Here is what I’ve learned so far:

• Empowerment happens in deep knowing, not loud action.

• Being absolutely clear and coherent creates boundaries without a need for fight or words.

• Differentiation and individuality can happen while simultaneously feeling deep connection.

• The unexpected can simply happen.

• Digesting the senses is kind of like being a breatharian that also enjoys food.

• Emotions are like google maps for the heart and soul.

• Self value is built through existence not accomplishment.

• Acting on intuition without questioning it creates trust.

• The unknown feminine as a companion to everyday life is terrifying!

• The simple act of being can become nourishing. Sit still. Wait. It will come.

• The feeling of flow in the body is a sensual form of self care.

• The support that exists in the universe is bigger than a tiny human brain can imagine.

All this after four weeks. I am now completely hooked into discovering my everyday feminine.

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I am pretty sure it is obvious to anyone who is observing the power in the world right now that its just a little bit…imbalanced. You can use other words to describe what’s going on that are more incendiary and disconnected but does that really help anything? Does talking about what’s going on, separating the self from reality, or reacting in intense forms of separation really support anything but the imbalanced power? Today I am focusing on one aspect of the solution - embodying into your femininity as an everyday truth.

One of the super powers of femininity is its ability to differentiate without contest. This is because the essence of the divine feminine is compassionate acceptance. Right now the world at large is too merged with the imbalanced masculine (greed, power, wealth and all distortions of the masculine) to understand that what has to change internally is not to attack but to accept with an answering power of connection.

Think of the phrase “fighting fire with fire.” When life gets scary, our human inclination is to react with the same energy that is scaring is. Community is found in acts of separation. Blaming, hating, judging, feeling superior, not tolerating, avoiding, feeling confused…the lower self grabs on to pretty much anything it can when society does not feel stable. The impulse to react within the known has to shift into a willingness to swim into the depths of mystery. Only in the differentiated unknown can we find a sustainable solution.

Yes there are problems within patriarchal paradigms. Women need to find their voice. The weak and underprivileged need to stop being oppressed. I have literally never heard someone talk about any of these topics without embracing the masculine. Fighting against men or intolerance. Identify as a feminist. Judge the oppressors. Identify the self in polarity. The known safety of the masculine continues to control our reactions and interactions.

The energy of the masculine is what we know. It’s mostly yang with a little bit of yin. There’s value in push, the outward flow into action. It exists all around us as the currency for our culture, our society, our basic needs, our work, our way to relate. We are raised in masculine constructs and taught to behave in the masculine. Our structures are prevalently masculine. It is the role of the masculine to contain the feminine in a safe way and allow the feminine to flourish under its being. Control has taken over.

The energy of the feminine is not lacking in our lives, it’s just not as easily accessible. It’s yin with a bit of yang. It is discovered in stillness and depth. It yields while also staying true to what it is. The feminine is abundance through the current of loving compassion. Femininity is presence without action, emotion with flow, clarity through acceptance. Femininity needs the boundaries of masculinity just as much as masculinity needs the clarity of femininity. One does not exist without the other. Our structures allow for femininity but tapping into it does take a conscious disconnection from what is comfortable.

The Nature of Femininity

The divine feminine has a specific energetic that is very different than the male. It is found in the yin, the depths of darkness and water, the flow of abundant life and creation. But remember the symbol of the tai ji, the grand ultimate. Within the yin there is yang and within the yang there is yin. To be feminie is to trust the masculine, to rely on it, to rightfully use its nature, to allow flow between the two dynamic forces.

陰 yīn

The Chinese character yin depicts the shady side of a hill. Cosmologically, yin is synonymous in its characteristics with 道 dào (the way) , in that it is the soft, receptive, and quiescent aspect of life. In humans, our storehouse of primordial yin is the ocean out of which all of our manifestations in life are drawn. Yin is the basis of the bones and the nervous system, which may be thought of as deriving their strength and integrity from our primordial source ... Yin comprises the physical substrate of the body.

Lonny Jarrett - Nourishing Destiny

Because of how effortlessly available so many of our social constructs are, the feminine has to get loud for us to yield to it. The masculine supersedes our default way of being and the feminine occasionally overpowers it. Anyone who has either experienced the process of natural childbirth or natural death has witnessed the power of the divine feminine. The waiting. The terror. The unknown arising. The beauty incarnating. While it is easier to open to the vast power of the feminine in the midst of great transitions, it is also terrifying.

Is our culture imbalance calling loud enough to invite you into choosing transition?

Are people ready to start to bring true feminine energy into their every day lives?

I’m not sure. What do you think? I think it’s time to embrace a leap of faith.

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New experiences are how shadow mending is verified. In relation to the world at large right now I wonder if something new is growing within the obvious repeating patterns of war and hatred. Doing shadow work means creating embodied change. The unfamiliar can only arise through recognition. I’m questing…is the everyday feminine already awakening? We as a species may be expecting something more profound, more grand than the simple invitation to embrace into the nature of stasis.

Who among us is ready to bear the foundation for actual lifestyle change is the world’s current uprising of shadow? The world simply needs more people to hold a cornerstone of support for human evolution. Those who feel called may have to be to alone for awhile to awaken those who can’t make the shift. Feminine power needs to be uprooted from our own psyches and embraced as more than a want and more than a masculine overlay. Femininity has to become a right. A need. A way of being. Only through this will we discover embodied equilibrium.

Take note here that I said PEOPLE. Not women. We have two currents in our body and you can consider them however you feel comfortable philosophically - light/dark, yin/yang, divine/evil, and what else? Male/female. The power imbalances we are seeing in the outside world directly reflect our own inability to balance power currents in our own bodies, in our relationships, in our work, and in our lives. The effects of these imbalances are merely rippling outward to affect society, culture, jobs, politics, lifestyle, relationships. The world needs to acknowledge that wholeness is not actually based in duality but rather our ability to create connection from separation.

The feminine is not perfect. It is an aspect of the fractioned whole. Imbalanced feminine power would be a different kind of toxicity if left to run unhindered. The movement that the shadow is seeking is a return to a state of connection, not another imbalance asserting itself as the answer. Femininity is not about winning. It is about being. It thrives in expressing. It is grounded in deep knowing. It is slowness in a fast world. It has compassion for hatred. It is security within insecurity. It’s the spiral that is asking you to wind itself into your life.

