Down the Rabbit Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole

Deep down you’ve known something wasn’t quite right inside. So you read a little and you understand a little more.

You decide – I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I must be able to fix it. So you reach out and find a professional to hold your hand through their process to understand a little more. 

You spend a few months, maybe a few years. Maybe its helped your mind understand that maybe your parents yelling profanities in your face had a little to do with it and your first love broke your trust in the opposite sex and that definitely had something to do with it. It’s still gnawing at your insides – something still isn’t quite right.

You decide – I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I must be able to fix it. So get a little help from your search engine and you find something else. You book your first consultation for whoo-whoo energy healing session with a lady who burns incense and judging from her room –  has an endless fascination with colourful rocks. You don’t buy in but you’re willing to try it. After all you must be able to fix it.

You spend a few months, indulging her whimsical dispositions. You feel a little different, maybe a month, maybe two. You saw your folks last December, it comes up again. I must be able to fix it. You hear of something that will definitely help for sure, something that is a little bit out of character. A microdose of an unfamiliar substance. It sounds like a far-reach, but if it comes in a pill form – it surely works. You gather details together with the product. Its been a few good months, you’ve been better and then your partner wants a divorce. You feel it again. Something isn’t quite right. I must be able to fix it.

Your spouse leaves. You feel worst off than you start off. The pain is unbearable and your parents screaming profanities had nothing to do with it this time. There are no more pills left, you gone as far as you can go and the low you’ve hit tops rock bottom. You get under the covers and stay there – it’s been 3 whole days of unrelenting tears and pain turned to body ache. You can’t eat – you’re too busy digesting all these emotions. It comes through, your lifetime of denying these feelings. You offer them up on your alter, one by one as they pour out of every pore

Two hands reaching out to each other, symbolizing openness and connection in human relationships.
A person in deep thought reflecting on communication and connection.

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Receiving Means Giving

Receiving Means Giving

A wise woman told me once that is it important to give if you want to receive. I was fresh on my spiritual path and I had internalized this concept in a very surface-level way. So I thought: ‘Hmmm ok, I want certain things for my life and it will be pretty easy to give things away.’ A very normal and transactional perspective of any twenty-something. 

It was only in my thirties that I really started understanding the concept of giving and receiving. Sometimes we’re unbalanced in one or the other. I couldn’t understand why I was giving so much, living with such an ‘open heart’ but I wasn’t quite receiving yet. I longed to break the salary bracket I was stuck in, I wanted to experience more satisfaction in my relationships, and I wanted a better life experience in general. I gave and gave and gave, sometimes until I was completely empty. 

In my thirties, I realized that the practice of giving was only half of the journey. I would need to travel the other leg of the journey too, and that was the right of receiving. I use ‘practice’ because there is a certain amount of intentionality implied and ‘right’ because there is a certain amount of self-acknowledgment implied. I had realized that my heart was only open to the outside but to myself, it had been shut. I did not know how to receive it, it was a foreign concept to me.

It meant I needed to go a lot deeper with myself, to get real with myself about how much I thought was okay for me to receive. I took a closer look at the opportunities that were given to me by friends, so that I could receive from them and realized I wasn’t really giving them an opportunity to really give to me – I was doing a lot of the giving: of my time, of my energy, of the shiny gifts. I started noticing my behaviour with giving and receiving. 

I started slowly entertaining the idea of receiving, being gifted, and being taken care of. It was the most difficult thing to do. It brought up thoughts of being burdensome to my friends and family. It made me feel shameful, it made me immediately feel like I would be indebted to someone else. I could feel the discomfort in my body as I allowed my mind to imagine this possibility. I realized that I had been avoiding receiving it because it made me feel uncomfortable. Therein lay my work and I started removing all the distorted thinking that got me to believe it was not okay to receive too.

When we allow one without the other, we are closed off. The experience isn’t complete if we don’t experience the other side. If we realise that we are all connected and moving through this experience as one massive wave, we must also realise that when we give to others, we give to ourselves. You know how good it makes you feel to give to someone and see how it impacts them. This is what I mean. In giving to that person, you also get something from the experience. In the same way, when we receive from others, we receive from ourselves. When someone gives you a gift, you would have to be receptive to receiving that gift. There must be some sort of permission you give yourself on some level, in order to receive it. What permission or allowance are you allowing yourself to receive? It’s your giving to yourself. 

 

Once we allow ourselves to give and to receive, we come full circle with ourselves.

