacking, populism and distraction is also an opportunity to create an inability to focus on the real issues, which is indicative of a society devolving into chaos. 

I personally feel the real game changer, aside of disengagement from the feed and the rat race, is the internal personal work required to defrag our mental and emotional dysfunction as a collective in order to be able to discern the truths that will allow us to grow and flourish as a society.

Much of my journey in recent years has focused on becoming conscious of the dysfunctional patterns of thinking and behaviour I adopted when growing up, recognizing they no longer serve me as a free thinking adult, then creating interruption to those well worn neural pathways, and deliberately creating newer, healthier responses.  

But another aspect of human nature has also caught my attention lately, and I think it relates directly to a person’s ability to question the kinds of things I’ve been talking about here; that of human character.

Thanks to the kids’ thirst for Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s book series lately, I’ve been thrust into the world of a fictional 1940’s Girls’ boarding school, and met an inspiring head mistress, Miss Theobald, who says:

“We are not out to cram facts and knowledge into the girls’ heads all day long, but to help them form strong and kindly characters.”

“I may not know what type of brain you have, exactly where you stand in class, or what your gifts and capabilities are without referring to your form mistress, but I know your characters; the good and badin you, the possibilities in your nature, your tendencies, your faults, and your virtues.”

“Unless you have enough courage to face up to yourself, and try to tear out the unpleasant failings that are spoiling and weakening what character you do have, we have nothing to offer you”

“Faults such as greed, irresponsibility and silliness, these arouse disgust but can be forgotten and forgiven. Spite and malice rouse bitter feelings; they rankle and are never forgotten”

Instead the stories about the school promote such qualities as honesty, self awareness, ownership of failings, bravery, leadership, resourcefulness and ingenuity. And I believe these are the very qualities required to really critically question some of the aspects of our lives that can lead to the growth and evolution of our species and planet.

So when you are confronted by someone’s strange and seemingly wild beliefs, do you have the strength of character to look at where your own beliefs come from and really do your own research before dismissing them?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life? What Are the Right Questions to Ask Right Now? and What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

My young niece had shared with me a powerful poem she has written about women, in part of it she wrote:

“Imagine a life
Where she wouldn’t look over her shoulder
And see a man doing no work
But he will still be paid more than her”
 
I longed to be able to say “We’ve evolved beyond that” but, while many men do of course work (and work hard), it gave me pause knowing this was an observation from our next generation and correlates with many of the facts and statistics I’ve read about ongoing inequality.

She gave me permission to share it and a good friend of mine responded:

“It is true, our hearts are somber that our young rising women look out and see a world that works only for a few. However, we, the elders, know there is good work to be done, and we eagerly pass on the baton encouraged because we can now hold better reflections and conversations than our elders did.”

This is so true.

When I was invited to speak as an influencer at a summit for woman this week, an interesting mix of emotions ran through me. I was grateful for the opportunity, surprised to be thought of as an influencer and excited about the prospect of women taking a fresh look at themselves.

But while speaking fits with my longer term vision, I had to step back and really assess whether this is something I’d like to say yes or no to in this moment. My gut told me “Not yet, I’ll be over extending myself”, my mind niggled “Am I just making excuses? Am I afraid?”

I sat with these questions for a while. I can’t deny wondering how I’d measure up, but I generally enjoy public speaking. I find it easier to express myself when I know people are actually interested in what I’m talking about and the platform is mine uninterrupted for a while.

So I laughed at myself and thought how ironic that the true issue lies at the heart of an aspect of my feminine side that needs to be honoured.

Having operated in the corporate world for many years running from meeting to meeting, which plays to the masculine aspects of my nature, I now try to keep everything as fluid as possible because so much of my life still revolves around the kids’ schedule, which in turns revolves around school (again a very masculine way of working).

I’ve discovered I need time that is fluid so I can dial it up or down depending on how I’m feeling.

For example, I was reflecting in a conversation this week on how I see a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle in terms of my energy; to me it’s like four seasons in a month. There are days when I feel decidedly Spring-like and want to get on with more physically-taxing tasks, there are days that are Summer-like when I feel very social, then there more Autumnal days when I turn inward and reflect,and finally the Winter days when I really do not feel like going out at all and want to rest a lot more.

Why is this talked about so little still?

The whole female physical structure gears up month after month, for four decades of a woman’s life, to create and host another being. And having brought two beautiful little beings into the world, I know it’s nothing short of miraculous. The whole process is not an aside, it’s inherent in my existence as a female, and I feel the beat of my life goes way more smoothly when I can go with that rhythm instead of a man made one.

I was reflecting on my life changes further after having a quick e-catch up this week with a publisher I haven’t spoken to in quite a while, who was wanting to use a quote from an old article I’d written. I was asking her how she is finding motherhood and, in return, she asked – other than busy – how I’ve been?

I know that seems like a routine kind of exchange, but given the topics I write about and the ones she publishes, I thought more deeply “how have I been?”

The ten years since I began my own journey into motherhood flashed through my head.

In that time everything has come under a spotlight, no stone left unturned. When the pressure is on – and it was, the heat higher than at any other time in my life, everything came into sharp focus.

I had a short, pointed reminder of my old life a couple of weeks ago when I found an old schedule of my day I’d written out when the kids were very young:

You can probably guess by the schedule I quickly lost patience and energy for the career and corporate world I had worked so hard to attain success in. Motherhood demanded the more feminine aspects of me to come to the fore, the children needed me to really see them and be able to hold their space emotionally.
 
The codependent relationship style I had unwittingly entered into as a child and unconsciously adopted in adulthood became untenable. My strong desire for my children to be who they truly are, forced me to identify and take responsibility for my people pleasing ways. Becoming healthier and creating better boundaries has shaken all my primary relationships to the core.
 
It’s been nothing short of a metamorphosis, one I’m still emerging from. It left me depleted and, while I’ve found more balance, I’m only really starting to rebuild strength from that more authentic platform.
 
But the thing that struck me was just how intense and polarizing the middle years were, suddenly thrust into the realms of watching my mother die (from colon cancer) while simultaneously dealing with violent outbursts and constant tantrums from both kids over a period of a few years as they started school and struggled (neurodiversity can be subtle).
 
I swung from one extreme to the other in my close relationships. No longer able to give others the attention I once had, being hyper attuned to their needs, I became much more self centred out of necessity; getting angry and resentful when my boundaries were trodden upon. While I survived, it was painful.
 
I see this in a similar way to the male-female balance having swung to an extreme as women have tried to reclaim a more worthy sense of place in the world. So many women, in the name of equal rights, have swarmed to university, to jobs and a world that was predominantly the domain of men.
 
In the process a new archetype arose in our collective consciousness, the superwoman, she who can do it all. In truth, having been one of those for a while, I feel it was nothing short of torture, and I was certainly not comfortable in my own skin. I think men too have become confused and resentful about their roles. What’s the answer?
 
What I’d dearly love to see more than anything, is the needs of the newest born of our race being recognised far more than they are so the emotional pandemic and dysfunctional cycles of human existence are broken. In those earliest months and years, if I had known then what I know now about healthy attachment and attunement, I would not have shipped my children off to someone else while I went to work, no matter how wonderful she was.

But what my kids needed wasn’t just their mother present in body, they needed me fully present in myself, not the wounded child in an adult body that I was.

As Teal Swan so eloquently says “You cannot be attuned to a child and have them grow up narcissistic or codependent. 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 attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality”. 

If a woman wants to become an engineer or a CEO, sure, why not. Or if a man wants to become a stay-at-home-parent or a hairdresser, fantastic. Or, possibly even more controversially these days, if a woman wants to stay at home to look after their kids while the man wants to work, let’s make that work.

But I think the key to all this doesn’t lie in equal rights or opportunities the way it’s been played out, the key seems to me to lie in each of us stepping into conscious awareness of the dysfunctional cycles of thinking and behaviour that appear to get played out generation after generation. In short, while I was hyper-attuned to others, I had to learn to tune into my own needs and desires.

As I have become aware of and ferreted out that dysfunction in my thinking and habits, I’ve rediscovered that the only true power exists within me – a fact I suspect that man-made power constructs like schools, health systems, governments and economic systems would prefer I am not acquainted with.

I can only imagine as people begin to attune to and honour their own unique needs, talents and desires, men and women will see each other through fresh eyes.

My niece wrote:
 
“Imagine a world
United at last
The thick fog of inequality
Raised at last”
 
I believe the inequality of opportunity that exists will melt away in a world where we attune to ourselves and others. We will become comfortable enough in our own skin to be able to admire and embrace the diversity around us. The structures of success will fall away and morph into structures that support the many, rather than the few. This is not a conversation about male or female, this is a conversation about re-parenting ourselves, creating healthy boundaries, truly seeing ourselves and others and fulfilling our potential as unique, wonderful, strange, marvelous beings.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, Womanhood: A Story of Our Time, Even in Grief There Are lessons to Be Learned, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, Take Back Your Power - Only One Thing Need Change for You to Feel Good  and You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A number of quotes from different authors clicked into a cohesive picture in my mind this week of the many ways in which I had been subconsciously turning away from my true self and the choices that have existed over the years that I had been blind to, instead feeling trapped in so many unnecessary ways…

Saying no to someone by saying yes to me (with grace) is, I believe, one of the most commonly missed opportunities in my life. I have awoken to the many ways in which I abandoned my own free will and now see quite clearly when others are doing this, or – at the opposite end of the spectrum – doing what they want regardless of the cost to others.

I was contemplating this early one morning and found my thoughts gathering some momentum. It started with thinking about my kids’ school, and then expanded across other aspects of education, into the health, financial and government systems.

When I am told to do something I get triggered.

Now I can see that there are situations in which telling versus asking would be important, such as life and death situations. But actually, my experience and observations lead to me believe it’s the predominant mode of communication among families and coming from institutions who hold some sort of (often perceived) authority or power over the people they interact with.

From my own experience I’d say this all comes down to the authentic parts of myself that I denied, suppressed and disowned over the years, in favour of a more palatable me that could survive the indoctrination into my family and society.

In the field of child psychology, and psychology generally, the word Attunement is well known. Dr Gabor Mate, an expert on childhood trauma and its effects on development, 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.”

This can be a huge ask. I am the first to admit that – if I was never aware of my shortcomings before – they certainly became very 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.

“We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us” says Teal Swan. 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?

As I’ve said before, I would imagine most people 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.

One of the most helpful things she says that has really stuck with me is “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.”

So I was thrilled to read Daniel Shaw’s explanation of these two typical responses in a slightly different way that gave me an even greater understanding of this dynamic. In his book Traumatic Narcissism he says “a child who is trapped in a narcissistic relationship system can either externalise or internalise the traumatising behaviour of the adult:

1. The child who externalises their experience perpetuates the pattern by projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear she experienced and cannot tolerate herself.
Whereas

2. The child who internalises their experience first develops a protector identity, usually dissociative, whose aim is to reduce harm by anticipating the narcissist behaviour of the adult. Later, as the child develops, this part that arose out of protection begins to function as a persecutor, a replica of the abusive adult that now lives inside the growing child’s mind.”

A narcissistic relationship system is one in which one or both of the parents are more focused on their own feelings than those of their children.

In hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings, internalising everything, and co-dependent in my relationships.

It’s probably 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 in a healthy way.

So when my partner, the kids, or someone else comes along sweeping me into something with no regard to my free will, it is easy to see why I get triggered.

Even as a child I inherently knew my sovereignty, and I can see – in retrospect that any anger I felt was a sure sign that my boundaries had been violated. But I had nothing I could do with that anger except suppress it, creating trauma, or express it from a defensive standpoint – usually resulting in such an unwelcome reaction that I eventually had to choke down how I felt regardless – also creating trauma.

Bessel Van Der Kolk says “Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself, of what I will call self-leadership. The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and mind – of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed or collapsed.”

Bert Hellinger, the psychotherapist best known for his Family Constellations therapy, said that belonging is the most important need of children. As such, a child will make incredible sacrifices to belong to her family system.

Daniel Shaw puts it this way “Children will go to great lengths to keep their parent’s good. Even if this means becoming the bad one in relation to the parents.”

Jane Peterson, Director of the Human System’s Institute points out that a healthy relational system is quite different:

“In a healthy dyad, both members are seen as selves, or subjects, with thoughts, feelings and needs. Healthy relationships are marked by a mutuality of relations and reciprocal interactions. Giving and taking is a dynamic flow with the contributions of each member valued by the others. These systems are marked by fluidity, the ability of members to tolerate and even appreciate points of view that are different from their own.”

She goes on to say “for the person wounded by the narcissistic behaviour of a similarly wounded adult, this can sound like a fairy tale. The way back to self-love, mutual interactions, a flow of giving and taking seems far away. It is possible and it takes work to repattern the brain and nervous system to learn what safety is, and to be able to receive love and appreciation.”

I see this played out beautifully in Lisa Romano’s story. Lisa Romano developed people pleasing tendencies through her hyper attunement as I did, and has shared her story in The Road Back to Me and My Road Beyond the Codependent Divorce. Both books are an easy read and give excellent insight into these complex dynamics through the everyday insidious examples that I have seen crop up time and again in my own relationships.

She shares:

“I had to learn to let go of my fear of displeasing my father, and accept that in living my own life, it was quite possible my father would in fact abandon me. In so many ways however, he already had…In all of my fear, I could never have known, that ultimately I had been taught to abandon and reject my self.”
In trying to figure out why she felt so angry as she started to become aware of and reclaim her sense of self she shares a conversation with her therapist:

“When my mother was angry she would rant and rave and sing her long list of complaints about me, or my sister or my brother….If she was really mad she’d clench her teeth and get in our faces and yell until she turned cherry red.”

I recognised this pattern from my own childhood and – one day – found myself starting to repeat it with my small children and knew then and there I had to take action.

Her therapist enquires:

“Did she hit you when she got angry?”

“Yes sometimes” Lisa answers

“Did she curse you?”

“Yes” Lisa says

“Did she ever label you as bad, or selfish, or call you any other mean names?”

“Yes. She said I was bad a lot. She called me selfish all the time….”

“…Lisa, I know why you are angry. Depression is anger that has been turned inward. You are angry now, because for the first time in your life you are taking you seriously.”

“…Lisa, you cannot heal what you do not allow yourself to feel. The more you feel, the deeper you heal, and the better you feel.”

She reflects in a later chapter “Although I was aware that my family was a codependent dynamic unit that operated under the veils of denial and, as I recovered from codependency in my life, I would inevitably need to confront my familial dysfunction in the process, I was not prepared for the enormous fortitude it would take to do so, or the avalanches of grief that were becoming as familiar as breath itself.”

“Only when I am asked to explain how it was that I made it through those early years after my marriage ended, do I stop to realise just how far I’ve come, and how many mountains I have climbed.
From the time I was a child, within my chest was a beating heart that beat the drum of desire, a desire for peace. My heart would not rest until, within my being, I found peace.

If I have learned anything in this life it is this – all love starts with self love…and self love comes only by way of embracing the courage to tell the truth, even if that topples over a few apple carts along the way.”

Beautifully put.

But where to begin? I had a friend ask this week whether I used The Completion Process after reading the book, or whether I used a practitioner. As I responded, I just do it myself, among many other approaches I use to heal the internal wounds I find. That’s me all over, someone very self driven and independent, both edges sharpened by the experiences of trying to stay one step (or ten) ahead of any criticism that might come my way and, again, reinforce the notion that I had no right to a self.

I was reminded though of a powerful question from Tony Robbins’ documentary I Am Not Your Guru:
“Who did you crave love from the most, as a child, and who did you have to be to get it?”