The thread that makes this whole dynamic difficult is that masculine energetics have overtaken what we believe to be structured reality. Can you imagine a doctor simply telling you “I don’t know” and sitting with you in the discomfort of that? Could you have patience for a teacher who asks you to find the solution to a problem without telling you how to find the answer? Would you trust a boss you asked you to motivate inside yourself without giving you a deadline? Who would you be without people in power telling you who you are?

We are more comfortable letting the feminine in as SHOULDS in our lives. Structures and facts are the foundation for how everything functions in the world. Many of us know that the answer to balance is in the feminine but choosing it feels so dissonant to real life that we just give up and succumb to what is easiest. This is not a victim statement in my mind. This is a simple surrendering to the current of the real. It is succumbing to what is accessible.

Embodying feminine currents in life is going to feel like work. It is understandably terrifying. It will feel like giving up, breaking down, losing at first. If it wasn’t so scary, more people would be doing it already. My question for you is, can you be good enough here and simply try without expectation? Can you let your feminine arise without an agenda?

We spend a large percentage of our day in the imbalanced masculine field of yang, push, struggle, fight, act, engage, do. Simply being on a screen is draining. To actively come into balance, you have to actively seek and embrace the everyday feminine. Eventually you will get comfortable enough with it to let it leak into who you want to be as an everyday self instead of who you think you SHOULD be.

Embodying the feminine in theory isn’t work but…every had a baby? I think for now we all just need to admit that it needs to be a bit hard. It should feel against the grain. It won’t feel natural and easy to let the energy of the feminine run as a balanced current in our bodies. The masculine is what we know. It’s how we’ve been not simply raised but how we’ve conditioned to engage with life. Our self identity is so wrapped up in masculine energetics that we cannot just undo years of training. We need the masculine but with less overdrive.

Beware the Trap of Idealization

Idealizing the feminine will make the everyday feminine harder to embody. Our everyday flawed human selves can practice engaging in feminine currents. Femininity can destroy just as much as it can create. Balance is never going to come through the destruction of the other, but through acceptance of the other in a field of universal understanding. We live in a world where the mix of dual energy exists to give us clarity on what wholeness feels like. Too much of one is just as diseased as too much of the other. Every person’s balance has to be uniquely discovered and expressed. Letting go of expectation and allowing ourselves to curiously explore the energetic of the feminine is part of how to heal the rift we currently have within us and around us.

My personal idealized feminine is Amma. Here is this deeply embodied feminine heart of a woman who travels the world giving free hugs! It does not matter who you are, what you’ve done, or how you show up. Amma freely embraces you with all of her loving soul. Here’s the thing. I have a husband, children, a dog, cats, farm animals. If I embraced that kind of being all the time my chickens would live in my kitchen and my children would have never moved out. I personally would struggle with that much giving because receiving is a life lesson for me. To know Amma exists and humans have that potential is deeply grounding for my faith in humanity. But I can’t be her. I have to be me and me is going to be type A sometimes and overly controlling other times and disconnected at points. I’m not a saint. I’m just a human trying to find balance in the life I lead.

I remember years ago I idealized communal living. I wanted to step out of the money making system and live in a world where communities of people cared about each other and let go of the exhausting striving for money and success that we consider the threshold to cross in growing up. The community living experiment, for me, was an epic failure. Ironically it was because all the people I was trying to do it with were raised as capitalists and no matter how hard we tried none of us could get out of the “me” mentality enough to actually nourish the whole. Decades later I live in a country that understands the value of the “we” and the “me.” I found a structure that represents balance. It took awhile. I had to both step out of my idealism and also embrace truths of human nature. I didn’t need to reinvent anything. I simply needed to expand my seeking.

Committing to the Everyday Feminine

Now that you’ve read my theoretical thoughts. Let’s move into the actual practice of embodying the feminine as a lifestyle. Remember. There’s no need to invent anything. Merely expand your seeking.

All of those lurking shoulds come into play here. Get familiar with your own. Here is a list to consider.

• I should use social media less.

• I should slow down.

• I should not base my self worth on what I do but rather who I am.

• I should be better at not losing myself to other people.

• I should know who I am.

• I should trust my emotions and let them guide me.

• I should meditate.

• I should think less.

• I should be more present with my loved ones or my children.

• I should be more loving.

• I should receive support better.

• I should feel abundant.

• I should be more sensual.

• I should embrace being vulnerable.

• I should be more creative.

• I should trust my intuition.

We all do actually have feminine energy lurking in us waiting to be assimilated in our daily life, our work, our self identity, and in our relationships. The feminine has been conditioned out of our default way of being. Healing modalities and concepts tend to embrace the feminine because being out of balance is the source of so many of our emotional and physical dis-eases. To rediscover our femininity, we have to step towards engaging in trying out the shoulds that work for us until they become natural for us.

To consciously step out of the flow of life into the deeper you involves a rebirth, a redefine, a rework, an exploration. Maybe you don’t like to meditate but you love laying down on the ground in the sun, listening to insects and birds. That could be your practice. Perhaps you like to stare into your phone for hours of every day not thinking. Experiment with thought free time without the phone. A tendency to freak out emotionally but not have emotions when “functioning” could be a sign that your doorway into the feminine is to let yourself have your every day emotions. Do you see why I write that the doorway into your own unique feminine has to be discovered by you and no one can tell you how to do it? It is as complicated as you are.

As you start to embody the everyday feminine, your lifestyle is going to change. What you define as your work is going to shift. Who you are and how you express yourself will become something previously undiscovered. What noruishes you is going to be different. Needs will be re-identified. Life as you know it will change. You will be more free to be your whole self.

The everyday feminine is going to feel outside of social norms. For instance, crying in public or at work. Can you imagine feeling safe enough with your emotional state to express and not suppress? Notice right now what restrictions your brain is already coming up with to justify NOT doing this. This is your conditioning into the masculine structure of being. Embracing the feminine is a subtle act of revolution - to allow space for a balanced sense of self to become part of the cultural real.

Consider the journey I am inviting you to adopt through the following poem:

Yang-Yin Poem

By Kate Lightstone

The fighter in me taught me to fight
Taught me to hang on when the Sun was too hot
the fields too dry
the water too little

The fighter in me taught me not to let things lay;
to pick up sharp, broken pieces
and handle them with grace
so that I may piece together a reflection
I understand

The warrior in me showed me that I can defend this temple
a fortress impenetrable
that can stand on her own
no you many not hold my hand
no you may not help
I can do it
I can do it

My fighter grew tired
pushing walls out around me
so far out that eventually a beautiful moat appeared
that no friend nor fiend could wade through

I grew lonely
the warrior tired of pushing
my fighter tired of the fight
my soul so thrust in overdrive
I recognized no part of me

I grew silent
the warrior grew sleepy, body forced into rest

and in that space
small stirrings of my womb began to whisper

I could fight no longer
but I could write

I could fight no longer
but I could sing

I could push and climb and scrap no more
but I could lift paint to a canvas and my voice to a note
and begin to pour a soft kind of salve onto the walls I had so steadfastly built

And when I believed I was losing sight of the Self that I knew
painting the walls with softness
A thousand tiny flowers pressed up gently through the soil
where I’d waged my last battles and whispered:

“Give us a chance to grow”

What could I build when I was not fighting?
What could I grow when I was not tearing down?

