Take a Small Break from Your Life to Restart from Your Authentic Core

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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