 

Questions To Reflect On: 

  • Are you open to fully giving from your heart?
  • Are you giving with pure intent? Or are you expecting to get something back? 
  • Are you allowing yourself to receive from other people and yourself? 
  • What feelings are you wanting to avoid by constantly giving to others?
  • What feelings are you wanting to avoid by constantly receiving from others?

In love and gratitude,

A woman's hands holding a flower, symbolizing the act of giving and receiving
quote from the post
A woman in a meditative pose, reflecting on the balance between giving and receiving.

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What to do when life gets in the way?

What to do when life gets in the way?

You know this one all too well: 

you plan to the most minute detail, to account for everything in your life until it throws you a curveball! Life’s sense of humour, when we take our lives too seriously, can really test what we’re made of. 

What do we usually do in situations like these? 

We go into a frenzy, we stress about how things will work out, we internalise the situation, and feel shame or guilt for being human. This is our default process, our unconscious and very mammalian stress response kicking into gear.

How do we respond differently to these outside circumstances that are so loud and demanding of our immediate attention?

  • We go in the opposite direction. 
  • We stand our ground firmly and how we do that is by steadying our nervous system.
  • We plant ourselves firmly in our bodies by consciously becoming aware of our breath. We allow our breath to deepen as it takes us deeper into our bodies.
  • We may play some soothing music.
  • We may feel like crying, laughing or screaming (this is the release response – letting go of all that tension that is welling up inside the body). You don’t want to miss out on this opportunity to let all that worry and stress out of your body, even if it takes you to a feeling of complete powerlessness. That is just the call for you to surrender. 

Usually when we have some kind of release, we allow ourselves to become emptier and more receptive to the information and guidance that is waiting for us. It comes in the form of inspiration to go in a new direction or to take a different action step. We may find that what has just gone wrong wants us to apply a completely new solution. All new information of the highest quality is waiting for your receptivity to be open and trusted before it can be recognised by our centers for cognition.

Most of the time, we want to know what this detour has happened, because we don’t have all the information available to us at the time. Have you ever looked back at the circumstances of your past and realised that certain things needed to happen, no matter how painful or inconvenient at the time? Looking back you can see why you were meant to stay in a place you were longing to get out of (maybe you met someone really amazing as a result or found a job that is exactly right for you in that place). We can never see the whole picture, we can only see the square that we have our feet on at the time. The thing about life is that it is constantly unfolding and we won’t ever ‘know’ for sure how things will pan out. Our work lies in trusting the path of our unfolding and also letting go of any preconceptions about our futures that are based on past fears.

Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. – John Lennon

Individual practicing deep breathing meditation for stress relief
Quote on What to do when life gets in the way?
Hands releasing light symbolizing the emotional release and letting go of stress

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Attention

Attention

The world our five senses engages with can be misleading. It will usually try to pull us in as many directions as it possibly can if we haven’t cultivated a relationship with our inner world. We can absolutely get stuck in the world our 5 senses would have us prioritised. 

What I have realized this week while I focused on my work schedule and daily duties, is that it was starting to pull me away from my inner world, largely because my attention was so focused on the outside world, without maintaining my attention on my inner world at the same time (when we do this in our daily life, it becomes a sort of meditative state that we move from). As a result, I started feeling frazzled and very unlike myself. 

Where we place our attention is where energy flows. You don’t have to take my word for it. Try it: Put all your focus on your left hand. Notice your fingers. Notice all the lines on your skin, notice all the tiny hairs. Place all your attention there for 5 whole minutes. Soon you’ll start to feel the flow of blood in your hand and fingertips. You’ll start to feel an aliveness there in your left hand and soon all that exists is your left hand.

It is the same thing with thinking. If we place our focus on a certain way of thinking and hold it there, soon we will experience that way of thinking. For example, we can do this by thinking about a pleasant thought (having a great day) if we keep placing our thinking in this place, our emotions tend to follow. Then watch what happens to our bodies. We start to notice ease happening in our body, the more we focus on having a great day. We may even smile. 

If we keep coming back to this thought of having a great day, we may even find that what would normally annoy us doesn’t have the same effect. This is because all our energy is focused on having a great day. It is impossible for us to have a contradictory experience. This is the nature of our attention. The more you do this, the more you start to notice just how much power you have over your own life experience regardless of the situations or circumstances you are in. Your attention is a powerful tool to get you directing your energies to where you would like them to go. 

‘’You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” (Marcus Aurelius)

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