What could I unleash into the world that would heal more wounds
than any walls could have prevented?

I did not know.
And so the flowers whispered on:

What if you were soft?
What if were gentle with yourself
the way you are with children
What if you gave that little you
a chance to grow?
what would you know?

And so I did what scared me most —
I lowered my bridge
crossed the moat of my own making
and walked out towards what I had avoided for as long as I could remember:
Companionship
Exposure
Connection

I will always have a warrior’s spirit
in my nature
in my blood

But I now choose to create from my experience
a path for teaching
no walls of mud

Although at times I try to hide
within the confines of my fears
I choose move forward
open by choice
guided by womb-stirrings
growing at the borderlands of love
I show up here
I am here
I am here

Eventually we all will be called into the feminine. It is present all around us and supports our presence on this planet. Perhaps you already know of a practice that brings you into your feminine being. Maybe you want to play and explore your way into having more. Trust yourself. Find your path. Create more balance. The world needs your presence.

Meditative Offerings

I am giving you two meditations to facilitate tapping into female energy. The first will allow you to feel into your feminine with the safety of the masculine binding it. The other will allow you to feel into your imbalanced feminine without boundaries.

Here is a meditation into flow with balance. For this meditation you will need to be lying down. Feel free to add some zest to it by being outside on the ground or as close as you can get to it.

For the second meditation, sit in cross legged position or a chair with a straight back. You need to have access to your full body as a sensational being.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to share, comment, and like this post if it speaks to you.

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Think about your life for a second. Think about how you THINK about other people. Think about the thoughts you have around your friend groups, your coworkers, your social groups, your community. The following questions can support getting clarity around your thoughts?

• How do you relate to groups of people as an individual?

• Who are you to people?

• What is your persona around groups?

• Do you feel like yourself or do you feel like you have to be someone other than yourself to be in groups of people?

• Do groups of people drain you, energize you, or have no affect on you?

• What, if any, kind of people do you instinctually feel connected to or want to connect to?

• What kind of people do you avoid connection with?

• What makes you feel like an “us”? Belief systems? Life style choices? Ideals?

• What makes you feel an other as a “them”? Politics? Gender? Wealth? Status? Class?

• What are the personal judgements or beliefs that you hold that allow you to be justified in separating yourself from an other without getting to know them?

  

Belonging

We all want to belong. We also all inherently resist belonging. When I facilitate groups, my main interest is centered on feeling into the participants’ continuum of belonging. Our tensile relationship to belonging is personal and, well, subconsciously devious. The ways we resist belonging define how we relate to the limiting beliefs enmeshed in our “us” versus “them” mentality.

Whenever we find ourselves in a new group of people, we instinctually will begin the process of inserting ourself into the group and also extricating ourself from it. This process is habitual. The insertion and extrication currents occur simultaneously. The desire to belong or not belong is a product of a society that does not know how to truly accept people for who and what they are. We cannot force this socially taught dichotomy into embodied connection without owning our own part in it through exploring our own relationship to belonging over and over again..

It’s pretty obvious that “us” versus “them” is being used by media, politics, religion, and society itself to highlight or evoke a polarization. It seems like culture is more interested in propagating the split than healing it. We justify reasons to be against others, to find the otherness of others, to forget the human struggles that connect us all. Our insecure self secretly and, when we are honest with ourselves, not so secretly likes the world of “us” and “them.” Why do we do prefer separation to connection?

Why is it easier to create a relationship to “them” than it is to remember that we are all interconnected in a universal “us”?

There is a force in the world that wants us to root into an “us” versus “them” reality. One the surface, this is not a force that sees value in the heart or in the interconnection we have to all that surrounds us. This force does not seem to care about the future of our children or a world where we as humans evolve into understanding how to cultivate peace and love. At first thought, the force wants us to align with “them” and, consequently, hate.

Looking deeper, this force is actually inherently positive. Why? We are born with the gift of choice. It is one of the pillars of our existence as human beings. Only in knowing how to separate can we make a choice to unify. We need shadow to arise in its darkest forms in order to cultivate unconditional connection as well as to consciously choose love. The “us” versus “them” creation force is a force of deep trust and surrender into our own choices, no matter how much we may suffer as a a result of what we choose.

Stepping outside of the demand of your own programmed “them” requires an evolution that moves from awareness into a sense of choice.

The Allure of a Closed Heart

Here’s the problem. In reality, there is so much energy and habit that can go into a “them” mentality. A “them” way of being has an energetic building and often a release to it. This process becomes addictive on multiple levels. The “them” has a churning sense of polarity that can be custom built to satisfy your own viewpoint and provides a clear corridor to avoidance of all your fears. It also has the power to connect you to your own wounded disconnection without ever needing to do the work of connecting. In a way the “them” can feel like your own internal algorithm is building a case against oneness or connection that is completely specific to you. Once you have picked your flavor of “them,” the “them” will appear not only in your physical life but your digital life as well. It’s creepy.

Have you ever wondered why we humans tend towards heart problems, circulatory diseases, and blood coagulation issues that get more likely as we age? This is because we close ourself off to our own heart over time. We harden. This is the natural side of living in a society that does not push us into greater degrees of acceptance and any true seeing of other people. We get to categorize into separation and avoid looking without and within.

Before we know it, we are habitualized to a life that is disconnected from our hearts and only aligns with solutions by closing down even more. I sometimes wonder if this is another side effect of our tendency to live in our own heads. The science of heart-brain communication reminds us that no matter how much we want to believe in the brain as THE solution to our problems, we cannot live a healthy life without the input of our heart. Why then do we prefer to listen over and over again to our brain and avoid our heart?

Your closed heart is safe. It is protected. It knows how to relate to the world in black and white. It seeks reasons to stay closed so that it doesn’t have to feel vulnerable. A closed heart would rather yearn for things to change than actually change anything. Intimacy, connection, love, and compassion are easier to desire than to create. To transform and experience trust, deep connection, surrender, intimacy, vulnerability, and to fall into a long term love are all concepts that involve a lot of risk.