I reread this in an article by Kathy Caprino, who eloquently stated “once you can feel and recognise what triggers you to feel unsafe, unloved and unacceptable, you can then explore the root behind it.”

For me, the first step though was to recognise that was how I was feeling. Because on the surface it manifested more as an ongoing knot of anger and exhaustion from trying to stay one step ahead of everyone and everything.

I simply didn’t see how deeply rooted my fear of rejection was, and I was angry because I was rejecting my self, fooling myself into believing I had to be accepted as someone other than who I actually am in order to survive.

I thought I was trapped in many situations, that I had no free will and certainly no way to exercise it gracefully. I have learned that is simply not true, and I am still learning how to exercise it with grace, but it’s getting easier.

In what ways are you abandoning your own free will? And are you willing to take the journey that will allow you to reclaim it, and allow us to see you and accept you for who you truly are?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved and How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

My mother-in-law and I went to see Yesterday (a 1970s tribute show) at the theatre and I was immediately transported back to my childhood in a good way. One song took me back to a moment on a Sunday night in 1975, I was only a pre-schooler then, and Sunday was a bath night but it was also the night the Top 40 tunes were revealed on the radio.

I’d forgotten just how big a part in my life music played as I was growing up. The popular music of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s was a constant in my life, with Top of the Pops a much-loved weekly TV show on our screen. One of my favourite activities on holiday with my family as a young teenager was going to the Bournemouth Pavilion in the evenings, where the ballroom was repurposed to serve drinks to hundreds of people sitting around tables listening to the live music. 

While doing healing work on the deliberate journey to uncover authentic me, by necessity I find myself remembering and observing parts of my childhood that are not always so happy, and not useful to my encumbered adult psyche. But there is another side to this work, and it’s the rediscovery of the parts of me that either haven’t seen the light of day in a long time or, in some cases, ever felt safe enough to express themselves.

I was having a conversation with one of my nieces about one of her favourite film series, Divergent. I like the constant reminder in the movies – to paraphrase some of the best quotes from them - we should always, under all circumstances, make decisions ourselves rather than letting society make decisions on our behalf. So she and I then got into a conversation about how much society influences our thinking.

This led to some observations about how much we each suppress our true selves in a bid to try to fit in. But the thing I personally find more difficult is to define that real self, so the music show I went to with my mother-in-law was a great reminder about that aspect of authentic me.

While in recent years my career and children have filled my headspace, making silence preferable to noise when I do have a moment to myself, it was wonderful to experience enjoying listening to, singing along and dancing to music. It also moves me emotionally, and I feel a deep connection with much of what I listen to.

I was watching a Tedx Talk by JP Sears Say YES! To Your Weirdness. I love JP’s humour, and I love the way he uses it to deliver more serious messages like “in seeking others’ approval we reject ourselves” and “a willingness to embrace discomfort is essential”. That makes perfect sense, when I’ve rejected parts of myself in order to fit in, rediscovering those parts and revealing them is sure to be uncomfortable at first.

He also makes the point well that approval (from others) is not acceptance. As a living example of his own work, JP has successfully relaunched his career from Life Coach to Spiritual Comedian in the last few years. Many of his recent videos are full of political satire in the face of current world events and yet amid a backdrop of evolving consciousness. By saying yes to his weirdness, he is now well placed to voice things others may be feeling but aren’t able to put words to.

This reminds me of another article of Teal Swan’s I read recently on How to Receive Love. She makes the point that, while I might think it should be easy to receive love, many people struggle with receiving it. This could be because of conditions placed on receiving it, such as my good behaviour, or feelings of unworthiness, or undeserving, or a fear of losing someone, or even an addiction to reciprocity.

If I take this alongside JP’s point, it is hard for others to love and accept me when I’ve rejected myself. So rediscovering, accepting and loving that real me is of vital importance to my happiness.

A good friend of mine, who is also on this journey, was telling me about some art sessions she is setting up for local kids. In her typical self-deprecating fashion, she said “It’s nothing earth-shattering, just me hosting a small get-together each week, we will discover and talk about a different style of art and (materials provided thanks to a local grant) the kids can have a go at creating whatever painting they want in that style”.

I think that freedom of expression is earth-shattering. My daughter complains bitterly about the painting and drawing at school all being highly dictated, she relishes having that kind of artistic freedom. And for families where art supplies are beyond their means or not on their radar, this gives those kids a place in which to come home to a little bit of themselves, I think it’s beautiful.

I also heard from a fellow seeker this week, who calls his website Inside-Out Mastery. He’s written an article giving ten easy tips to finding happiness when feeling trapped. It is fantastic to discover and connect with others who are on their own journey to self-discovery and sharing what they are learning.

For my niece, she has reclaimed a little piece of herself in sporting some new Doc Martins that speak to the rambunctious, rebellious kid inside.

Every little piece of the real us that we can shine a light on and reclaim is a triumph for our authenticity, a stake in the ground of our own sovereignty. What are the parts of you that have been sitting on a dusty shelf or were long since buried that you might now have the courage to reach for and reclaim? These are the parts that will allow us to love the real you, as truly strange as that might once have seemed.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Respect Your Own Value, Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life?, Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved and How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’m going to go for the short answer upfront: no. However, I will admit there have been times in my life I’ve found it hard to really hear what someone has to say when I’ve known they hold a different set of beliefs or opinions than I do. Why is that? Honestly it’s a question of safety.

To take an extreme, could I bring myself to listen to one of Hitler’s speeches or read Mein Kampf without any kind of a veil or judgement? I’ll admit I could not, I’d find it repugnant. Yet when I read one of his quotes “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed” it feels like a truth; I can think of many examples beyond his where people have been (and continue to be) manipulated like this.

In my own case, it did not feel psychologically or emotionally safe for me to have my own beliefs and opinions (that were divergent to the pack) as I was growing up. It seems to me it was (and still is) the norm. I certainly wanted to fit in, be accepted and feel validated.

Despite being well-intentioned by my parents, teachers and other key influencers in my life, it was damaging enough that I no longer recognised my own inner voice; I would often feel fear, guilt or shame and was inadvertently trained to look outside myself for answers. This is where my strong sense of calling comes from, to help others hear and trust their inner voice.

The irony is, by not living life from my own authentic standpoint and not even really knowing I had one of those (it was more just that life could often seem heavy or off), I attracted all sorts of painful circumstances into my life.

Now I’m an adult with curiosity and critical thinking, and I’ve figured out all those circumstances were pointing me somewhere – back to the real me. And it has taken a while to really figure out who that is, and what I actually believe about life.

So it was interesting to me that, when I wrote ” a central theme of my authentic paradigm is that there’s no one truth, we each hold within us our own truth” in How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice someone I know felt really challenged by that.

The context of my sharing that belief was not a teaching, it was a vulnerable disclosure of a desire that I had felt on my journey, a desire to feel validated by those who had brought me into the world, to validate my inherent right to my own worldview.

Having someone feel challenged by that view was a wonderful opportunity for me to check in on how I’m travelling. The key benefit was the triumphal recognition of the old defence patterns that momentarily kicked in, and then drifted away on the tide as I dropped out of flight-or-fight mode, and into the space of the adult who has done some healing, and has the experience and wisdom to now deal with this kind of questioning.

I was intrigued by what these questions would awaken within me. I realised I’m feeling quite secure in my paradigm and I liked the answers that came forth in response to questions about absolutes, right and wrong, good and evil and so on.

For me, it is all a matter of perspective. I am aware of myself as a consciousness inhabiting a human body, but I am simultaneously aware of myself as a far more expansive consciousness – as I am aware of all others in just the same way.

Now that, right there, would challenge many people’s paradigms. I am okay with that; it’s my own experiences of this that have led me to my views.

Do I think in terms of absolutes? Not generally. I find absolutes constricting. But if there is an absolute, and people are able to learn again how to hear and trust their authentic inner voice, I trust this absolute will reveal itself within the sovereignty of their soul.

I see right and wrong as judgements, and wonder “who is the judge?” There are many sides to each story, many hurts, many intentions. For example, how many believe it was right to execute Saddam Hussein? Can killing someone ever be called right? I suspect many people have differing views on the matter.

The same could be said of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the West. I remember wondering as I watched in shock at the twin towers falling, feeling the horror and desperation of the situation and wondering “what drives people to do this?”, yet some part of me understanding that there must be another side to this story.

As to good and evil, was Hitler evil, or were many of his acts evil? Some see no difference in the two. But I can’t help but wonder from what place of inner pain does someone incite such heinous acts?
If you are a child growing up right now in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Yemen or any of the other conflict-torn places in our world today, who seems good and who seems evil, who is right and who is wrong?

And how to do we respond? With revenge, retaliation, punishment?

Now these examples are all what I’d call big-T trauma, they are the kinds of examples commonly recognised as life threatening and harmful in physical, psychological and emotional ways. These are acts that affect whole generations of collective peoples. I see polarisation around who is condemned and why, depending on the perspective.

To me, acts of harm, harm all. If I hurt you, I hurt myself. If I hurt a creature, I hurt myself. If I hurt this planet, I hurt myself. It is all connected. All I see is that pain begets pain until the light of conscious awareness is shone upon it. So where is the compassion, the rehabilitation?

And how does all of this link into the life I am living, with a partner, children, a family, a community, colleagues and so many other versions of relationships, with whom I can disagree vehemently in what they believe and in how they conduct themselves and in what harm I feel within me in these interactions?

And why do I feel harm? Why do I get so upset? Usually because that person has accidentally tripped over my paradigm, my view of myself and the world and what is right and what is wrong.

As Teal Swan says “When we fight from two different perceptual realities, we only end up strengthening the current beliefs and values of the other, causing further polarisation. Instead we must shift our focus to the vulnerability that the other side may be feeling.”

I see answers to reducing harm by creating awareness, understanding and education in how we indoctrinate our newborns into this human experience. When I think, for example, of Gabor Mate’s insightful descriptions of the first year of an infant’s life in his book Scattered Minds, and how they link to our neurobiology and behaviours, there is much pain created in this world from an inadvertent lack of attunement.  

And I see answers in how we help those who have misguidedly learned that their power comes from taking it from others, they will never be able to take enough to satisfy themselves; the power is within. As an adult I see it as my responsibility to re-parent myself, to create a sense of secure attachment and attunement and learn to interact with the world from that standpoint.

Which brings me back to becoming aware of the unhelpful thought and behavioural patterns that exist within, and cause harm. I am talking about the often subconscious beliefs I might have about feeling invisible, or powerless, or not enough, or too much, or unworthy, or being unwanted, or not important, or different, or inferior, or wrong, or alone, or bad, or deprived, or worthless, or a failure,or a burden, or crazy, or that I don’t belong, or I’m not important, or I don’t matter, or I’m not safe.

The journey to me has involved – and continues to involve – questioning the validity of these subtle little suckers that can create so much misery. These thoughts got planted there from the earliest moments and they simply do not serve who I am today.

As I have become more conscious of these, I have observed myself and others living in very unique, self-created and self-centred webs of protection that out-served their use long ago.  As I confront these and integrate past experiences with the person I am today, I become less defensive, more open, more able to really see and hear others.

I believe a more conscious world is a kinder and wiser world (to borrow a Sounds True tag line), I believe that we can evolve beyond the kind of atrocities that I have talked about in here, and beyond the insidious day to day reactions to the petty disagreements or comments or actions of other people around us.

Do you need to have unified beliefs to be able to really listen? No, but I believe you do need to have clear sight of your authentic self and feel safe and comfortable in your own skin in order to truly see the perspective of another.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I have been contemplating a question that someone asked me this week “How can I trust myself enough to put away my doubts and share what I’ve learned?” because I can relate to it deeply. Particularly when she went on to say “I do share, but I hold back. I know things, but don’t want to look like a know it all.”

I have read so many good quotes about using my voice, here is a link to just a few, but I would sum up the overriding message as your voice is important. This rings true. Just listening to the voices in the last year about white privilege, and the swathe of new language that has become more commonplace as a result, talking about acts of micro aggression, subtle acts of exclusion and psychological safety has opened up huge growth potential inside me.

The factor that is of most importance to me when I start thinking about how to share, is that it’s my authentic voice I’m putting out there. And, when I’m listening to someone else, it’s an authentic voice I want to hear. I use the word heart in the title interchangeably with authentic in this case.

About a year ago someone said “you talk too much” and I felt badly wounded, right in my chest, it was heavy, and my throat constricted. Context is everything of course; this was an experienced person trying to mediate a conversation between me and a loved one.

They were right though, I did some introspective, exploratory and healing work around it at the time and when I heard it again a few weeks ago – instead of feeling wounded – it was a reminder “ah, yes, I do talk too much from my head”. It is usually in defense, I need instead to intentionally focus my awareness into my heart space.

For example, last weekend was our kids’ school fair, it was not a comfortable day for me, and I had all sorts of stories in my head about why this was the case.

While how I hear my authentic voice isn’t the focus of this week’s musing, I do cover it in some of the article links I’ve included at the bottom. As Michael Beckwith sums up nicely “Ask the right questions. Instead of What’s wrong and who is to blame? ask What is trying to emerge? What gift is trying to be born in my life?”

When I did some introspective and exploratory enquiry, it took me to a different place entirely than my head’s stories. I went back to some unhelpful thought and behavioural patterns that stemmed from the place in my childhood when a sibling was born and I adopted all sorts of unhelpful beliefs about responsibility and putting the needs of others before my own.

It was a good reminder to me to share from my authentic heart space and not my (usually) defensive head space. This is the first step to overcoming any doubt about what I am sharing.

The next step is whether the person I’m sharing with is actually open to hearing what I have to share. I’ll be honest, as I started to really redefine my own world view, or paradigm about life, the very people I wanted to understand and accept it were the very people who were largely responsible for shaping my behaviours as I grew up.

It’s not that I necessarily wanted them to accept my view as their own (especially since a central theme of my authentic paradigm is that there’s no one truth, we each hold within us our own truth), it was more that I wanted to feel validated in having my own worldview that was different to theirs.

There was some wonderful advice that speaks to this, again given by Michael Beckwith when I was listening to him being interviewed a while back:

“If you have a loved one who is ill and resistant to thoughts you have about their wellbeing, all you can do is love them. Until they ask you a question you’re trespassing on their paradigm.”

While the question obviously related to someone being ill, I felt the answer was very universal. I’ve learned it’s worth asking first whether people are open to hearing my thoughts. And if they are not, and I’m still very attached to them, well that’s an indication that I have something to work on.

A final Michael quote from the same interview, same topic, that I love is “People would rather hear a vision than a rant”. That is good advice that also helps me re-tune from my head to my heart.

I can’t remember where I’ve heard it, and it would be from several sources, but there is also another  great piece of advice about changing the pack I run with if my friends and family chronically frustrate me, or make me sad, or depressed because of our differences in opinion.

As a general statement, most of my family aren’t into diving in the depths like me. I still love them and I haven’t abandoned them – nor will I intentionally abandon myself again. I have a set of friends with whom I can happily explore depths together, which has come about from being brave enough to share with people my authentic ideas and emerging beliefs, like attracts like.

As I publish the lessons I learn on the journey to me, an act of vulnerability in itself, I don’t have any expectations about what happens as a result. I do feel if what I have gone through and have learned from it can help others, I have an obligation to share it, which is where I found the courage to begin. But again, like attracts like, and it’s an indication to me that there are many others in the world who explore the same depths I do.

I love to hear people’s comments and get emails with other’s stories, or asking my opinion, it all adds depth and new dimension to my own journey, as well as a sense of belonging and being seen. All of that gives me more confidence to be me while around family or others that I’m not so attuned with.