Point to Consider: How many times do you tell yourself that the change you desire is too hard for you or will require too much work on your part?

We are more likely to seek out reasons to close the heart and keep it closed. We rationalize how to shut down and shut out others. This is the personal appeal to the “them” mentality that is stronger than our own desire to change. We use this against ourself. We conclude that negative sensations and the feeling of negative emotions is an excuse to shut down our heart. When we find reasons to cultivate a “them” we are aligning with our own inertia in service to our closed heart.

In addition to this lure of the closed heart, there is also the release found in the energy that goes into the “them.” Just feel into your own relationship to any “them.” Start to think about all the reasons you are justified in feeling this way. Let yourself feel the separation and the pull it has in you. As you do this, notice how everything gets activated. Feel how it grows and changes, getting stronger. Feel how good it can feel. Patriarchy, feminism, racism, war, politics, the environment. What gets your negative juices moving? Let yourself feel it here with me now. Feel the plesure. Feel the possibility. Feel the sense of choice.

Your energy is moving, yes. It is moving in a stream, or possibly even a flood, of negativity.

This is not a risky movement for your energy. It is a familiar way to push the world away and to make yourself important. It is a safe way to be separate and not have to go deep or self reflect too much. Your ego can run on this energy for a long time without ever getting sick of your own thoughts. Any negative feelings or uncomfortable realizations can simply get pushed into the abundant energetic stream of “them.” It is so easy! It takes zero mindfulness, no attention or self honesty, and has a scary familiarity to it that can be rationalized and justified in any direction you want to take it. Quite frankly, it is one of the most addictive ways of being we have available to us. It is also so easy to fall into and believe.

Hatred spreads. It grows like a tumor. What may start as a simple seed of thought or an evasion of feeling easily becomes systemically narcotic.

We can feel hatred in a location in the body that doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with our heart. We can hate with our entire being. We can radiate hate. We can run hatred inside us so that it becomes more familiar to us than the truth of our own being. Hatred keeps us safe. It keeps us separate. Hatred keeps us feeling alive while just as loudly killing us off. The more we run hate inside us, the harder it is going to be to trace it to the root — our own beautiful and vulnerable heart.

The Root of Hate

Inside us all is a core wound that says “I cannot be loved for who I truly am.” It’s not a hard wound to end up with. How it originated in any person’s creation story simply tracks back to a time when we expressed our self and someone rejects us.

We all get rejected at some point in our upbringing by someone who is really important to us. It’s not hard to create this wound in a child. As a parent, I’d say it’s actually impossible to NOT create this wound in our children. The moment this wound occurs, we decide that we have to separate a part of our core self from our self. To be loved and accepted, we avoid feeling the wound by creating a “them” inside our own being. We separate from our own innate “I.” How many times we are exposed to feeling unloved or rejected and how we are exposed to this wound defines how potent our sense of “them” and our loss of “I” becomes.

This “them” that forms inside of us is saying that something has to die inside us for our “I” to survive in the world.

We choose hatred because without a boundary between “I” and “them”, we believe we will be killed by the other. Our hatred keeps us in control through choice. Hatred is a black and white vision of reality that does not have any bandwidth for grey. Hatred is choosing death over vitality. Our hatred knows that to close our heart is the ultimate act of avoidance

Hatred is easily referred to as a closing of the heart. I am going to argue it is important to take this easy supposition one step further.

Hatred is a closing off of a relationship to not just our heart, but our soul seat - the place inside us that connects our core self to our heart’s expression. Our soul seat is where our soul’s purpose and soul’s longings reside. Our soul seat is the sacred space of our heart. All of our heart energy feeds into the soul seat. The soul seat brings us into a place of individual knowing of value and uniqueness as a necessary part of the world as it is.

Our soul seat answers the question, “How am I meant to share my soul with the world?” How often do you ask yourself this question? How often do you get an answer?

By opening to hatred we are shutting ourself out from our own soul’s purpose, the reason we are here on the planet at this moment as humans. When we hate, we are rationalizing ourselves into believing that we have to compete to survive. We have to fake who we are to live. We are choosing to be killed off to maintain control and avoid pain. We are creating an eclipse between our truest expression of self and our life.

Self Hate

Whether or not you are more comfortable internalizing or externalizing your hatred is based on how you process the wounds of your soul. The root of all hatred starts within as an avoidance of pain and a subsequent deep rejection of our self. From there, some of us are more comfortable running energy that cloaks the rejection or externally feeds off of it. All hate stems from the initial impulse to hate the self.

For some of us it is kind of like a moment of duh to read think about the root of hatred as self hate. To say that all hatred begins as self hate is more obvious to those of us who are full of self hate. You are the people who tend to internalize hatred into self hate.

For those who struggle to make this connection between hatred and self hate, the comfortable relationship to hate is going to be in externally running of its energy - hating others. You may find you are addicted to the releasing energy of hate. For those of us who disassociate from hate, there is even more deeply ingrained self hatred.

In those of you who disassociate or who cannot admit hate, you are rejecting your soul’s purpose at its deepest level. Your soul path feels like it cannot even be present in the world because of the hate that exists here as a beacon of light.

Whatever combination of hate you have, recognizing the fact that personal work on hate needs to begin within can be a hard reality to swallow. It’s so much easier to demand that the world change before we soften our heart to our soul.

Hating Those We Love

This type of relational hate is more subtle than the habitual hatred we choose in our desire for space and defining self. Feeling hatred towards those we love actually stems from wanting to protect ourself from deepening into an unconditional love. Sometimes we love someone so much that we hate how they don’t give their own self the space or permission we give to them. We love someone so much that we hate the choices that they make to close themselves off to who they truly are.

Sometimes we hate people we love for not being able to deeply see us or actually for deeply seeing us. We want to be valued without taking risk. We would rather hate someone who seems not to value us than soften ourselves enough to ask to be valued. We are afraid to risk the person we love’s rejection and so we suppress our self. When someone deeply sees us, they may believe that we are capable of something we do not believe we can achieve. We may enter into hate because we do not want to admit a truth about ourself that is necessary to open into deeper self love.

Hating those we love is saying, “if I can love you, why can’t you love me?” or “I hate you for not being able to love me the way I love you.” The conclusion we come to is to hate as a response that avoids fully surrendering to the force of unconditional love. Hating those we love is wanting to be seen more. Hating those we love is also sometimes not being able to love someone in their choice to shut themselves off from the love that is shared between you.

Hating those we love can also be a side effect of jealousy or envy. In this case, we are reacting to something that we think we can’t have that someone we love does have. For example, we may hate someone we love for being able to easily engage in self care or for being effortlessly artistic. We may not at first feel this as hate. We may even, in new relationships, feel this as admiration, lust, and a reason to fall in love. Yet as love progresses this same thing we once admired changes to hate when we feel like we cannot have what we want in our own life.

We may wish that the person we love feels more value in their own achievments or pay more attention to what they can effortlessly accomplish. We may want recognition for our own unique skills. All of these negative feelings get confused in wounds and defenses and our inability to understand and appreciate our own precious uniqueness.

The Wake Up Call of Hate

Our inability to be our self or our lack of willingness to know our self is the root of hate. If you think about it, this process inevitable. This process is also completely ordinary in our human world. This is why I believe that there is a connective force of awakening and choice behind it. Hatred is, at its root, pure love. Without it, we will not understand how to choose love and how to express our truest self as love.

Hatred is asking for light. Hatred is begging for your own slowing down and seeking of an inner truth that has been lost to you. Inside hatred is an impulse towards something that is judged and denied. This impulse is often one of vulnerability, innocence, connection, and self expression. This is the place inside us that wants to open to its birthright of loving everything, everyone, and all that is true about the world. The birthright of worth, expression, and value. This is need in its purest form. The need to be needed and the need to be loved.

Often when we try to wake up to hatred, fear comes up. The fear is trying to tell us that we WILL lose ourselves if we open. This is the voice of separation that is trying to keep out change. The ego is strong in this voice. We need to be able to hear the fear for what it is and acknowledge that in embracing it we will actually find ourselves. The fear is convincing us that to risk anything but what we know will cause us pain. The desire to shift hatred means we have to be able to accept this fear as part of a process.

• First, we get to experience the emotion that feels like a choice - hate.

• Then, we have to surrender to the true emotion underneath that is running the hatred itself - fear.

• Last, we get to choose to seek inside and speak to our own heart and soul and ask ourself what we need to be needed and what we need to be loved?

The following is my own meditation with my self hatred. (FYI - Paid subscribers get a guided meditation at the end of this post.)

I feel hatred as a conduit of darkness inside me. My urge to do something about the darkness is impulsively greater than my desire to sit and tolerate it, let alone get to know it. I want to move it, act on it, not be absorbed by it. I want to push away and not feel vulnerable. I must tolerate all of these currents of sensation to go deeper. Hatred is my place of death. Hatred spirals into negative thoughts and emotions all on its own. To sit in the space inside myself that hates is to accept myself as dead. To fight it brings aliveness…but also spreads the death.

Instead I bring in unconditional love and say to this space, “I want to know me here.” I feel a lightening and also a hiding. The feeling is more tolerable. I must remember to withstand everything without making anything bigger than it needs to be. I sense my own loss of innocence, my surprise at how cruel others can be to me. I sense my innate distrust of the world with my pure naive soul. I wonder what care is. I feel acceptance towards my own soul’s vulnerability. I feel a need to be important inside my own heart. I ride the subtle waves of opening and do not ask for my self to be any greater than what I can handle. Flowing through me in this moment is what is, not what I want it to be. I step aside and surrender to the current.

Transformation: Is it Possible?

When you decided that there were parts of you that you needed to hide, disown, fake, avoid, or forget your own path towards hatred began. It is impossible to live in this world without the impulse to hate. To transform it, you have to own how deep hatred resides inside your being. You have to recognize your tendency to push away as an attempt to claim space and also your tendency to reject parts of yourself to avoid pain. Both of these inclinations engender hate.

Hatred that is ready to be transformed will feel like a forgetting of a self. When hatred feels like forgetting, it doesn’t have that addictive quality to it anymore. Hatred starts to feel bad while a coinciding feeling of choosing differently arises. It fills the black hole inside that is our ultimate separation from your own light and path. When you can build your container to feel this type of hatred, you no longer want to nourish it and addictively run it’s energy. Instead you want to awaken to your inner self and acknowledge it’s preciousness. You break the shadow cycle of self sabotage.

The following is a meditation to explore the current of hate inside you. Please Please Please go easy on yourself if/when you choose to do this meditation. It can be pretty scary and dark here. Perhaps you need to invoke a spiritual ally or protect yourself and your space. Do something conscious that shows you are strong enough to withstand the feeling of hatred and explore what it is opening you to. Remember that making the feeling of hate bigger is going to be instinctual and noticing that current without aligning with it is going to deepen your transformation into what else is present.

Breath is the single greatest element you have for not simply living, but thriving.

You can use breath and take it for granted.

OR.

You can choose to use breath to actively engage differently with your life.

Breath is the simplest tool you have at your disposal to shift your reactions, your thoughts, your emotional charges, and your trauma. Breath can be used to regulate hormones, to shift nervous system responses, to clear trauma, to stop repetitve (and totally unhelpful) thought cycles, to engage in the present moment. Breath Breath is simply waiting for you to use it, to be aware of it, and to harness it. The choice is so simple…isn’t it?

Breathe more. Breathe different. Befriend the breath. Become the breath.

So often people want to face their problems with their brain. This same brain that is so busy thinking about how to resolve itself while keeping itself necessary. The brain is coming from a belief that there is something wrong with you. It is the source point of your limiting beliefs. It creates your problems because what it knows is not what you need.

The breath is oriented completely around everything being right with you. This is why it is such an amazing teacher and crucible for change. You may instinctually want to turn to what you lack as a way to create what you want. When you turn to the breath, you are orienting toward what is open, available, and present. The breath is all and more, known and unknown, friend and instigator. It is a gift waiting to be opened and explored.

Today I have a breath meditation for you that is used to transform fear in an embodied way without getting triggered by fear as an emotion. The meditation can be used to remove blocks of stagnant fear inside your body so that you can feel your core more clearly. When fear can be felt as an embodied sensation, you are teaching yourself how to be in positive alignment with your nervous system.

I also have included for you a discussion on differentiating what you consider breath work and what you consider breath meditation. Both are valuable tools for transformation.

• Breath work is used to shift your relationship to your present moment in the midst of life with all of its busyness, stress, decision making, reactions, and work.

• Breath work helps you differention between reaction and self.

• Breath work allows you to make a choice in the moment to come out of pattern and into change.

AND

• Breath meditation creates cellular memory.

• Breath meditation teaches you to engage in alternate states of being through different methods of breathing.