After six years of publishing these articles, I’m now realising I’m very comfortable writing and sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings. And it is no surprise that a small challenge arose from the lips of another who questioned how comfortable I felt using my voice.

At first I was thinking “well I publish my innermost thoughts ever week so I think I’m pretty comfortable”, then I let my energy sit and sink to my heart space and I heard another thought “yes, but are you as comfortable with actually speaking in a physical sense?”

That led to two separate pieces of advice that have all serendipitously come about. One was to regularly sing in front of the mirror to have fun and start to feel safe using my voice. The other was a variation on the theme, stretching the comfort zone somewhat, and to start a podcast.

While I haven’t decided where I am going in that sense, something a good friend of mine said a while back has stuck “I wish other people could hear you speak. When I read your articles I can hear your voice, I know your self depreciating humour, and wonder if others might read the articles as more serious in tone.”

At this stage, it’s all sitting there as a seed of an idea, but the point is that there are many ways to share. I listened to a podcast this week with LaRayla Gaston talking about the ways in which she shares the lessons life had taught her, which is through showing love in action – buying homeless people a coffee or a meal.

LaRayla did not have an easy upbringing, but her grandmother lavished so much love and kindness on her, she wanted to share that, because that is what had sustained her heart. When her grandmother died it was a catalyst to share her legacy.

And, as with the earlier discussion about sharing my opinions with others, LaRayla’s advice was not to be attached to the outcome. She offers things to people, they don’t always accept, and she accepts that with grace, or in her uniquely LaRayla style says “I’ll catch you next time Boo”.

When I contemplate the ways in which the heart’s voice can be shared, though words and actions, it’s really obvious to me that there is not just something for everyone but something I can learn from everyone, in many wonderful ways.

For those who have felt at times invisible, or powerless, or not enough, or too much, or unworthy, or not wanted, or not important, or different, or inferior, or wrong, or alone, or bad, or deprived, or worthless, or a failure, or a burden, or crazy, or that you don’t belong, or you’re not important, or you don’t matter, or you’re not safe – we need to hear your heart’s voice so that we can all heal and grow together.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When the kids and I first met the character Reyna Avila Ramirez Arellano in Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, it was the observation of her by another character that really struck me, because it could have been someone describing me for most of my life:

“Annabeth recognised something else in her face too – in the hard set of her mouth and the deliberate way she raised her chin like she was ready to accept any challenge. Reyna was forcing a look of courage while holding back a mixture of hopefulness and worry and fear that she couldn’t show in public.”

Later, in the Trials of Apollo series, she reflects, as I have reflected in recent years:

“My whole life I’ve been living with other people’s expectations of who and what I‘m supposed to be...But you showed me how ridiculous the whole situation was. That’s what healed my heart, being able to laugh at myself again, at my stupid ideas about destiny and fate...That allowed me to break free. I don’t need to wear anybody else’s label. I need time to just be me, to find out who I am.”

As I have been on this journey to me, I have uncovered quite a few self destructive beliefs that have been lurking in the shadows of my mind, driving my thoughts and actions like a hidden force,

When I get triggered about something in my life, I take this as a signal to explore those hidden beliefs and bring them into the light of day for a good shake down.

This week I retuned to do some work using Brandon’s Bays Emotional Journey process when I could feel myself getting irritated by a sense of giving too much to others.

What I discovered in the process is that giving too much stems, for me, from this subconscious idea I’m not enough. My true state is actually receptivity, openness and warmth and the guidance (that came from a deeper part of myself) was to remember I am not the personality or the experiences, but the benefactor of the growth that arises out of those.

In fact, the wisest part of me said “You are love itself and there’s always enough love, in fact that’s all there is.”

Another aspect of my hidden belief structure that I had been experiencing lately was a sense of feeling under-valued, unseen and under-used in my gifts and capacities. What I uncovered in the process is my true nature, which is radiance, standing in my own power. I can choose to combat and play small, or compassion to play big; to see others as comrades not combatants.

In this scenario the wisest part of me said “Be expansive. There are many things that you know you know, live those.” I understood that I must have compassion for myself and others to grow beyond this unhelpful belief pattern.

I have also been reading another beautiful (fictional) book by Anthony Doerr called All the Light We Cannot See that weaves together the backdrop of the lives of a young orphaned German boy who was eventually drafted into the Hitler Youth at the age of twelve or thirteen, and a young blind girl who lives in France with her widowed father.

The story slowly wraps its way towards a point in which they briefly meet in occupied France just before liberation. It then continues to unfold into the years following the war into the present day, demonstrating how those events became so interwoven into the lives of the sister of the German soldier (who did not survive) and the French girl (who lived to a ripe old age) and her family.

It was nothing sort of tragic, as I am sure it must truly be for anyone directly touched by the ravages of war, regardless of side there appears to emerge only tortured souls. In this I felt the utmost compassion and the sense that these two enemies were kindred spirits who had found themselves wrapped up in circumstances beyond their control.

While I’m not wading in that extreme of life, I certainly find myself unconsciously creating us and them scenarios, both in my personal life and as I look out into the world.

For a completely different kind of example, I’ll use the recent Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah. This sort of hyped razzmatazz is not my usual fodder, I don’t tend to actively follow any kind of current affairs or news, but I'm like a little meerkat who pops my head above ground every now and then to get a gauge on what's going on out in the magical mist called the media.

Growing up in the UK in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Charles and Diana's wedding, the births of their sons and Diana's death, were all moments I remember well because of the vast media storm that accompanied them. Not least I recall the haunted faces of the two young boys made to walk behind their mother’s casket in the funeral procession.

All I know of Harry and Meghan is what the media lines have fed us for last few years, which my dad aptly summed up after he exclaimed “You watched the interview!” by words like self serving, egotistical and manipulative.

That's exactly why I listened to it, I like to hear and see people speak directly because it gives me a much better gauge on what is going on than a third party account.

I had also read a book by one of my favourite fictional authors, Lucinda Riley, a year or so ago that was based around the British royal family and a huge cover up that stemmed back decades to the early part of the twentieth century. It was all about the 'old firm' and the security services that surround the family.

While it was a captivating story, the most interesting aspect lay not in the fiction but the facts around the book finally reaching print.  

As a young author she had much interest in the book when it was first written. It even had a publishing deal but the deal got withdrawn and all doors were closed. It is only several decades later and after the successful publication of later books, it finally reached print.  I'm guessing the fiction was too close to the truth.

This idea of the velvet curtain has always intrigued me. So I found Harry in particular interesting in the interview, although Meghan I think was better able to explain how it works.

It gave me pause as I thought about what it must be like to be born into that machine, to not know a world any different.

Now what is their agenda? Well that's an all-sided question. Certainly I start with the media who have had some very strong opinions on Ms Markle. I don't know her from Adam, and she could be a sociopathic narcissist for all I know, but I wanted to hear her voice. And she made some very interesting points.

As for Oprah, I like her. Does she have her own agenda? Sure. Don't we all? The only thing I felt about Oprah's interviewing was that it missed something quite key. While she fully explored the racist component about why little Archie wouldn't become a Prince, it missed completely exploring the idea that it could be because she was a divorcee, something that has caused so many issues within the royals.

That said, does it serve the needs of our society to dismantle white supremacy and white privilege, absolutely.

While talking about it with family and friends afterwards reminded me of the kind of polarisation I looked at in The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, it was, I felt, probably one of the most true-to-life looks behind the velvet curtain that I've ever had, even if (like everything in life) it was serving multiple agendas. I understand my call to watch it was an extra layer of my learning around compassion at the moment.

In every crevice I am finding compassion; from the echoes of the ravages of war, through to something as distant to me as the media swirl surrounding royals, and as personal as those deep shadows etched on my own soul. The message is clear, embrace compassion over combat and step into your true power.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Compassionate and Curious to Live Your Best Life, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Heck no!

I remember being struck by a conversation I had with one of my nieces a couple of years ago when we were talking about what she saw herself doing with her life. She wasn’t particularly inspired by the lives of adults in our society, whom she viewed as quite stressed and harried most of the time.

It was a fair point, one that gave me pause. It reminded me of a little plaque I bought years ago when visiting the California Redwoods, it says “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” While that is an obvious reference to our ecosystem, as a mother it also makes sense to me in the context of our emotional ecosystem.

I decided I am going to be an example either way, good or bad; I can either be an example to aspire to, or one to run from.

This came up again when I asked another of my beautiful nieces what she would give if she could gift one thing to every person in the world. Happiness was her answer. I then started to think about what happiness is.

What immediately came to my mind were the things that keep me from feeling happy - the stories in my head, the meaning I assign to everything that happens in my life.

What I did inherit from my ancestors are a lot of those stories, and they are not stories I necessarily want to gift my children.

I saw an advert yesterday for a course that was about helping kids and teenagers look at their inner critic. One of the exercises involves filling in the thought bubbles above a monster’s head about all the things I think I’m no good at. Where do those voices come from?

Mostly those voices in my head are ones both deliberately and inadvertently planted there by my parents and other influential adults as I grew up, no doubt echoing the voices of their parents and so on. There were certainly things they wanted to teach me about life, what they deemed good values and behaviours, but what I actually took to heart about those might not be the same as the intention behind them.

To give an obvious example, a friend of mine recalled an incident this week that happened when she was a little girl, when she (and a little boy she was playing with) were being naturally curious about body parts. Her grandmother’s reaction created shame by the bucketful and she was reflecting on the magnitude of how that had contributed to how she felt about herself.

I also recall my mum sharing with me (many times) the story of overhearing her older brother’s friends talking about girls in a derogatory way. The key messages I took out of that story were multilayered, from the obvious intent “do not open yourself to be the topic of that kind of conversation” to the many others about having sex out of wedlock, and the general disgust towards the male sexual psyche.

But aside of these examples that shape body image and attitudes towards sex, there are many more examples of the ways in which my attitudes towards myself and other people have been shaped. In every minute of every day there are thoughts running through my head that have probably coursed through the minds of my ancestors for generations.

What I have found though is that the feelings I have about those thoughts, when I bring them into conscious awareness, are usually a good litmus test as to whether they represent my truth, are these thoughts a fit for my authentic self? Do these thoughts make me happy?

To stick with the example I gave about beliefs around sexual relationships, and then put that with my own life experiences of going on to have multiple failed relationships, marriages and pregnancies. I can see just how much the swathe of inherited beliefs about myself and the world actually played into those so called failures.

What is more true to say is that each led me towards more authenticity, and when my inner world is not at odds with itself, the chance for happiness is so much greater.

When I asked my niece how the gift of happiness could be achieved she talked about looking beyond ourselves and others, and being kind to ourselves. Beyond those stories, that’s the work right there, the goal to pursue to attain the (not so) impossible dream.

Of course it’s not as simple as just deciding not to buy into those stories. I can’t just tell myself I don’t believe the story in my mind because it has a lot of supporting evidence accumulated over a number of years.  But if it’s a story that is making me miserable in some way, it’s an indication that my mind and heart are not in alignment.

Recently I was asking my homeopath whether there was a remedy concoction she could recommend for headaches. She made the point there is no one cure-all as headaches carry a message, and the remedy would depend on the cause. But once I pause to listen to the message that in itself will usually sort out the headache.

She did go on to say that there is nothing I need to do/sort out, just come into my heart space. It is no coincidence my chiropractor also recommended coming into my heart space to feel the love within myself rather than pinging all over the place intellectually seeking solutions to satisfy my inner critic.
I’m often in my head. To set my mind at ease and tune into my heart’s voice, this is a practice that can be achieved in many ways, but it is a practice, it requires – well – practice.

One of the best ways I find to tune into my heart space is getting out in nature; I particularly like walking along the ocean shore, whereas my partner is more a fan of the forest. Just sitting listening to the chirruping cicadas and birds in our garden can be enough to bring me into the present moment, or even just looking around the room I’m in through fresh eyes.

Certainly I would be far less present if I also hadn’t learned to practise daily meditation. Presence is the core point of Eckhart Tolle’s teachings, some of my favourite quotes of his are:

• “People don’t realise that now is all there ever is. There is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.”
• “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”
• “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
• “Anything you resent and react to strongly in another is also in you.”

I’ve come to recognise that when the same themes emerge in my negative stories about life and people, these are old patterns there that are no longer serving me and need to be brought into the light of more conscious awareness and deactivated. Some of my favourite techniques for that deep work are Brandon Bay’s Journey Work and Teal Swan’s Completion Process and Part’s Work, among others.

But there are also many more moments when it’s less about doing anything and just being in appreciation, learning to tune into my heart and the love that dwells within me for me, my life and all life in general. A quick fix is often the soothing tones of a Sarah Blondin meditation, Loving and Listening to Yourself is a great one.

So coming back to this idea of happiness as an impossible dream, no, I know happiness is always there beyond the “triggered and distracted” pattern of life. In the quiet of a moment when I allow myself to be still and be present and open my heart to all that is good in my world, and even to love those things that don’t always feel so good, they are all pointing the way, that is where happiness lies.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Are You Getting Distracted From Who You Came to Be This Life?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A few times in the last week I’ve been triggered by communications I’ve received and my mind has gone into overdrive compiling responses.

I know enough now, and generally have enough restraint, not to react when I’m triggered. This is eloquently summed up by Teal Swan in her article on criticism when she says “Be aware that the reactivity that spirals us into criticism is always a by-product of trauma we have suffered. It is indicative of the ways that we have been hurt. If we tend to that hurt, we will be less reactive and become less critical. Our opinions will then be wanted and received well by others.”

Tending to that hurt is the bigger part, as I talked through in How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight. I think of it like doing the groundwork before a new construction project can take place.

By the same token, I want to express my perspective and to hear that of others. As Teal says “We need feedback, our growth and awareness depends on it…

But feedback falls into two distinct camps:

• Criticism
• Your individual and honest perspective or experience

Criticism is often done in a state of reactivity when we are in a state of defense, it has no regard for whether the person on the other end is receptive”.

She makes the point that there is really no such thing as constructive criticism “The more the person you are criticizing feels compelled to defend their value, the less capable they are of absorbing what they are hearing.”

Then she goes on to say “We have to be aware of why we feel the need to share our opinion. And even if we have good intentions, we must still ask ourselves if - despite the good intentions- we are harming the other person with our critique.”

I thought these were really good questions as I worked my way through the fire consuming me, not wishing to leave my relationships in the burnt ashes of my reactions.

Relationships are important to me, but I also often have a tendency to put other people’s needs before my own, and to rush in quickly to prove my worth, which I covered in How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns. So I have to look with real curiosity at what’s actually going on in each situation.

What was triggering me this time were some communications from the kids’ school that opened up an old wound. A wise person once gave me an analogy of putting our hurts into the manure pile versus the freezer, the manure pile being preferable as it fades to nothing over time. But this wound had obviously been bunged in the freezer, unattended, since it stung just as sharply as if it were fresh.

Anything that requires or encourages extracurricular activity throws me into a spin, since my kids have well and truly had enough in the process of just attending school each day. By the same token, I’m a person who attended school without any real issues while also managing a few extracurricular things and, later, an all-encompassing training program as a competitive swimmer.

I prided myself on my resilience and strength (part of perfectionist tendencies designed to prove my self worth and avoid the harsh criticism and punishment), and still laugh/cry at the memory of me pulling my daughter’s dummy out of my bra in the middle of a corporate meeting, wondering what it was that kept itching my skin.

So when receiving various communications this week contradicting the school’s own philosophies (zealously encouraging our kids into extracurricular sports activities and daily violin practice), on top of extensive requests for my personal participation in fundraising activities, meanwhile hearing a comment made to the whole parent group that was clearly criticising my individual decision on pursue external remedial support for my kids to help them work with their brain instead of against it, triggered me in gasket-blowing ways.