• Breath meditation teaches you how to get out of your head and into your body.

• Breath meditation creates a focal point for your mind so that you can breathe and notice sensation.

Both breath work and breath meditation are essential for transformation, for creating the you that you want to be and living the life that you want to have.

Ok. So here goes. I hope you enjoy this meditation. The side effect of this meditation when done to completion is a complete let go and relaxation of tension and a return to the self.

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Have you stringently controlled your thoughts because you want to make sure whoever reads them doesn’t judge you?

Do you obsessively think positive thoughts because you know that negative ones have more power?

When you get something you really want do you wait for the other shoe to drop?

What’s the common denominator in all of these questions? Authority.

Exploring your unique relationship to the known and unknown aspects of authority key you into the more subtle ways you resist personal empowerment. In today’s world, where power dynamics are coming out of shadow and authority is often in projection, getting clear about your own ability to relate to power is doing the work of the collective.

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The Images

You have been taught how to engage with authority and power. How you have been treated by authority and people with power over you affected your reaction to those who yield the staff of responsibility on your behalf. The unconscious holdings in our family system around authority have formed your ability to feel your own inner authority as trustworthy or something to suppress. All of the authority figures in our lives creates our images around authority.

Can you draw a picture in your mind of what you see when you consider a quintessential authority figure?

• Does authority have your best interest at heart?

• Who do you have to be to deserve a positive relationship to authority?

• Who do you turn into when you no longer care about what authority is telling you?

• Is authority demanding something of you?

The images you have around authority relfects how you react to the different types of authority. Strong authority, weak authority or missing authority all have their own triggers. Where you stand within constructs of authority reflects more how you react than how you feel. Authority invites reaction. It invites us to respond to it.

“Yes.” “No way.” “I don’t care.” “I’ll do whatever you want.”

There are not a lot of creative ways to respond to authority. In fact, choice is pretty limited. The ways to react to authority reflect some version of submit, rebel, withdraw, or surrender. Reactions to authority are a blend of these respnses. They create your own unique response to authority.

Any response or reaction is a version of not you. Self when something is bigger and overpowering you is reflexive and learned. It is you running a program of you. This program is going to differ immensely depending on your upbringing and the level of fear, shame, and guilt you have in your body related to authority.

Response to power is not simply rational or thought based. There is also an unconscious cellular response to power. Survivors of an abusive childhood or sexual trauma perceive authority in anyone who has the same energetic pattern as that abuser. Overpowering authority in young life creates a stronger cellular response to authority - one that is unconscious and overpowering in and of itself. You cannot ignore your cellular response to authority if you want to explore your own empowerment.

Every response to authority is not completely conscious. When you respond to authority with a reaction (or a justification) you have already lost a piece of yourself. Whenever you have lost something of yourself, your ability to be relational suffers.

The unconscious expression of a response to authority takes on a posture that communicates your reaction. A submissive person holds themselves very differently than a rebellious one. You may have separated a piece of yourself away from an authoritative reaction and feel this as disassociation. In the face of authority you react habitually, compulsively, or instinctually. You may even react positively to authority because you distrust or fear some other authority more. No matter how you react, you can be more curious about the reaction itself.

The “Yes” Response

“Yes” reflects an ability or desire to surrender. When you surrender to authority it shows that you trust it. This may seem like an idealized reaction to authority when really it is a symptom of trust and a reflection of positive authority in your upbringing. A “Yes” response may show that your inner authority aligns with the outer authority’s dictates. Yes you are still responding to something bigger than yourself. You are doing it with acceptance because you want to or can. It is always good to question a “Yes” response though because you may be cellularly triggered into complacency and actually desire a more negative reaction that you do not let yourself have.

The “No way” Response

“No way” shows there is a push back and a need for a separation or boundary from an authority. When you rebel from authority you present a false self that is bigger than necessary in order to keep an other part of yourself intact. You pretend on the surface to be strong andsecure. The “no way” response has power without trust. While a clear response is present, your inner reaction may not simply be hidden from the authority but also from yourself. Power can feel like a drug, especially power in reponse to authority. Softening into the place of distrust or fear of authority is more difficult when the “no way” response is present.

The “I don’t care” Response

“I don’t care” reflects a complete giving up in response to authority. Anything you tried in the past didn’t work. The only solution is to go away. When you withdraw, you go away and let authority take you over. Within the withdraw is a loss of self. The self no longer matters because the authority is always going to win over you. Your “I don’t care” may not even have an authentic, trackable thought, emotion or will in the face of authority. Giving up is devoid of life. Another belief takes over and moves into the body letting the power have all the authority it wants. A strong “I don’t care” response may never even realize that another response is possible.

I would consider the “I don’t care” response to be responsible for the cold depression that is so rampant in our society. Cold depression occurs when you have no joy or eros for life. You do your duty. You go about performing life. To the outside world you might be successful and functional. Yet life just feels like a never ending duty to perform. The self is gone and authority has taken over.

The “I’ll do whatever you want” Response

“I’ll do whatever you want” is a learned response that masks your authentic reaction to authority. It has a timid cotowing type of respnse. You submit to authority by tamping down your own spirit and trusting in the collective. You believe you have to get small in the face of authority. This response creates the energy that I call sheeple. It is the place where authenticity is not sought and so the masses become dangerous. Followers don’t care. Followers submit. Followers do not question. Followers trust in people that are not trustworthy. This response is dangerous in that the self is acknowledged as being in service to the authority and does not count as being valuable in its individualism. There is a sense of brain washing in the “I’ll do whatever you want” response. Life is present and interesting to this response, it is just not questioned.

In day to day living, your responses to authority continue to safely navigate you through life. There is no ideal way to interact with authority. What can be present is an awareness of what in you is responding to authority and why. Knowledge of reaction reflects a chance to delve into and explore the deeper images and triggers at work. Eventually inner authority can be assessed based on the stimuli of outer authority.

Inner Authority Check In

Your rections to outer authority created a loss of inner authority. Inner authority is difficult to embody into. Being low on trust in authority itself is totally understandable. Abusive and totalitarian power abounds, as does the power that says, “I know better for you than you know for yourself.” (caretaking power) It’s no wonder your inner authority has been taken over, lost, distorted.

Whether a sense of inner authority is natural or alien to you, the practice of accessing it can be cultivated with patience and reflection. Any aspect of your life where you are either required to do a task without question can create a curiosity towareds inner authority. Boundary issues also reflect a desire to find your authority. These are two easy places to cultivate the practice of a check in.

• First identify the situation. What are you being asked to do?

• Breathe down into your body. Feel your physical reaction to the situation to see if you can identify your unconscious cellular response to what is going on.

• Put the situation, the dilemma, into your belly with breath. Notice how your belly reacts. Does it have tension, resistance, fear? Listen to your core. Stay with yourself. Breathe and listen until the sensation turns into a sense of alignment, ah ha, or release.

• When it does, bring the situation through your breath up into your heart.

• Check in again.

• Does your heart race, hurt, feel panicky? If so stay with your response as sensation instead of thought. Listen. Slow down. Allow something to change.

• Then bring your situation back to your core and check in again. Are heart and core aligned? Listen and breath until you have a sense of coherency between heart and core, body and spirit.

When you know that your inner authority is in sync with your body, you will find your reaction to authority changes. This may require some sort of uncomfortable confrontation with yourself or another. It may need you to act in a way that seems foreign or risky. If you can stick to your true self you are learning how to remember who you are. You can start to align with your inner purpose, heart, and divinity with trust and surrender. You can become free to be you.

Here’s a meditation for you to support the process of finding your own inner authority alignment.

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Think of it this way…

Emotions are energetic in nature. They are supposed to be sensations. When we can have emotions without grabbing onto them with our thoughts, they flow. The express themselves as their fluid selves, moving through our bodies and our consciousness without attachement. When we can be emotion, emotions stay as energy in motion.

When we need to think emotion, we become stagnant. When we think emotion, the trap is getting stuck in story. When we think into emotion, we risk losing the emotion and letting it get trapped inside physical body. This creates pain, disease, and suffering. Shadow emerges not through thinking it into being but through allowing emotion to surface and flow.

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Alive people feel alive through feeling emotion. They accept emotions. They let every range of emotion be a part of their communication with the self. There is no “bad” emotion. There is simply holding onto emotion too tightly when we do not know how to let emotions flow. I want to teach you how to let emotion be sensation. This is the essence of my embodiment practice teachings.

We need to spend more time embracing our energetic nature to avoid having our physical nature weigh us down and consistently dampen our experience of being alive. Embodiment occurs when we can welcome our true nature into our physical body. When we can allow ourselves the freedom to be energetically alive, we connect with the vitally alive world around us.

It’s weird (or at least to me it is) how so many modalities of energy healing require some sort of attunement or perfection or idealization to prepare oneself to practice it as an art. We shouldn’t need to be upgraded to do any sort of energy healing. We are energetic at our core nature and physically human as our secondary nature. To tap into our energetic self is not work and definitely does not need to be idealizied.

We simply need to be able to understand that we are not as strongly physical as we believe ourselves to be. Our thought oriented self can be put to the side. The more we can practice being energetic, the more potential we have to let emotions be a tide that run through our bodies instead of a control mechanism for our behavior.

Today’s post gives you two videos as part of my Embodiment Series. The first video is an explanation of the how what and why behind allowing ourselves to try to engage with emotion as energy in motion.

(I do also just want to note that as a perimenopausal woman, the ablity to allow emotion to be sensation has eased all of the potential health problems and mental struggles so often attributed to this stage of life. So there’s that too.)

The second video is a breath and energy healing exercise combined to move deeply embedded blocks in the physical body without having to think into them and create stories.

As usual, any feedback is welcome here with this post - likes, questions, comments, restacking, sharing with a loved one, and of course subscribing. Thank you for engaging with my work. It wouldn’t be what it is without you.

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Embodiment Lesson #11

In this lesson, I talked about two different breath practices that I’ve offered in the past. The first breath practice, as mentioned, is used with a trigger to move an emotion, found here. The second is used to remove emotion and enter into a parasympathetic state of being, found here.

If you would like to engage in a breath practice that moves stagnant blocks in your system, try the video below.

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…Or perhaps you have just fantasized about this kind of magical connection…

There’s a reason why romance writers spiral into the interest and attention dynamic as they weave fantasies of a perfect couple. They are working off of a premise that we all crave being interesting. At our core, we all want attention. When we are given the full attention of someone else, everything around us and inside us becomes more alive. That embodied sensation of interest creates the capacity to feel erotic.

What if you could allow attention - not just receiving it but also giving - to be erotic? (Teaching point: Erotic does not equal sexual. Erotic means to feel vitally alive as a sensate being in your own body.)

There is a paradox with attention and interest that requires the fantasy. We can both crave attention and interest and be terrified of it. Our wounded self at some point got called out for something we were expressing that was too much. Some of us even got traumatized or abused for expressing self. Here lies the paradox. Wanting attention and interest. Being terrified of attention and interest.

At the core all of us as human beings need interest and attention. It is a need based not simply to feel nourished in communion with other people. The need for interest and attention go deeper. They are based in a need that exists to as a reason for being alive at this moment in time. The need being met creates permission to grow into who we are meant to be.

The fantasy aspect is that one person is not only going to find you worthy of all that attention and all of their interest, but also be able to maintain that energetic for the rest of your life. To bring it back to a realistic meetable need, we have to be able to recognize those moments of getting the need met may be fleeting and they also may have to come from more than just one perfect person.

The need to receive attention and interest beckons to the part of us that is wounded and doesn’t feel worthy of attention. We need to be able to discern fantasy from reality. No one can give 100% attention to anyone all of the time. Attention has to be cultivated and discussed to be attainable. In relationships its easy to demand attention rather than ask for it or talk about the blocks that are inhibiting it rather than try to acknowledge what is possible. Mutual attention and interest is based on relatability.

All this interest, attention, need and wound swirl internally to create three diverse questions.

1. How do you know that your capable of meeting the basic need of attention and interest?

2. When you do know that you are capable of giving that need back to another and feeling?

3. Is it possible to feel nourished by not simply the receiving of interest and attention but by the giving of it as well?

Today’s post gives you a way to measure your own capacity to give and receive attention and interest in relationship. Consider that your actual desire to engage in relational content with other people can be mutually nourishing.

First. The Baseline Assessment

Ask yourself the following question and try not to judge or curate the answer.

“Am I capable of perspective in this moment?”

It is important before I go too far into this litmus test to assess your relational capabilities to talk about the prerequisite that means you are either capable or incapable of being relational. The baseline assessment for relational capability is based in your ability to have perspective. Perspective, as I am using it here, is the ability to allow yourself to be a complex being with multiple parts of self.