It created a surge of feelings comprising being overwhelmed by contradictions, criticised, disregarded and undermined. The little girl inside me whose thoughts and feelings were unimportant to the adults making decisions, who had to strategise to canvass and rationalise my opinions, and get my needs and desires met, swung into full counter attack and defense mode.

I observed all this. I struggled between the part of me that that wanted to lash out at those whose words poked at all my old wounds, and the part of me that wanted those people to simply understand the unintentional ways in which their words have landed.

I want people to understand what it feels like when your kids have different wiring, unseen and yet overwhelming. I especially want those who are charged with the care of my children during their time at school to know this. If I go further with this, what I deeply desire is an educational approach that caters to the neurodiversity and differing talents of all children.

But I also know that, while those who educate my children during school hours care about them, there are another twenty five or more other unique kids in the class to cater to – quite aside of the teachers they report to, the school board, the Education department and the many other stakeholders involved. I know that those who educate my kids also have their own rich perspectives, and most likely their own wounds. I know that in order to be truly heard, I will have to be kind, to tread softly.

I recognise people don’t make me feel a certain way, I simply feel what I feel in reaction to what they are saying because of my own unique circumstances, experiences and disposition.

So, while tending to that wounded part of me - the groundwork that has to happen before I share anything - I have asked myself many times:

• Why do I want to share my perspective?
• How can I share it in a way that is not going to harm? In a way that is not likely to invoke a defense response?

I have reworked my response many times in my head; continually refocusing within myself to hand the talking stick to my heart; the warrior self versus the infinite self. Early in the week, in a more peaceful moment, my inner voice spoke its truth plainly. It took another few days to get my mind aligned in order to proceed without the criticisms that wanted to work their way in there.

All along the way I kept asking myself whether any response was required at all.

In the end, I did send one because – as I’ve said - I deeply desire an educational approach that caters to the neurodiversity and differing talents of all children. So I believe it is important to voice our perspective in the current environment to create the seeds of awareness that may one day spout into positive changes.

I received a response thanking me for my insights and also for seeing what the teachers are contending with, and with – I felt – a genuinely hopeful interest in seeing where the approach I’m taking with my kids leads.

I have a perspective that is different and valuable and so do you. But be kind to yourself and to others, and be wise in your ways of sharing. Tell us your story in a way we can hear it, so it can benefit the growth of the whole.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I had a vision of myself in the shape of a turkey running into the sunset making one last ditch attempt to take flight while hysterically shrieking “I want a do-over, I want to live life to the full”, all the while knowing my epitaph was more likely going to be “Triggered and Distracted, Try Again Next Time”.

Triggered and distracted, these were the words that came to me after I was considering how sidetracked a conversation with my partner had gotten, and I realised that would be a good description of much of our time together, and much of our individual and collective lives.

The start of a new year has been and gone, that time of self reflection and hope already a distant memory. Time has marched on, eaten up in the business of day to day living. Sure, I have a few nice memories here and there, but it feels like it could be so much more – and I know why, I keep getting triggered and distracted by a whole bunch of (not living life to the full) stuff.

Listening to more of Sarah Blondin’s soothing tones this week, I was captivated by her meditation on Our Warring Self versus Our Infinite Self.

She describes the warring self as “the part of you that hides under the surface and surprises you when she shows her teeth. The part of you that you deny, push away, pretend does not live in you. She is your darkness, the one who dwells in the shallow waters of your being, riding up on the back of your self righteous ego. She is in every one of us.”

I felt guilty because my warring self showed her teeth last weekend when I was in a store buying a new top. The label on it had the wrong code, and the young sales girl was doing her best to find a code so she could put it through the system. A supervisor was drafted in to help, but to no avail, and I was getting anxious.

I had headed to the checkout after receiving a phonecall that the rest of my family were ready to be picked up in the forest where they had been riding. I had said I would be there in ten minutes, and was acutely aware that it was now taking longer.

There are so many subtle layers mixed in to just this one tiny example, but I can summarise by saying my people pleasing tendencies together with childhood lessons about “being on time” had kicked into overdrive. Eventually, after standing smiling and waiting patiently, my inner turmoil was enough to alert my warrior that I’d had enough and needed to take immediate action to alleviate the discomfort.

On the inside I felt incredibly anxious, and it turned to anger. On the outside, I have a mental snapshot of the sales girl’s surprised face in my head as the patient customer in front of her suddenly turned into a tense, complaining one. “I will just have to leave it” I said in a clipped tone, “I have family waiting to be collected. But I am very disappointed that I have stood here for ten minutes and can’t buy the top I wanted despite having the ability to pay.”

Now while all of that is legitimate, and it probably wouldn’t rate as one of the worst experiences the sales girl has had in her job, the internal intensity of it for me was very much one of the warring self.
In contrast, the infinite self is “tender, able to withstand storms” Sarah Blondin says. This is who “catches the furious pain of others, the difficult experiences you face, the things that make you want to fight, and she cradles them, swaddles them in unconditional love over and over. She is the bottomless source of light and love, she is your essence. Pure and wise, she lives in your deepest depths.”

Most importantly, Sarah adds “She is the one you can choose to embody, to call forth as you navigate your life... she serves where the other severs; she heals where the other wounds...you have the power to choose which to call into form. They are two polar energies, forces living within you, a choice for you to make in every triggering moment in your life. There is no question which makes us feel more alive. More vivid”.

This reminded me of another quote I heard recently “Nothing that needs to hide in the dark has an authentic power of its own”. Yet here I am actively seeking to free myself from the shackles of the shadows of my childhood; the turkey trying to become a bird of flight.  How powerful those shackles become because the voice in my head is the voice of a parent or my resistance to the parent, old outdated well-worn recordings that no longer serve.

As Sarah Blondin put it “such intensity and emotion is very powerful, palpable, weak in root but alluring in force”.

And all the while time is ticking. And the only way to end up with that “Lived Life to the Full” epitaph is to take one conscious breath after another, to become more present and grounded in the moment I am in. Or as worded more poetically by Sarah “feeling your softness, returning to your nature, is the only thing that will feed your life in the ways it is asking.”

I think of all those moments in my life where I’ve been triggered and distracted and I compare them to those where I’ve been present and my sense of humour is happy to play, I know which feels better.  

I also know that doesn’t mean I have to be a doormat in any shape or form, it’s all in the way in which I stand in my truth and, more importantly, which truth I’m subscribing to. Am I reacting from the (often) much exaggerated place of the wounded child within, or am I acting from the point of a healthy, present adult?

Ultimately, I want to feel delighted and amazed when I reach the end of my life and think “well, I really did learn how to live it to the full!” What about you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“A part of me is scared to open my eyes because the very nature of waking up is to be aware, to be accountable, to be responsible for the healing of my life and take on the task of loving me until I feel full... But another part of me knows, in every inch and ounce of its being, that I am serving no one – not one single life – by staying asleep.” Sarah Blondin from Healing Through Letting Go

Someone commented to me that my life load seemed heavy. I hadn’t heard that expression before and I really liked it because it takes into account more than just a person’s seen productivity, it takes into account the unseen burdens of a life beyond the observable circumstances.

In this case I was talking to another parent about a huge organising role she had voluntarily taken on, expressing my admiration in light of mentally projecting myself into that role and shuddering at the thought; “I am often just trying to get through the days” I said honestly.

While my observable circumstances are pretty busy, it isn’t those in themselves that create the load, it is more about what is going on beneath the surface, within my mental, emotional and spiritual worlds. When things get out of balance life feels heavy.

Last week I got a really sharp insight into an emotional load I’ve been subconsciously carrying and how it has been affecting me. Basically I was at the local pool nearing the end of my swim, which I do a couple of times each week. I have been going to this pool for a few years and can probably count on one hand how often I have had to share a lane; if I do, we usually just split the lane (one on each side) so we can do our own thing and go at our own pace.

Anyway, this guy gets into my lane and – unlike most people – didn’t stop to say a courteous hello or confirm how we would use the lane; he just starts swimming up and down. Keeping to my side I changed to backstroke. The guy comes crashing into me, demanding “what am you doing?” and decreeing that we should always keep to the left (the way a swim squad does when training).

That is necessary when there are more than two people in the lane but, as mentioned, in all the years I have been going to that pool it has been rare to share a lane with even one other person never mind more than two. It also means everyone has to be swimming at roughly the same speed or it quickly becomes an aquatic pile-up.

Now I would have been happy to have a collegial conversation about this, but the guy swam off and did not stop in all the time I waited at the end of the lane in the pool, he kept right on turning and swimming. Short of manhandling him, creating a deliberate crash or waiting until he came out the pool, I was left with no option but to get with his programme or end my swim.

Seeing as I had been nearing the end of my swim anyway and my friend (who was, by now, sharing her lane also) was relying on me to drop her back home, I basically left it at that. As we drove away I observed to my friend how shaken I felt after the encounter; I felt powerless, furious and close to tears.

After dropping her off, I drove across town to pick up some library books and, as I was alone on a country road, I let rip one guttural scream after another and tore that man to shreds (well, the virtual version of him in my head) for his arrogant and dictatorial behaviour.

It did strike me as interesting timing when I had just been feeling so proud of myself lately for learning to speak my truth in a calm, assertive manner as I described in How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight.

I realised just how frustrating and – frankly – traumatising it was to be in a situation where I felt powerless to try out my new prowess. I also held a deep sense of shock at being spoken to in this way by a stranger.

I noted as I screamed my way to the library, liberated in my travelling cocoon (though I may have traumatised half the wildlife as I sped past), that the feelings the situation had brought up were nothing more than a big fat reflection of the powerlessness I had felt as a child.

The part of me who had to do as I was told, regardless of what I thought or felt, was rebelling in a way that could have started an avalanche if I had been near any snow capped mountains. Another part of me observed in astonishment the sheer scale of negative energy pouring forth that I would ordinarily stuff down inside.

It was no surprise then, really, that in the next few days I had severe renal colic (the area of the body that processes anger and resentment) and my voice sounded like a teenage boy’s breaking as he hits puberty. Given the enormity of my reaction, I knew I’d hit upon something that had definitely been affecting the weight of my life load.

This led me to do the Completion Process when I next had some space to myself, so I could transmute this emotional trauma into something softer in order to avoid being thrown into the stratosphere in future. And of course I listened to the hypnotic sound of Sarah Blondin’s raw and soothing Healing Through Letting Go meditation, I highly recommend both.

I could also see the burden related to interactions with my partner and others over the years who have spoken to me in a derogatory, demeaning or dictatorial way. I had quickly learned that angry rebuffs were not helpful, but my system would be stuck in fight-fight mode none-the-less and I’d often be unable to get past it productively.

In addition to the stance I outlined in How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, a couple of other Wendy Behary’s insights I’ve also found helpful are:
​

• Transforming the voice of my stress response:
  1. Fight/counter-attack – I’m prone to fighting back when I feel attacked in some way, my inner voice says “I’ll show you”, Wendy suggests modifying this to “I have rights too” which I now use as a mental anchor
  2. Avoidance/flight – those who are prone to running away when things get difficult have an inner voice staying “See you later” which would be better modified to “I need a time-out”
  3. Surrender/freeze – those who become immobilised in interactions that feel threatening  have an inner dialogue saying “You’re right, it’s my fault” would benefit from changing that to “I may not be perfect but it’s not all my fault”.

 

• Having photos of my partner and I as children displayed in the house, because when times get tough in our interactions, they are a great reminder of the hurt children underneath whose responses are no doubt at play in whatever is going on.

Letting go of the life load is an ongoing process. As a parent it has been confronting in many ways as I wrote about in Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master and When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom.

One of the things that has really made a difference in my life is having a felt sense of my spirituality, meaning a sense of connection to all living things and the laws of cause and effect. I know I don’t live in an isolated bubble whether I want to or not, all living things, including my mind, body, emotions and spirituality as connected.

Having already awoken to many of the aspects of myself that cause life to feel heavy, I do sometimes think it would be blissful to simply abandon my lifeload, but it’s more a case of surrendering to it as my teacher and guide I think.

If there was some quick way to retain all my wisdom and simply ditch all the unhelpful patterns then I might be tempted, but I’m guessing that would carry the dangers of a body that has been starved and is suddenly fed a rich diet, or conversely a body that has gone from snowman to supermodel overnight under a blade and suction. In themselves both would create major trauma, even death.

So I will stick to the gentler unfolding. In the wise and oh-so-soothing words of Sarah Blondin “There, inside of you, a wondrous part of you is calling you to step into the land of your great, unbounding potential, freedom and abundance. Any change or forgiveness you have experienced in your life was not just because someone else made you let go, it was because you chose to. The power is yours, the choice is yours.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Our Children Are Changing – We Need to Move with the Times, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was listening to an interview with Amy Scher this week, author of How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can, and while her experiences and conclusions were so familiar to me she reframed them in a way that I hadn’t considered before.

In talking about her experiences in healing herself from an autoimmune disease, which she was unable to do until she started looking beyond the physical landscape at her inner world, she said “I sometimes feel like there’s missing piece we’re not talking about, which is the greatest fear that we have is the fear of being who we really are.”

Interestingly, as I am finishing off a dive into the world of narcissistic traits, a description Wendy Behary gave as representative of a childhood in Disarming the Narcissist also caught my attention:

“The most popular proposal for the typical origins of narcissism is that the child grew up feeling conditionally loved, meaning that love was based upon performance.

This could come about through a number of scenarios. One might be where the child was criticised by one parent, who made them feel that whatever they did was not really good enough, whereas the other parent may then have doted on, overprotected or used them as a surrogate spouse.

The end result is a child not loved for who he or she was, not guided nor encouraged in the discovery of their true inclinations, never held in the arms of a caregiver who would make them feel completely safe and unquestionable cherished.”

Whether narcissistic traits or people pleasing ones like those I developed, I suspect they all come from conditional love in childhood.

Over the years, with deliberate inquiry, I’ve started to make the links and connections back to those childhood perceptions I had about the need to defend my position, the need to be perfect, the guilt and blame I felt when things went wrong.

Being triggered is a regular occurrence for me. I still take far too much upon my shoulders.

There are times when I find myself longing for acceptance, validation, recognition of who I am, what I need, feel and achieve. There is a longing for support and connection, a need to feel safe to be vulnerable.

All of that is grounded in fear, a fear of putting the real me, the one who was berated as a child, out there to get hurt.

When I watched a SuperSoul Session with Oprah and Gary Zukov a couple of years ago, he made a statement that has stayed with me “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.”

This has helped me realise that in order to fully express who I am there is a need to be vulnerable. I have to take responsibility for who I am being, how I am limiting myself and what I am receiving in this world, because I am not a helpless child anymore, I am an adult who can make different choices.
 
As Amy Scher described when asked how she responds to people who bristle at the idea that our thoughts, beliefs and emotions affect our physical landscape:
 
“I had doctors who asked Are you under stress? And I was even mad at them for that. There was nothing worse for me than something being my fault. In fact I spent so much of my life not wanting anything to be my fault that one day I just decided to play devil’s advocate and thought What if it is my fault? What if I did unconsciously in some way play some part in the manifestation of my illness?”
 
And the conclusion it led her to, I think, is really powerful:
 
“What does that say about me except I’m human? And when I surrendered to the idea that in some shape or form I could have contributed to where I was, I stopped resisting and bristling against the thing that could help me.
 
I discovered that some of the patterns in my life were crushing my spirit, and when a spirit is crushed it has an effect on the physical body. And interestingly, some of those patterns come back to the fear of it being my fault. I was a people pleaser, I didn’t like anyone to be upset and I was a perfectionist. I had completely irrational expectations of myself.”
 
What she goes on to say, I have profoundly felt the truth of in my own life too:
 
“I lived in deep fear of being who I really was. So I had started to contract myself and by contracting who I am, I contracted my body, my energy systems and my emotions.”
 
I didn’t think of it as being in fear of being me, I just saw it as being a good person, the good girl, the good member of society I’d been taught to be. I had learned to feel comfortable in the discomfort of that skin, never really looking at those parts of me that I’d disowned or suppressed.
 
When I look back at, say, the panic attacks I had in my early twenties, I can relate to this idea of bristling when a doctor asks about stress. I took pride in being strong and resilient. But if I am honest, I can see in retrospect that I was not in a good place, I’d been through a painful breakup, and I believed I was unworthy of the kind of love I longed for.
 
With the benefit of hindsight, as scary as it to be vulnerable, I can definitely attest it’s far better than a life half lived, always hiding what I’d really rather say, do or be – even from myself at times. That is why I decided on the journey to me, to take each of these things that show up as less than desirable in my life, or that really trigger me, and to take the time to make the connections with the ways in which old thought patterns might still be at play.

Once I identify the patterns, bringing them into the light of conscious awareness, I work on them in many ways, shapes and forms as I talk about in Want More Energy, Clarity and Time?

What about you? What was it like growing up in your home? What were the expectations and values? What was it you had to work hard to maintain? In what ways have some of those things possibly shown up in your life to your detriment? How did you promise to yourself you’d be different if you have kids? Is it time to overcome your greatest fear and embrace who you truly are?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom , Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving? and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“For Presence to become deeply rooted, it must be tested in the fire of relationships.” Eckhart Tolle

I really have relished this lesson, more now that I am finally getting more successful at achieving it as opposed to when I’m in the midst of the fire. It’s been a bumpy road that was fraught with suppressing my feelings at times, inappropriately expressing them at others and generally leaving trail of carnage either in my inner or outer world depending on how I had dealt with situations.

Listening to Wendy Behary talk to therapists on how to deal with clients who exhibit narcissistic traits this week, I realised that her advice summed up well what I have learned in general about speaking my truth, to anyone.

She talks about developing the ability to stand your own ground with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you. I know you. I know what you are up to”, rather than a defensive one. She describes the aim as:

To be able to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or hurt, feel threatened or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

That is the bit I used to have real trouble with. I had a pattern of getting triggered and acting from that provoked part of me, rather than taking the time to observe what about what had happened/was happening that was actually triggering me. It wasn’t until I took the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with my life story that I started to make progress.

I did relate to one case study she shared of a woman who didn’t feel sure of herself. The lady had been brought up to believe she had to forfeit her needs for the needs of others and, if she expressed her opinion, she was at risk of being humiliated or abandoned.

The client did her work to repair the internal damage and re-parent herself to reinstate the bright, capable being that she was. She was able to get to a point of not being so frightened of losing her husband that she was able to choose him. And once she was able to become more secure in her choices, she became more vocal in expressing her needs.

When I am dealing with interpersonal difficulty I always go back to the Teal Swan’s article on Attunement. She 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. We either learned that our survival depended on:
​

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. 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 tends 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.

Fighting is just one outcome when I am not attuned to my needs and able to be fully present, what is really happening underneath is a reaction to unconscious memories of those early years, my physiology goes into flight-or-fight mode. As Bessel Van Der Kolk relates in his book The Body Keeps The Score the goal is really self regulation.

It is probably no coincidence that, as I listened to some stories from people around me in the last few days, I began to see how these dynamics play out in all sorts of ways, big and small. I could also see how each of these scenarios could improve hugely by just one of the party’s taking Wendy’s approach.

One man was telling me about the dynamics between his wife, who is a teacher aide specifically hired for her skills in dealing with neuro-diverse kids in the classroom, and the class teacher. The teacher appears to take a very black and white approach and expects the aide to get the disruptive children to behave like every other child.

Knowing a little about the common neuro-diversities seen in classrooms (meaning autism, dyslexia, attention deficit, hyperactivity and so forth), I know a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work, we didn’t all come out a cookie cutter machine. However, it’s possible the teacher was parented in that way and so it has become her modus operandi and her safe place.

Meanwhile, the teacher aide is well attuned to the diversity she is experiencing in the children and adapts her approach to each child, often – in this case – having to act as a buffer between teacher and pupil. I can only imagine the relationship is rather strained, especially since the teacher apparently sees herself as the person who dictates what happens in her classroom.

So this man was relating to me his wife’s frustration and the interactions that have occurred between her and the teacher, sounding not unlike Wendy’s case study of the woman who was afraid of losing her husband, only in this example it’s a job at stake.

I imagined if his wife were able to approach the teacher with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you” rather than a defensive one. If she could learn how to be able to state her truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of herself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

I imagine her calmly telling the teacher after lesson how keen she’s sure her little pupil is to learn from the teacher, but how humiliated he had felt when the teacher shamed him for being late, which was the fault of the parent, and further punished him by not allowing him to participate fully in the game the class were playing.

The teacher would no doubt have leap to her own defence, and perhaps started to lash out verbally at the teacher aide, but I could imagine the aide standing her ground calmly and saying “Well, that’s the way I saw it” and leaving the class, no argument, no defence. “Gosh, I thought, what a difference that would make”. It might not change the teacher’s entire behaviour, but I’ll bet she would be more cautious the next time a pupil was late.

Then there was one of our neighbour’s sons who was sitting out in his car at 11.30 at night beeping his horn randomly. He is a teenage boy on the brink of passing his driver’s test, no doubt longing for the freedom of the road. While another neighbour went out, understandably angry, I could imagine myself getting in the passenger seat instead and having a chat about life, I feel like his beeping horn was an outward expression of some bottled up things spilling over.

And, in my own world, I have talked before about the dynamic in my own relationship and how that has improved by learning to stand more calmly in my truth.

But in another realm of my interpersonal relationships there was an issue that came up over the school fair. Only a couple of years ago the school fair was something I couldn’t even think about without getting highly triggered.

Thankfully, after the work I had done to break that cycle of instant anger that arose in me every time I felt like someone was stepping over my boundaries, which usually escalated to some call to arms on behalf of a bigger cause, I was able to calmly articulate how an intended approach was making me feel. This resulted in a genuine interest in my insights rather than a wall of silence, a standoff or a dust cloud from people running in the opposite direction.

What is it that has to happen to allow you to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way? And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room? Will you take the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with your life story so you can start to make progress?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Makes You So Afraid of Conflict?, Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth and How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A very dear friend of mine was here for her annual visit recently. As usual, we were engrossed in our conversation about life at the deepest of levels. She had been musing on what she was here to do in this life, with retirement in sight and with many mokopuna (a Māori word meaning grandchildren) growing up around her, her purpose seemed to elude her.

We had talked about many things. One of the questions she asked was why a person would want to strip away all their layers of life’s stuff, of course I could only answer for myself as it’s the journey I’ve been on.

“It feels lighter, less encumbered.” I told her, “I get less wound up by the same old stuff, less triggered and able to respond more calmly; I can think more clearly and, well, I feel better.”

We also spoke about this idea that perhaps we are all just aspects of the one thing getting to know itself. This led her to question why, that being the case, starvation was something that needed to be repeated over and over in different lives.

It is an interesting question. I’m not sure any of us came intending to suffer in any way, yet there is clearly a lot of suffering that occurs from the ritual beating ourselves up in our own minds (which is likely an echo of a past parent’s words) through to starvation and so many more horrific ordeals.

Perhaps it is more that I came with an intention to gain something new from this life, a new way of being rather than of doing.

My friend told me it was a huge relief to think of life as becoming who she was meant to be, rather than what she was meant to do; it felt far more achievable that this illusory purpose that had seemed to evade her all these years.

Perhaps there is something specific I am here to do, but I suspect that until I become the person I intended to be in this life, the fullest expression of myself, it will not be clear. I also think it’s entirely possible that I may never know what I’m here to do, because it seems that I could have an effect on another’s life without ever knowing it, the way many others have had on mine:

The kindness of my paternal grandmother, her gentle nature and care for me...The belief my first swim coach had in my ability to improve and swim well, and the time he spent helping me do it...That same belief my second coach had in my ability to succeed at a higher level and play an important role in the team...The question posed on how many dimensions there might be, a physicist revealing to me the ten already discovered by scientists in the early 1990’s...

I could go on, these are seemingly small yet seminal moments, times in my life that have retrospectively created a sort of virtual cheerleading squad in my head when I would otherwise have had doubts about who I am and who I am capable of being.

Regardless of the circumstances we are born into, or find ourselves in, whether mundane or horrific, I suspect it is who we are being that carries the most weight.

A starving grandmother can still make a difference in who she is being both to herself and to others, as can the well-fed one. Sometimes those circumstances are extraordinary, sometimes ordinary. Perhaps though, it is in the extremes of life that things that are most important to us come into sharper focus.

I can only attest to my own circumstances; I find myself in the murky soup of western civilisation. I say this not to point to the current global pandemic, I’m pointing to all the modern conveniences and constructs of life that serve to distract me from things that are important.

Like someone talking to me about conspiracy theories the other day. The moment I hear someone referring to something that is conjecture as if it is fact, my solar plexus goes off like a tsunami warning system.

It is not that I disbelieved what was being espoused particularly; it is simply that I was listening to my own truth. My gut was telling me to steer clear and for good reason. Whether some well known historic figure is still alive, or whether a government has a malign intention, or a secret organisation is behind events or atrocities, there is little to be achieved by my dwelling upon it.

The temples on each side of my head start to throb and my mind starts to feels totally congested with information that cannot serve me in that moment except to distract. It brings to mind a statement I heard long ago “if you cannot convince, confuse”. I have a suspicion that is exactly what most of this information is designed to do – both in the mainstream and in social media.

I have done, and continue to do, my personal work; unwinding the unhelpful thought patterns and beliefs that I unwittingly adopted in my childhood. I do this so I can think more clearly, without getting waylaid or triggered by old fears.

In a life where I wasn’t unwinding my trauma, I was distracted going around the same old loops, having the same old arguments, the same old guilt trips, and the same old unhelpful stuff. I spent too much time worrying about what other people may be thinking or worrying about other things that are outside of my control.

This brings me to a conversation with another friend, when I said “I reckon most people have been getting born, then spending their life distracted. This feels like the start of an era of moving beyond the distraction, gaining clarity on who we each really are, our authentic self and who we came to be”.
Who were you born to be this life?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Are the Right Questions to Ask Right Now?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

He arrived home, like a great gust of forceful energy sweeping in the door. “Where is the charger?” he snaps. “You’ve packed the charger when I need it?”

We were going on holiday, I had been packing while my partner had gone to work for the morning, we were leaving in under an hour. I’ve left out some expletives, but suffice to say it was a tirade that was neither respectful nor even rational far less loving.

It’s the kind of thing that happens under stress and, in similar scenarios, in the past I’d have felt the sharp edges of it like a personal sting and lashed out in defence – particularly if I was also under stress. And let’s be honest, life can be stressful.

But I feel like I’ve awoken from a long sleep. Instead of being locked in a cycle of anger and resentment, I’m now able to be an observer more of the time. What I observe can sometimes makes me think “Really? I’ve been putting up with this?”, but on the other hand, I am no stranger to poor behaviour.

Being hyper attuned to others feelings, I have tended to suppress my own until they all spill over and unleash in more of a volcanic reaction. I can be loud; when I was growing up, a parent from a rival swim team once asked my mum if she fed me on raw meat, such was the strength of my voice in leading our team’s chant. When I open my mouth to refute something the indignance in my voice carries force.

The times I have reacted angrily have rarely been in proportion to what has actually happened. It is more like my reaction to the sum of every similar experience I’ve ever had, remembered in mind and body. And it’s fair to say I had never moved far past my teenage rebellion towards the things in my upbringing that constrained me, I just became more refined in how I expressed it.

The term nature versus nurture is commonly used to describe who we were born as (our essential nature) versus who we become (the reaction to the sum of our experiences). Personally I suggest that developmental trauma is probably a more accurate description than nurture.

I certainly come from a time in society where children were to be moulded rather than nurtured to blossom into our full potential. Little was understood about subjects such as secure attachment and attunement, only now am I seeing more discussion about this in the psychology fields. It seems like the general approach to parenting is slowly changing, but there is lack of good education and role modelling.

I heard a description by, I think, the internationally renound family therapist Terry Real, that states the journey of our psyche from the wounded child to adaptive adult (the ‘grown’ rebellious teen also known, in my view, as most adults on the planet today) to the integrated adult, one who learns to take all prior experiences and integrates them in a healthy way.

That has really been the foundation of the journey to me. To give an example I’ll turn again to my favourite document by Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas on the self limiting thought patterns people tend to have and the associated gifts those are pointing to.

As a child I felt pretty powerless. I had to do what mum and dad said, let’s face it, they held all the cards. In reaction to that powerlessness I’d aspire to be the leader rather than the follower in life, and I had a hard time being vulnerable, rarely letting people know what I needed.

I’d present myself to others as though I had it all together and didn’t need them for anything, put up an invisible shield against hearing the whole truth, covertly letting others know I only wanted to hear positive feedback, and usually failed to have other powerful people in my life with permission to coach me.

This meant others would not perceive me as having problems or needs, they may have experienced me as unteachable at times and may have had a hard time contributing to me because I already seemed to know everything.

So I’ve had to find the kind of role models I aspired to, and learned to listen deeply to the wisdom of others. I’ve had learn to hold power alongside equally powerful peers, to simply say “I don’t know” and stay open to new possibilities,  and am learning to tolerate uncertainly as one of the most powerful places to be standing.

According to Zammit and Thomas, one of the gifts of having believed I was powerless, and having acted so independently in order to gain a sense of power, is the potential to hold a tremendous amount of power in the field and have the ability to lead others to unprecedented levels of their own empowerment.

The deeper truths, that I recognise, are that I love to learn and everyone has something valuable to teach me, and I am here to serve the full empowerment of others.

So when it comes to hearing something these days from a loved one that is less than loving, less than respectful, and devoid of appreciation, I am able to observe rather than react angrily. I can do this because I have done the work to both become aware of the self defeating beliefs that were invisibly shaping my life and have reshaped these beliefs based on the reality of my life today.

That does not mean I should allow someone to treat me in a demeaning manner, I teach people how to treat me by what I do and don’t accept. But because I can observe what is going on in a more objective way, I am now generally able to talk to my partner – or whoever happens to be the perpetrator - about these little outbursts in a way he can hear me, and he tends then to adjust his approach.

He is not deliberately acting that way to demean me; he is acting that way to gain power because of his own invisible and unhelpful belief patterns. We each have our own work to do.

While my work is not done, I feel well on my way and – more importantly – I have uncovered many ways and methods to help me and others. Instead of lapsing into an angry or depressive state I have learned to welcome these blots on the landscape of my day as they are there to show me the way home to a more expanded version of myself.

​Is it possible you harbour learned but invisible beliefs about yourself and your life that could be holding you back? Are you willing to look at them in order to receive the love, appreciation and respect you deserve? I hope so, because that expanded version of you is the one you’ve been waiting for, and the one our world needs.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was reading an experienced tutor’s words and he said to his students “The first step of the process (of learning this method) is to respect your own value. Understand that you have skills and talents that can change someone’s life.”

It made me think about the times in my corporate career I’d sat and refreshed my work resume and how much effort it had taken me to really hone in on those things that were unique to me and had created value.

Ordinarily I’m looking at myself from the inside out, not the outside in, and I am acutely aware of my own doubts and failings – far more so than my value.

But there is a statement I read “My very existence in and of itself provides extraordinary value, and is a profound blessing to all” that really resonated with all I have come to believe about life. I can’t imagine why some people would be created as less valuable than others, like a creator somewhere would be saying “Hmm, that’s enough people with value, now I just need some to fill the space around them with useless folks”.

​So, back in the corporate days, I would sit down and start with all the outcomes of my productivity, and the ways in which I could quantify it. Then I’d look at any praise or feedback I’d received and, finally, I’d go through the list and focus in on the things that I had really enjoyed. 

I also remember formulating my elevator pitch, a short description of what I did and the value it added that I could recite casually at the drop of a hat.

Having embarked on a deliberate journey to project myself from the inside out, my pitch has evolved. 
For example, one of my online profiles says:

After years of working with people and cultures in the field of customer experience transformation, I know true success comes from people like you and I being, well, the real us. Figuring out what that means is a process for all of us. Each week I publish articles sharing my own insights and experiences to inspire you to live the life you deserve – and to help you become the authentic person that our friends and family, our organisations and corporations, governments...our world, needs. To find out more visit shonakeachie.com

It’s been a while though since I revisited it, and I’m now starting to orientate myself to what else, beyond publishing my own experiences, I could do to help others on their journey.
I wondered what my pitch would be in ten years time.

This reminded me about what the ancient Egyptian’s call the ren (they referred to five parts of the soul: the ba being the personality, ka the life force, ib the heart or record of good and bad deeds, shuet the shadow aspects and ren the name).

It is said the ren was more than just a name, it was a secret name, a short phrase that depicted the sum of a person’s experiences that only they (and possibly those closest to them) would know. Knowing someone’s ren held power, it is like a concentrated or condensed version of a person’s authentic totality and a hyper condensed version of an elevator pitch.

I admit this idea of a ren is appealing; it calls to my desire to really crystallise who I am. From that perspective my ren feels like a work in progress, yet to be revealed. The most concise statement I have for me right now is something like “Seeking a way to put to good use that which was lost and now is found”.

I suspect there is some gold among the last few years of learning, discovery, healing and child rearing. And, probably like in the days of writing my resume, I could start by casting the net wide and just listing the things I’ve been doing and then start to really consolidate that down into the value I’ve gotten and created. The journey and growth these last few years has been huge.

For example, I uncovered a belief that I felt – to a degree – invisible.

Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas outline in this fantastic document the self limiting thought patterns people tend to have and the associated gifts those are pointing to.

As I read through the notes associated with the belief I am invisible, things like not asserting my needs and desires (even when I was aware of them) struck me as true.

It’s no surprise then that others can be completely unaware of my feelings, needs and desires in that context, and can become very self centred in my presence. This could then lead me to believe others are selfish.

In close relationships that could then result in me asking for what I want in ways that are attacking, making an assumption people don’t care about me. Or it could lead to me engaging in selfless service to the point of exhaustion and depletion rarely presencing my needs and desires.

Zammit and Thomas go on to describe the skills and capacities I may want to cultivate to evolve beyond this false belief (that I am invisible) and then go on to describe the gifts it offers and the deeper truth statements that represent more of my authentic self in relation to it.

For example, they write “You possess a deep capacity to see the invisible, the ability to hear what is not being spoken, and to discern that which has never been made known before”.

That one document is abundant with phrases that encapsulate the deeper exploration, learning and growth in relation to the pursuit of my authenticity these last few years.

That one document is abundant with phrases that encapsulate the deeper exploration, learning and growth in relation to the pursuit of my authenticity these last few years. That my inner and outer perceptions are now closely aligned has given me a deeper respect for my value, I no longer feel like some imposter is out there acting as me.

In fact, as I read through the document and recognised many of the unhelpful beliefs about myself I’d uncovered using various methods – many of which were self driven - it gave me a much greater appreciation and respect for the journey I had undertaken and the value those experiences can add to the lives of others.

Perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at yourself and all that you have achieved in order to appreciate your journey and its effects a little more, and start to respect your own value? 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving?, How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Image by CJ from Pixabay

Eckhart Tolle, a master teacher on the concept of presence, said “Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there”. I can relate to this.

When I was at the chiropractor, I asked her what she had noticed in my body this week and she said “It was twisted, it easily untwisted but it was twisted none the less (in my usual left hip to right shoulder pattern) – like you are being pulled in this direction and that direction”.

As soon as she said it I pictured a tug-of-war, rather like Dr Dolittle’s fictional Pushmi-Pullyu animal being pulled in different directions. It made absolute sense to me because it’s how I feel when the family are all at home and I have things I need to do, yet they are clamouring for my attention.

Of course, here in the southern hemisphere, it is school summer holidays, but this year – with so many lockdowns in process – I am sure there are many parents around the world contending with the same issues and on more intense levels.

For my kids I’ve found there is balance needed between planned activities and having enough downtime in order for boredom to kick in.

School takes care of much (often unwanted) planned activity during term time, but during holidays that falls more to me. Though as the kids get older they obviously have more of their own ideas and plans, which can bring about a whole other level of conflict and logistics to manage.

Another of my favourite Eckhart quotes is “Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found”, it has also always been the place in which I am most in touch with my own thoughts and feelings, my sense of self, which is something I desire for my kids also.

When boredom kicks in for the kids, though, I both relish and dread it.

I dread it because it is a temporarily painful experience for me, they start to complain and pick fights with each other, looking towards me as a beacon of hope to solve their boredom and their conflicts. However, I have found that it is often wiser if I avoid doing either, and simply give them each some positive attention before turning my own attention back to whatever I was doing.

But I also relish their boredom because, once they get over this hump – which they do (and they do a lot quicker without devices on the scene), I see the magic of their creativity come to life.

This used to create other issues as, when they were younger, it often involved turning our lounge into some fantastical kingdom, which could look like someone had taken the contents of our cupboards, strewn them over the floor and then stirred with a big spoon. However, as they get older, they get better at tidying up with less intervention.

Then, of course, there are the other things that need to happen, like clothes being washed, food purchased, meals prepared, alongside the support I provide to my partner in his business. And because none of this really floats my boat I heed Annette Noontil’s advice:

“It is best not to do more than 50% for people because it takes away their opportunity to learn and grow. If you have to do 100% for someone make sure you are learning something for yourself from this opportunity.”

Which is why I make it a priority to type these posts each week, it’s my time to really sit down and take in what lessons are presenting themselves.

So when I ponder on what I really need to know when I feel pulled in these different directions, here is my take out:

• I have a tendency towards people pleasing, and the fact I feel pulled in different directions is a signpost to relook at the lessons I’ve learned about what being hyper attuned to others’ needs and feelings has taught me, including defining and asserting my personal boundaries.
• No one will respect my needs and desires unless I prioritise them; I teach others how to treat me.
• In my situation, no one is going to die if I don’t get the balance right between doing too much or too little. But the fact I’m feeling so torn probably means I would more likely benefit from doing less; my expectations of myself are too high.
• Nothing needs to be perfect, whether I get it right or wrong for me, the kids and/or my partner, there are always going to be things I can learn and grow from, so either way I’ll get where I want to go. As my gran always said “What’s for you won’t go by you.”
• Be present to whatever is happening in the moment. Even in the process of typing this up, I’ve had to press pause a number of times and switch my attention to conversations with the kids and with my partner and each interruption provided an opportunity for connection with people I love.

With humanity experiencing so much turmoil right now, I imagine many people feel pulled in different directions. What is your life trying to teach you? What do you need to know right now to feel less torn and more present?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I asked my young niece how she would describe love without using the word love and she responded “it is what you feel for someone who is important in your life and the person/people who you would always want to be around until the very end”.

Aside of being my favourite answer to this question so far, it also made me look at the people I love in my life through new lenses, are these people I want in my life until the very end? Thankfully yes. But there have been times in the past when I’d have said no to that question and, inevitably, these people are no longer in my life, which is why it feels like a good litmus test for me.

But I can’t think about love without thinking about emotional entanglement. At the core of my discoveries about life, is this notion that as I was born into a family with a mother and father who – probably like most parents – loved me and wanted a good life for me, but that meant moulding my behaviours and my thinking, even my feelings, so that I fit in with what they and society expected from me.

Let me give you an example. Just today I watched a little boy (he was about one-year-old) and his brother (who was perhaps around three-years-old), playing with a ball. The infant boy clearly wanted the ball all to himself and got very upset every time the older boy went near it.

The kids were split up, neither allowed to play with the ball, and while the older one was clearly upset, the younger one was totally beside himself. This is a great saying as it reflects extremely well what is usually going on in the physical body; the consciousness is no longer at home. He was crying, loudly, clearly distraught, now well away from the ball and the parent was sternly telling him “no” over and over.

But what does “no” mean in a situation like that? If I project myself into a one year old’s psyche, completely devoid of rational thought, this would hold limited meaning beyond my parent’s disapproval. Of what? Of me. Does it mean I am wrong to be this upset? I can’t help feeling the way I feel. Am I not allowed to feel the way I feel? How the heck do I reign in such huge, overwhelming feelings?

As to questions about whether I’m not supposed to be acting this way, showing how upset I am or embarrassing my parents, or not being selfish with the ball, that is way beyond the realms of my young mind, way way beyond. I just need this adult to be able to handle the totality of who I am and all my feelings, if he can’t, how can I?

But the adult can’t or won’t and, since I depend on him to feed me and look after me, I have to take that part of me that is really upset and shove it deep deep down inside – over and over until I learn to suppress my true feelings with such ease I no longer even identify with them.

So then I grow up and my friend watches someone blatantly step in front of me in a line and I say nothing, even though that person then takes the last – say, soda – that I really wanted. My friend can’t believe I never said anything. I am annoyed of course, but I don’t want to create a scene, it feels wrong and, frankly, a bit scary.

My own kids are a bit older but still at an age where they are dependent on my partner and me for their survival needs, and there have been many moments when I’ve been on the parent’s side of that kind of example, and many moments that I too have not acted the way my kids would have liked me to.

Of course, they couldn’t tell me that, they could only express their big emotions which left me feeling turned inside out, in a tug of war between the child-part of myself that learned to suppress such feelings (and would not have dared embarrass my parents like that in public because it would have had consequences) and this other part of me that wanted to figure out how to let my kids express themselves authentically.

This meant my kids’ experience of me was rather schizophrenic, until I was able to learn new ways to deal with situations like that - both inside and out- more consistently. Generally now, if my kids get upset, I simply acknowledge how they are feeling and how I would probably feel like that in their shoes, it’s amazing how it takes the resistance and momentum out of a situation and calms things down.

Yesterday we visited a park with lots of families around and, aside of being grateful for our relative freedoms here in New Zealand, I watched with interest as children universally mirrored their parents, for better or worse. I could envision fast forwarding twenty years and many of those children rejecting the many parts of themselves that mimicked their parents, and their parents before them.

I find myself thinking “These kids take their cues from us, and we are just screwed up kids in adult bodies, they deserve better. Some wear their broken parts more obviously than others.”

In fact, my daughter asked me today who I liked better when I was growing up, my mum or dad. In the not too distant past I would have avoided answering that, out of some sense of misguided loyalty or fear of creating a rift in their relationship with a family member.

Instead I gave an honest answer and I was very clear that my preference was based on my cumulative experiences of kindness versus harshness.

There is another emotional entanglement when it comes to love. Should love be easy or hard? I think perhaps love it easy when it reflects the authentic part of me. But given I spent most of my life walking around in a skin made from experiences such as the one I described above, I did not spend most of my life projecting the authentic me into the world.

Whether my relationships have been easy or hard, they have all reflected back to me what I did or did not want, and therefore have been enormously helpful in pointing the way towards reclaiming the real me.

I am both the injured person and the person beneath the injury after all, and that does not mean I should stay in a relationship because I can see a person’s potential.

Within my relationship with my partner, after our kids came along we got to a point where we didn’t know if we even loved each other anymore. We were mirroring so many parts of our entangled childhood selves and experiences – parts we had denied, suppressed and disowned. And because we loved ourselves enough, and chose our family over going separate ways, we worked on changing who we each are – the less tangled versions.

It reminds me of a Viktor Frankl quote I heard this week “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” He goes on to say “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

In my case, while I could have changed my relationship status, I have been in enough relationships to see certain thought, emotional and behavioural patterns recurring, and there came that time to look in the mirror and be honest about what I was contributing that was creating those patterns.

So is love an adjective or verb? It’s both a feeling and a action. But because of these entanglements from childhood, until I figured out who I really am and connected with others from that place, it kept creating entanglements in adulthood.

When my niece then asked “So, Auntie Shona, how would you describe love without using the word love?” it gave me pause. I like her definition, especially when I think about all these entanglements created by parts of myself I’d denied, disowned or suppressed; I wouldn’t have wanted to be with that version of me to the very end, I really didn’t love myself enough.

But I also think of love as being our natural state, when things really hum, life happens with ease and I feel good. When I am not in that state it’s a calling card to become aware of what’s actually triggering me, who I truly am, and own it and appreciate it and put it out there.

So just how important is your definition of love? Regardless of what your experiences have been to this point in your life, we each have the opportunity to experience more love in our lives, starting with the way we feel about ourselves.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving?, How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As 2020 draws to a close, I was reflecting on a piece of news an old colleague of mine had posted about a lovely surprise holiday her husband had booked to a tropical location at the end of next year. Probably like many people, I am unsure whether that kind of travel will be possible again by then, but I started to wonder whether that was even the right question to be asking myself.

In his article 15 Great Quotes on the Importance of Asking the Right Question Mitch Ditkoff states how, as a consultant, he continues to be astounded by how few organisations have any kind of process to press pause, reflect and make sure they are coming up with the right questions. 

Setting aside questions about COVID19 itself for now, I started to think back to those early lockdowns, when much of the world seemed to stand still. It was a time when we as a family got to pause, reflect and take stock.

I can understand people wanting to get back to holidays and social activities, but what did that pause shed light on? There were reports of Venice’s canals running clearer, the clearest they’ve been in sixty years. An article in Science Direct sadly concluded (after research looking at the effects on the environment during the first global lockdowns) “Coronavirus itself is Earth’s vaccine and we humans are the virus”.

Talk of holidays and “getting back to normal” evokes in me a sense of frustration. I’m going to ignore the expression “the new normal” for the moment, because that seems to be more associated with control and fear, and that is not the kind of future I’m envisaging. But this idea of life going back to the way it was before the global pandemic seems ridiculous to me.

It has amplified so many issues about our environment and our social, political, economic, technological and personal challenges that it is a time in history ripe for change.

But having witnessed the relatively quick return to a lack of human connection between commuters in London after terrorist attacks in the early part of the millennium, I know how quickly distraction sets in.

During the lockdown here back in March through May, I revelled in being able to stroll out my front door and walk peacefully through our neighbourhood. But as soon as the restrictions were lessened, road traffic increased and the peaceful walks became crowded with road noise and traffic fumes, so now I have to get in my car to drive elsewhere if I want to take a peaceful walk.

I loved that my car did not get its tank refilled for over two months, it weighs on me that I consume fossil fuels. Yet, like many people around the world, I have commitments that would be extremely difficult to meet without running a vehicle. How can I find ways to change this?

How many governments and major political parties right now are even thinking about the lessons this crisis has taught us and have evolution on their agenda?

That said, I know my most effective voting takes place through the money I spend and the things I give my attention to. So where am I placing my attention? What am I spending money on? Am I using my resources in a way that would encourage the kind of change and transformation that could be for the benefit of not just me or my family, but for all of humankind, the creatures and the living planet on which we all reside?

I learned this year that I have white privilege. What other privileges do I hold? How can I give other people the benefit of my privileges? How can I help dismantle the systems of oppression within myself and for others?

I also learned from The Social Dilemma documentary that social media is six times more effective at spreading false news. Since conspiracy theories have abounded in 2020, I’ve watched friends and family become polarized on important topics to a degree that neither side seems able to hear the other.

I’ve had to ask myself, am I using social media as a tool? Or am I letting it demand my attention and manipulate my thinking? And where is my own resistance to hearing others’ opinions?
 
I learned that, in a time when our country faced a health risk, our government cut off the supply to my chosen form of healthcare and made only pharmaceuticals available. What can I do to ensure I maintain a freedom of choice in my healthcare even in times of crisis?

I learned that I was absolutely spot-on in my self assessment that I am not cut out to home school my children. Yet being able to give them and their schoolwork such individual attention led me to asking the right questions that uncovered their neurodiversity, and still more questions to find the right support and training so they can flourish. I wonder how I can support all children in their uniqueness to flourish?

I learned the importance of self sustainability. With panic buying, a lack of groceries and no access to garden supplies, keeping emergency supplies and a variety of fresh things to eat growing in our garden became more important. It highlighted all the problems I had known about with mono-farming and the way we currently source goods and services from around the world. What more can I do with our budget to encourage local and organic businesses?

I learned that reconnecting with my partner and children was simultaneously challenging and liberating. It brought about a huge amount of personal change in terms of consciously shaking off old beliefs and behavioural patterns that weren’t serving us. Where to next on that I wondered?

And then I got one of Claire Zammit’s emails that asked seven power questions:

• Where in your life have you most felt like yourself this past year?
• What have been the greatest challenges you’ve overcome?
• What can you acknowledge about yourself and your strengths?
• What is it time to let go of in your life?
• What is it time for forgive yourself for?
• What is it time to forgive others for?
• What are the old patterns that it’s time to release?

It reminded me that, while I have learned a lot about myself this year, the road ahead lies wide open for me to keep learning.  

2020 is a year that I think of as catalysing. It has led me to ask more questions than it has produced in terms of answers. I’m always impatient for change, and I know as I look back change will probably seem quicker than it feels right now.

Am I asking the right questions I wonder? So long as I keep taking time to pause and reflect on the bigger picture of my own life, I’m confident the right questions will arise.

The question is, with holiday season almost upon us at the end of this landmark year, what are the right questions for you to ask yourself right now?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change the World One Day at a Time, Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, What Value Are You Adding to the Currencies in Your Life?, How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside and The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As I write this, three years have passed to the day since my mother died. I’d like to tell you this article is about her, but it’s not, grief is about the ones left behind. Being the anniversary of her death, I have relived it many times.

It truly was the worst of times. After months of waking up to hear the latest progress and prognosis from the other side of the world, my waking hours filled with thoughts of what I could offer that would help inspire or sooth, I’d finally flown over to say goodbye the month before she died. It was the first time she was ready to admit she might not make it to December when I would arrive with my partner and our kids.

So I left my two young children in the hands of their other grandmother and their father, and flew there and back in five days, it was all I felt I could allow myself away from the children. In those five days, between the jetlag and the intensity of the reason for the trip, I think I only slept a handful of hours.

But I had my time with mum, who by then was a shadow of her former self; skeletal. Her muscles were so wasted away that her last efforts to walk were more a feat of will, balancing the top half of her body on her hip bones while she put one foot in front of the other.

And I watched with morbid fascination every time she spoke. Her face no longer had any proper muscular substance, her jaw would move in a strange motion, more like a skull clattering open and closed, which totally changed the way she formed and spoke words.

After saying our goodbyes, I arrived back in the same country a month later, this time with my partner and children. She died in the early hours the night after her grandchildren all met for the first time, something she had longed to see, yet she was bed-bound hundreds of miles away, having only had brief lucid moments in those last weeks as her body was in the final throws of shutting down completely.

The next day my brother and I drove those hundreds of miles and back again to spend a few hours with my father. And later in the week I drove those miles again with my kids and partner so we could spend a few weeks near my dad and help where possible.

It was a trip to the other side of the world with young children and, while they were upset and overwhelmed, there was also the practical side of needing to fill our days somehow. So we took trips to many of the places of my childhood and then we would head back to dad’s so we could all eat together and I could help pack away mum’s personal belongings and ponder the awfulness of the situation, as life carried on cruelly without her.

Frankly, it was an out-of-body experience. I was there, but my tank was running on empty. The emotional and physical horror of it all took its toll, and I’m sure it was no coincidence my first kidney stone occurred within a few weeks of arriving back home.

Needless to say the three years since have been challenging. That is no surprise I guess when the person who birthed me into this world, and who loved me and shaped me in so many ways, has died. The challenges have not so much been around accepting her death, with a degenerative illness much of that acceptance slowly occurred before her actual passing, it’s more been about facing many of my own shadows.

My mum was, beyond doubt, the single biggest influence of who I became in this world. She played her part beautifully, because I had little idea of who I truly was, what I really believed and wanted and needed beyond what I’d been taught. I don’t mean that facetiously.

Sure, I would be lying if I said there weren’t times in my life I resented my mother, but I never doubted her love nor her intentions. She did her best and was – like all of us –a product of her own life circumstances, parenting in a way that was good in its intention and (as is common) ignorant of the unhelpful beliefs and patterns that shaped who she was and how she shaped me.

When my own kids were born, I had a burning desire to allow them to become who they are, to treat them as a flower that needs nourished and watch in wonder as it grows and emerges, rather than a piece of clay in need of moulding.

Despite my own good intentions, I’m also aware my own kids will have their own issues. This isn’t about me becoming the perfect mum; it’s about me becoming who I intended to be in this life. My mum did not deter me from that; in fact she was the perfect one to help me.

Without feeling an acute lack of not knowing myself, I’d never have felt such a strong desire to get to know me. And in learning how to come home to myself, I now have a wealth of experience, knowledge and a service to fulfill, to help others who are searching for the same. 

In those first years of my children’s lives, the last of my mother’s, I became acutely aware that I had choices to make about who I was being - particularly when my mother was around, which was the real litmus test. Each year my parents would make the trip across the world to see us, and – being such a distance – would stay with us for a prolonged period.

There were certainly battles. As I’ve said before, while I learned early on to hyper attune to others’ needs, there was also a strong voice within me, and so I’d live in this state of speaking my truth in defiance but feeling like a twisted car wreck inside. I spoke my truth at the cost of high anxiety, often in anger, and then frequently compromised out of guilt.

I let go of judging my mum, she was a survivor and I loved her very much. I am grateful that those intense visits brought opportunities for me to finally look her in the eyes and say “I’m doing it my way” and “I love you”.

Before she died a lot of my journey was about discovering the true nature of life and who I am, something on which we did not see eye to eye. Through my experiences, I have come to have very different beliefs from my parents, but I had no doubt they still loved me as I said in Coming Out – Psychically Speaking. That said, I was still looking for their endorsement.

I realised if I wasn’t happy with my life then I had no one to blame but myself. I have spent far longer as an adult making my own decisions than I did as a dependent child. So when I’d get triggered about things in my life I would – and still do – take a good look at what is going on beneath the surface.

There were a lot of beliefs lurking there that really weren’t serving me; this is shadow work (but is called many other things).

As I look back, I really wonder why it took me so long to begin. There was so much time and energy wasted blaming and resenting. However, like grief itself, I also trust it was part of a process. If I’d acted more quickly many of those patterns might not have been as obvious, over time they played out in all the arenas of my life, triggering the same feelings of anger, disappointment, anxiety, rejection etc over and over again.

So many unhelpful beliefs lurked: “I’m selfish”, “I’m a disappointment”, “I don’t belong”, “I’m a burden”, “I’m crazy”, “they are idiots”,” I’m different” and many many more. All of these are rooted in the shame or guilt I felt as a child, and while those were valid fears as a dependent child, they no longer serve me, they are all the opposite of my truth.

Claire Zammit tackles this topic beautifully. She says “When you believe:

• “I’m alone” or “Other people don’t give me what I need” or “Life is sad and lonely”, the underlying lesson is actually “I came to love and be loved and I have the power to create meaningful connections to others.”
• “I’m bad” or “Others are always angry at me” the underlying lesson is actually “I am here to contribute to the evolution and advancement of humankind and I create openings for the flow of life to emerge in new and powerful ways for all.”
•  “I’m not enough” or “Others don’t value me” the underlying lesson is actually “My very existence in and of itself provides extraordinary value.”
• “I’m powerless” or “Other people are incapable and incompetent” or “When others hold power there is less for me” the underlying lesson is actually “I am a powerful leader, here to serve the empowerment of all”.

And so forth.”

But as Belinda Alexander wrote her main character as saying in Mystery Woman “I’ve been afraid for so long I don’t know who I would be without that fear. How could I change that now?”

There are many ways to change the way we look at things and feel about them, and I found different ways worked with different issues. But it has all been a process of unburdening, getting lighter, letting go.

If you are grieving someone who is no longer in your life, whether they have died or not, is it time to figure out who you are in a world with them no longer in it?  For even in grief, maybe especially in grief, there are lessons to be learned.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Rejoicing in Who You Are, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, You Are Not as Important to Your Parents as You (or They) Think and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A wise lady recently told me something I’ve heard many times, that the first law of the universe is to put myself first. “Though” she acknowledged, “your children are not quite at the age yet where you can”.

This cleared up a question that had been sitting with me for quite some time.

Over the years I’ve heard and read a lot in the personal growth field about putting myself first. On the whole, I really get it, in order to take care of anyone else I have to take care of my own needs first so I’m in better shape to help others.

Being someone who had very poor personal boundaries, I’ve often dwelled on the irony of coming to know myself and my boundaries (my wants, needs and desires; the things that define the edges of where I end and others begin) at precisely the time in my life where I have children to raise.

It’s been an interesting journey trying to figure out how to reclaim the sovereignty of my soul while simultaneously helping each of my children on their journeys.

It is fair to say that, when I first had kids, a huge part of me relished handing them over to someone else for most of the day while I dashed off to live the piece of my life that I felt most productive in. That said, I had become increasingly frustrated (over the latter years of my corporate career) that what I was doing lacked meaning for me, still, it was more tangible than my newfound role as a mother.

Sitting for endless hours while a fledgling suckled at my breast, trying to figure out why this tiny fragile person seemed so restless and discontent. I always imagined a baby would feed, need winded, perhaps relieve itself and need a nappy change, and then would nap; and this cycle would repeat maybe half a dozen times in a day. But no, it was more like a half dozen times in a hour.

There never seemed to be time to take care of even the most basic things, like going to the loo, preparing and eating my own food, taking a shower and getting dressed, or cleaning and tidying the house. Far less anything more productive that would require use of the well honed skills and experience I had come to be prized for outside the home.

So, yes, there was a large part of me that was very glad we couldn’t afford for me not go back to work at the time.

Fast forward three years, with another addition to our family in the picture, trying to work full time in a role that carried a lot of responsibility, expectation and reward, yet missed the mark entirely in terms of filling my heart, things looked a little different.

My children were on the move and able to express themselves so much more clearly. I mean, it wasn’t like they were able to say “hey, we need more attention from you, and we would really like to be in our own home each day”, but it was pretty clear they were deeply in need of these things despite the wonderful care they received outside their home.

As I would walk in the door, the kids would melt down, all their pent up emotion spouting forth like a cap popping off a shaken up bottle of soda. This would go on for hours and when, at last, their little bodies would give in to exhaustion and fall asleep, it was short lived, with both awakening multiple times through the night wanting the mummy time they missed during the day.

Suffice to say, things had to change and they did. Making changes in our location and lifestyle, I took on the role I dreaded, being home more with the children. I really felt I had no choice, I simply could no longer cope physically or emotionally trying to keep a foot in both worlds, both of which I was resisting in some way.

The thing I quickly realised was the world I had left behind no longer held any appeal. After a short spell consulting, I knew without a doubt that I was not going to find what I was looking for in the same kind of roles I had been doing. It didn’t take a genius to understand that corporations were never going to transform and change unless the people leading them changed.

And I knew I needed to change too, to go inward and start to live my life from the inside out, more attuned to who I authentically am.

I also started to see more clearly the effects on my kids of my not being there early on, the degree  of attunement and attachment they wanted and needed in those first moments of life had led to anxiety and anger, it took a few years to disentangle much of that.

Each step of this journey has been a challenge. I started as an adult who had really developed a complex, multi-layered persona in reaction to the way I had been parented and brought up, much like most people I guess. But life in our home forced me to look at all that with entirely new eyes, I started to view it as a mirror showing me where my learned behaviours were at battle with my true nature.

In being there to allow for more attachment and attunement to my kids, it’s allowed me to attune to myself and create a more healthy attachment style. I started to realise that, while the domestic duties that go with having family are not my thing, it was exploring the emotional aspects of child rearing that really helped me to find my way back to my own authenticity.

And while I have embraced that, I have also continued in many ways to resist my role, seeing it as something that is keeping me bound uncomfortably. Inside me is a desire, an insatiable wanderlust for exploration to worlds unseen (inside and out). While, at this point in my life, my main focus has to be on the children, it plays an endless tug of war with my desire to let my attention wander as it begs to be. 

As we approach the end of the school year here which, with lockdown measures, was already somewhat shorter than most years, my kids have been at home not feeling great. This was the last full week where I – in theory – would have had several hours in a day that my attention would not be split across three people.

In the past, the need to be fully present at home and waylay my own plans would have twisted me inwardly, like a self torture chamber. Wanting to there as opposed to here creates too much inner tension and resistance, too much stress, and my life is far easier in the moments when I surrender to just being here; even if it means I can’t do the thing I seem to be wired for. That is precisely the tactic I took this week.

I am a phosphorus constitution, my homeopath reminded me. Like my elemental namesake, if left to my own devices, I would consume all the oxygen quickly and – though my light would burn brightly – it would burn out quickly. What a gift to be brought back down to Earth, to be present with the children then, it keeps me from obsessively pursuing my explorations and burning out.

I’ve realised, amid the feeling of being in a tug of war for my attention - a cocoon that has bound me tightly to its child rearing purpose - a metamorphosis has occurred. My change and transformation skills have been applied inwardly, and I’ve shared those lessons in my articles as they have been learned. I now have a vast understanding and awareness of many techniques and resources centred on how to come home to ourselves.

For all its perceived bonds, it has in other ways been a beautifully unencumbered journey. Having been a child of a society that wants scientific proof before anything can be believed, and having followed the traditional path through higher education, it has been so freeing to follow nothing but my own intuition.

I do not require a piece of paper to qualify me to become myself.

Wading into the waters of the metaphysical and the mystical along with the latest scientific understanding has been liberating. What I’ve discovered along the route using these many woven strands has been enlightening. The convergences are many and often, we are truly evolving to a place where science is beginning to understand the nature of consciousness and many other things long ago deemed sorcery.

Despite the perceived limitations of the cocoon, my explorations have been wide and deep. My current intrigue lies with a deeper dive into work on trauma using somatic therapy, but this is one strand among many.

While I have been bound to this life I thought of as highly dissatisfying in many ways, I’ve simultaneously learned so much about the art and science of personal transformation, of becoming the fullest expression of who I intended to be; reawakening.

Forced to kneel at the doorway of my heart, or continue to suffer, this year I’ve stepped across the threshold and now stand in the entranceway and hear myself yell “hello, the house”... I’ve come home to myself at last.

Are you resisting the thing that binds you? What about its bonds could be pointing you straight in the direction of your true freedom?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Planning who to invite along to an afternoon tea on her birthday, my daughter felt rather crushed when one of her close friends insisted another particular person be invited or she wasn’t going to come. At first my daughter asked me whether we could invite this other person so, as I dug deeper and uncovered the reason, we had a little chat.

I explained that unless she took the risk that her friend might not come, she was going to feel worse on an ongoing basis that she had not spoken her truth and honoured herself. Her truth is that, while she likes this other person, she doesn’t want invite them into her close friendship circle.

Without another word, she picked up the phone, called her friend and told her that she would love to have her come along, but she would not be inviting the other person, it is her birthday and she gets to make that decision. Of course, her friend said she would come along after all.

This is one lesson I wish I had learned myself many decades ago. The fact was not lost on me that it was precisely those early social relationships where I would have started to embed my own way of relating to people outside that immediate family circle.

Instead I was largely codependent in my relationships and had poor personal boundaries, because I was hyper attuned to others’ feelings. I’d learned from the cradle that my best strategy was to anticipate how the people (who were responsible for me) were feeling and adjust my behaviour in order to avoid getting into trouble.

That meant often swallowing my disappointment that how I was feeling had not been considered and then I’d change who I was being in order to fit in. Nowhere was this more obvious than in my personal relationships.

I shared with my daughter how I’d fallen in love when I was younger (in the olden times), and was in a relationship with someone who had ultimately left and broken my heart. I used to idolize him; he was so completely unlike anyone I’d met before.

But, while I enjoyed many aspects of being with him, and was upset for many years after we parted, in truth there were ways in which I didn’t feel honoured. For example, I used to get ready to go out on a Saturday night and be waiting from around 7pm, then he wouldn’t show up until 9pm, and he never used to acknowledge how late it was or apologise for keeping me waiting for hours.

On the other hand, I never used to call him out on it. I remember once his sisters mentioned how awful it was of him to do that, they had noticed it, which made me feel somewhat seen, but I never challenged him on it. More fool me, as my mother would say.

Looking back now, I can see that I was so afraid of losing him, or being seen as less than cool, I never gave him the chance to see and love the true me. That is not to say that he would have, but in the end it didn’t matter anyway.

When we split up, I was devastated and wondered what it was about me I needed to change. I berated myself for being too needy. And I was, I thought I needed him to love and accept me to make me whole, when really I needed to know and love who I am.

Dealing with the things that are unsaid has been my Achilles heel in life. I’m a straight up kind of a person and, because I anticipate others’ feelings, I am usually on the front foot apologizing or explaining. So when I’m caught up in a situation where someone denies, deflects or disowns their behaviour it takes me more than a moment to change gear.

It took me a long time to recognise that pattern with my partner. If something would come up that triggered me, I’d criticize and he would deflect with another criticism and we would go down this rabbit hole of blame that became so out of proportion to the original trigger, we were caught in a spiral of old unhelpful belief patterns.

Thus my adult relationships of every kind have been this intricate and cumbersome tango that have incorporated my own emotional baggage along with that of my friends or partners. There was me simultaneously trying to figure out who I should be in order to be loved and accepted, and at the same time also balking at my own lack of integrity with myself.

Most people may either resonate with my experiences or the opposite extreme; of disconnecting and retreating into a bubble, where all that is real and all that matters is the individual experience. The degree of attunement in infanthood is reason for this, as I talked about in Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In .

But as I result, I don’t like to cause damage in my relationships; it feels very unsafe to me. And how to navigate things that trigger me has been one of the hardest patterns to break, moving away from the blame game and into more of an observation mode.

I should confess I am no wallflower. At every step of the way the part of me inside that recognised I was getting trampled upon and carrying too much baggage would protest and I’d lash out in some version of criticism and/or (mostly) restrained anger; with a lot of internal anger and resentment towards myself.

So it is with some relief I’m now at a point in my life that the advice I’ve given to my daughter is the advice I’ve been taking myself in recent years.

After figuring out who I am - what Shona Keachie actually likes and dislikes, needs and desires, and being in loving acceptance of that - the other challenge has been to risk my relationships with others in order to keep integrity with who I am. It has meant some relationships have fallen away, others have deepened, and new ones have appeared.

But the common thread is that I can present myself in relationships without having to wear a mask of some sort, shape shifting to suit the people around me. There is freedom in that, and so much less encumbering than wondering what is wrong with me and why I am not like these other people around me.

Do you know who you truly are? Do you love and accept yourself? Are you willing to risk your relationships more in order to be fully loved for who you are?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy My Needs versus Yours, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This is a question that came up for me this week, and I will tell you how. But I also thought it was an interesting question to ask given how topical giving and receiving is for many people around the world at this time of year across various cultures.

Of course I am not talking about those horrid itchy socks Auntie sends every year. This is about examining my beliefs so I am open to receive all that is helpful to me on this journey of life.

The question came up when I went to an appointment with a chiropractor I hadn’t seen before. I thought I’d try something new to see if I could get any relief for the tension in my right shoulder that is often there.

I figure that at some point, along my inner journey back to authentic me, I will address the layers that are keeping my shoulder bound. Since there is nothing structurally wrong, it’s more likely related to an unhelpful thought pattern or belief (or multiple layers of unhelpful beliefs).

The chiropractor took one look at me and described what she was seeing: locked up at the pelvis, twisted on my left hand side, and that crosses over in a common pattern of tension up through my right shoulder and neck.

I explained some inner work I had done around my shoulder which revealed some emotional trauma as a baby (having to suck up or rein in my feelings when being weaned onto a rubber teat at two weeks old) and there is some past life memories there that I am aware of relating to being badly beaten for the knowledge I possessed.

This, I guess, made her feel comfortable talking to me on a metaphysical level. She explained her own understanding of the pattern she was seeing. What she told me was that we often receive an imprint of our mother’s nervous system from our time in the womb, and then when we are born our will is usually shaped by the role models around us, so our ideas about masculine and feminine often come from our mother and father, for example.

Metaphysically the left side of the body relates to the feminine and the right side to the masculine. So as she saw my left hip twisted inwards (in a defensive/protective type posture) it’s a physical representation of the feminine blocking the masculine.

The question to ask myself, therefore, is “what do I currently believe about receiving support from the masculine?” and “where am I blocking myself from receiving support?” Knowing, of course that I have aspects of both masculine and feminine within me, and I may be blocking myself from internal support and/or external support that would naturally come to me if I was open to receiving it.

Because I am a writer, I just starting writing out the response. It was fascinating to look at how my beliefs have been shaped through my experiences with my own parents, siblings, partners and other important males like coaches and grandparents.

As I sifted through memories of mum relating to me her opinions and experiences of men, the story of overhearing my uncle’s teenage friends talking about girls, for example, I was aware of little alerts getting flagged in my system. Perhaps I haven’t been as trusting of aspects of masculinity as I would otherwise have been.

I also took a look at the most enlightened and encompassing definition of masculine that I could find, I wanted to know what a fully embodied expression of masculine could look like. Devine masculine represents action, direction, movement, responsibility, strength, focus, fatherhood, the sun, generosity, encouragement, material abundance, clarity, intellect, transformation and growth.

I can certainly see, for example, being the eldest living child in my family, responsibility is something I do well, maybe too well. Maybe I even have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and don’t always let others take responsibility for themselves. This is especially important for me as my kids grow and I let go.

While there is undoubtedly more support I am blocking myself from receiving, becoming aware of where I’m blocking it is the first step to unblocking it. There are a myriad of way to change the emotional signature of my beliefs by revisiting these early memories, as I talk about in Want More Energy, Clarity and Time? but it all starts of awareness.   

In diving deeper into my associations with the masculine, I also became aware of some of the wonderful support I’ve received from men over the years.

I don’t have many memories of my grandad, he died when I was fourteen, but I do remember him taking my brother and me to feed horses at a local estate. He didn’t have a lot to say, my grandad, but there was a quiet solidity about him, like a space in which I could just safely stand as who I was without judgment of any kind. And his gentle example of feeding the giant horses helped overcome fears I had inherited from my parents’ who were not animal lovers.

There were also my swim coaches, my diving coach and the lovely gentleman who worked with me in the travel centre in one of my student’s jobs. Those guys were in my corner, and my dedication and success was their reward. They were there to show me how to give others a hand up in life, to pass on what I know.

While I feel like I have only just begun my journey of uncovering the helpful and unhelpful beliefs I have around receiving support from the masculine, it also feels like an important perspective to share. In what areas are you blocking yourself from receiving?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Value Are You Adding to the Currencies in Your Life? How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

It’s simple; I got more energy, clarity and time by doing my inner work.  While that is a nice neat statement, I can also add that I’m more relaxed, have more perspective, more focus in areas that are important to me, a much better sense of self, my health is better, my body and mind look and feel better and my relationships are better. Honestly, life is just better.

What do I mean by inner work?

Well, I mean that I always felt stressed, tired and unhappy and was always looking to fix the things I blamed – usually circumstances and other people. After years of external change to try and fix how I was feeling inside, I realised it was time to stop running from the heaviness that seemed to lurk there and, instead, shine some light on it.

What has brought this to mind is I’ve been doing some catching up with friends as the year approaches its end, swapping our tales of challenge and triumph for the year.  I had been sharing, among other things, the continuing work I’ve been doing rooting out old and unhelpful beliefs, thoughts and behaviours.

One response was “I’m not quite sure I'd want to think of all the crap stuff in the past, I am sure it would be helpful in some ways but in others, I think ... just bash on with life.  I know I need to chill out a bit and laugh and enjoy life more and will perhaps try and focus on that in 2021”.

That is how I used to feel too, I get it. My life was busy, crazy busy, and hard emotionally, I carried a lot. I felt alternatively like superwoman (I think that was the adrenaline) and anxious and irritable (which was probably the cortisol), and I also felt really weighed down (which, it turns out, was all the unhelpful thoughts and feelings that actually were weighing me down).

I’d sit there at 10pm at night, when my partner would switch off the TV, knowing I really needed to go to bed and get some sleep but simultaneously feeling like I was just being swept away on the tide. Meanwhile it felt like there were better possibilities that existed for my life, but it was as if those were happening somewhere just beyond my reach.

I’d often liken my experience of life (until recent years) to swimming through treacle, but it's getting better as I wade through all my unhelpful thought and behaviour patterns. I’ve found that "all the crap stuff of the past" is really one big generalized bucket. 

There was the first seven years of my life, of which I have little conscious memory, but that is precisely when all the internal wiring occurs, so that is where I've been focusing my attention.

It's fascinating, it turns out my life was basically just a repeat loop of experiences that reflected all these crazy beliefs I had picked up as child, a toddler, a baby, and even in utero – in fact there is also a whole lot of inter-generational and collective trauma in there for good measure. It was all just playing out through more and more exaggerated experiences. 

For example, last week I had been away for a few days with the kids while one attended an out-of-town course. When we got back I was busy and, after saying I would make salad for dinner, I then told my partner I was too exhausted and wouldn’t be making one.

His face fell, he was disappointed, but said he’d make it. His facial response had triggered me though; I was irritated and needled him. To give this context, he had also had an extremely busy week so we were both pretty tired and low on energy.

In the (not too distant past) this scenario may have played out with a lot more intensity than it did, given neither of us was in a good place emotionally. Thankfully however, having both done some inner work around conflict, it didn’t get ugly.

That said, I was still aware of an unhelpful belief that was bubbling up within me, the belief that I wasn’t seen. There was a definite voice of a martyr in my head, and what felt like a swelling or stuckness in my throat.  I worked through the emotional intensity on a scrap piece of paper “I am angry because…”, “I am disappointed because…” working my way up the emotional scale until I reached a point of clarity and even the silver linings.

This perhaps makes it obvious how I’ve gained more energy, clarity and time.

Previously I’d have gotten really stuck on something like this for a good few days, because it would have seemed so much bigger than it actually was, because of all the deeper (and heavy, negative) meaning attached to it. I’d have jumped from recognizing I was too tired to make a salad to questioning the entire basis of our relationship and a minor blip would have become major battleground.

That takes a lot of headspace, a lot of energy and creates a much muddied view of life.

There are so many ways to tackle this kind of work, and gain insights, and start to lighten the load. I have taken advantage of many free video mini-series that teachers and authors often use to launch online courses, read many books, listened to many practitioners from many walks of life share their insights and experiences engaged with mentors and made use of other help; there is a veritable smorgasbord of tools, practices and people to engage with in whatever way suits the situation at the time.

How did I know where to begin? I just started to tune in to that innate wisdom that lies within. The truth is that there is only one person who knows what is right for me at any particular moment and that is me, I am my own unique cocktail of genes, experiences and much more. But I had to become practiced at observing my thoughts rather than totally identifying with them.

The way I did that was to stop procrastinating about meditation and start doing it. Every day I take fifteen minutes and breathe, letting my thoughts drift away like a cloud each time I notice them. Doing that has not only helped my nervous system enormously, it’s helped me to really get this sense of my inner – more objective - observer and the thoughts and feelings I’m noticing.

That has helped me to develop my innate sense of intuition, which helps me make better decisions about how to tackle things in my life. It’s helped me to connect with the various kinds of help I’ve needed along the way, most of which would have previously just been ignored.

In Judith Fertig’s novel The Taste of Lemon, the main character’s dad has been absent from her life for many years after he couldn’t cope following his time in Vietnam. Finally, after getting the help he needed with his trauma, he remarked “I feel terrible. I know that is how it’s supposed to work. You have to feel worse before you get better.”

It’s so temporary though, feeling worse, it really is fleeting. More than that, it is so much better than the feeling of dread and running away from the things I feared for years, not even thinking about them fears or as anything more than a dense mass of shadows somewhere back over my shoulder.

Psychologists are really changing the way they deal with trauma, whether it’s the more insidious common variety emotional trauma experienced by most people though the early years of attachment and attunement, or more obvious and heart wrenching trauma.

Terry Real has a three-part model for thinking about the psyche that can help clients understand the aftereffects of trauma and relate to other people from their most thoughtful, mature self. He says “Oftentimes, patients reenact past trauma in their current relationships. Not only is this heartbreaking to watch, the patterns are extremely difficult for client to change without awareness”.

In Brittany Watkins work, while centring on comfort eating and dealing with the tap roots of where that unhelpful behaviour begins, she powerfully and relatively easily addresses the emotional signature of those heavy feelings people have been carrying around.

Jimmy Davis, astounded by the far reaching effects of her methods, said Brittany had told him “If you have a computer and it’s slow… Usually, that just means there are lots of programs running in the background.  When you get rid of the programs, the computer runs how it was designed to.  Humans are the same way.  Your brain installs software (belief systems) based on traumatic events that happen when we are younger. Usually, they are not positive, so your subconscious installs these programs to protect you. Once you get rid of those programs, you run how you are supposed to.”
He added “I realized in that moment everything I had tried to fix previously was simply managing symptoms rather than the actual root cause.”

I relate to this, I've had this drive to tackle the root cause (or dissolve the treacle, so to speak) as I'm crossing the halfway point of my life and I want my body and brain decluttered. This seems necessary to take on this next part of my life that I want to live from that less encumbered and more authentic perspective.

Anne McNaughton said “There is always the point in any month when you get a chance to exhale, catch your breath and make time to hear yourself think. There is some opposition to this, with life fighting back and (whether real or imagined) a belief that time out to hear yourself think is being lazy or unproductive. However there couldn’t be a more productive use of your time.”

With the end of the year and perhaps some downtime in sight, perhaps it’s time to hear yourself think and start becoming aware of some of those unhelpful patterns in your life so that you can gain more energy, clarity and time?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You? Put Money in its Place,  Autonomy – Break Free of Money Fears,  and Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.