Perspective means that you can recognize that you have parts of self or gradations of abilities. Acknowledgement of your parts of self is necessary to be relational. You have to know what part of you is in charge in any given moment and what other parts might be present in that same moment as well as what is being repressed in that moment. Perspective comes from being able to step back and say to yourself “oh, this part of me feels this way.” or “look, this part of me doesn’t WANT to be relational.” Without perspective, there is simply a weak ego running the show and letting it drive you into all of your worst nightmares.

Once again. This baseline assessment process is NOT ABOUT FIXING THIS PART THAT IS INCAPABLE OF RELATING. When you assess your own perspective capabilities, just be honest with where you are at. It is not about making one part shut up or one part go away. Perspective has no idealization of self in it. Simply the ability to be present with the self as it is while staying interested and not making anything too concrete. Perspective does not exist when you believe yourself to be 100% of something. As long as there is the presence of a little voice inside that is not fully believing that 100%, you have perspective.

When I write about perspective, I am talking about the act of non judgmentally accepting that you have a part of you that is wanting, thinking, or feeling one way and another part of you that is wanting, thinking, or feeling something else and so on and so on. Letting these parts of you feel a certain way without latching too strongly onto any one part creates the ability to have perspective.

It’s okay to not always want to be relational or not always be able to relational. Just engage in that self honesty thing and admit that’s where you are at. You are going to be more relational in the long run if you can just be with your own truth. There it is. Self honest at it’s most truthful.

There’s a concept in psychology called the haunted house. It’s a house with rooms but no doors and no windows. The rooms of the haunted house are full of their own stories, stuck in shadow until you get stuck inside them, and not connected to the other rooms in any way. When you find yourself in a particular room, you have no access to the outside of the house or any other rooms in the house. There is also no escape. You walk through the haunted house materializing in each room, entrenching yourself into a way of being simply because you cannot access anything in the moment but this known default nightmarish way of surviving. When you are stuck in your haunted house, you do not believe that anything else exists and have no tools to escape the truth of your own state of being.

Read here…NO TOOLS…Yet…Keep reading…but remember that truth.

If you cannot in any given moment choose to have perspective than you are, in the current state of your own being, not capable of being relational with yourself or others. In this case, your litmus test has no foundation. It does not have the baseline required to be relational with anything but your own negativity. This isn’t failure. This is information. If you are in a state of being incapable of having perspective, you are in either a young defended state of mind or a shadow emerging state of being. Your haunted house needs to be addressed.

When you get stuck in your haunted house. When you have no perspective. You need to develop tools and you need support. You need time to create compassion and acceptance in your self for this part of yourself. Your haunted house needs some doors and windows, staircases and hallways. Here is where you need others to be relational with YOU. Consider engaging in inner child work, meditating to sustain an observant state of self and a witness state of self, getting some therapy or calling upon a non fixing friend. These are all tools to use when you’ve entered into the inability to have perspective. Instead of getting lost, try letting yourself be found.

Foundational Assessment Complete. What’s Next?

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the unloved self. This part of us that is both ordinary and extra ordinary in nature…but not necessarily in a way that we can accept and nourish. The ability to be relational is integral to working with another’s unloved self. It’s also necessary for assessing when our own unloved self might be running our psyche, affecting our choices, and creating a life we don’t actually want.

You can get confused inside and hide from yourself. You can get scared inside and push others away. Being able to assess your own ability to actually move forward and gain ground instead of repeating the same mistakes needs to be learned. By actively engaging in a conscious scanning of your state of being, you will learn how to be present with the vast aspect of your psyche. This isn’t about feeling schizophrenic! It’s about knowing that you are capable of more than you realize and that simple tools can change everything.

Remember. Ability to have perspective is the first check in. Then you can move forward with the litmus test. The following is a list of questions to ask yourself in order to assess if in any given moment you are capable of relating.

THE LITMUS TEST

1. What is the nature of my breath in this moment? (No breath means a part of you does not want to be present)

2. Do I have an agenda already in place? (Agenda creates demand)

3. Am I idealizing myself or am I feeling like I can be fluidly authentic? (Idealization and expectation create disappointment and avoidance)

4. Am I able to see the real person in front of me? (Projection means you aren’t talking to a real person and are not interested in them for some reason)

5. Arm I stuck in the past or am I available to discuss what is currently happening on the present? (Transference, the presence of always and nevers, means you are defended with a trigger that is unprocessed)

6. Am I interested enough to actually listen or actively listen? (No desire to listen means you cannot be present for the person)

7. How curious am I really in what is going on? (No curiosity means your curiosity wants to engage somewhere else)

8. Am I willing to allow for an unknown to arise? (No opening for mystery creates no possibility to allow for change and that a door is closed in this conversation and will not open without exploration)

9. Can I face what is happening with compassion? (No compassion means you have relational capacity with defense present)

10. Can I step back and have more than one part of myself engaged in this inquiry? (Multiple parts of self give you relational capacity with tracking of self)

11. Am I capable of being present with an authentically imperfect response of the person I am talking to? (No tolerance for imperfect response leads to defended communication, the possibility of unstated demand, and losing a percentage of the other’s response.)

It’s probably a good idea at this point to consider the nature of a litmus test. A litmus test is done when you want to figure out if a substance is acidic, neutral, or basic in nature. It has gradations and polarizations. The polarization is acid or base, all or nothing, one or the other. We humans really like to polarize our psyche. In the case of utilizing a relational litmus test, it is not about going from a 0 to a 14 on the acid to base scale or non relational to perfectly relational reality. Relying on the fact that it’s impossible to be at a 14 or a 100% relational factor all the time is important. Don’t idealize. Simply assess. Let yourself be on the scale.

This litmus test is incredibly helpful when you are about to go into a difficult conversation OR as a pause point to assess your own capabilities when you are in the middle of a fight with someone. Going into a difficult conversation or situation with an idea of what your baseline is will allow you to potentially recognize when you have gone OFF baseline and try to get back where you want to be. When you’re actively engaged in a fight with someone, it can be a huge relief for both people if you can simply assess your own relate-ability and admit, “you know what, I’m not able to be present anymore with this conversation in any way that is going to solve our problem right now.” This kind of statement inserts the flag of truth into a fight and creates choice - fight for the sake of fighting or regroup and revisit when less triggered.

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Choice

Every answer the litmus test gives you creates the potential for choice. When your state of being is something you can admit to and let be, you create the ability to move in and out of states of being with more flexibility. Denial of state of being is more likely to create set ways of being that bring you into that haunted house self. Judging states of being creates that same inflexibility. Self honesty is not about ignoring or avoiding doing self work but creating the necessary bridges to be able to engage in self work with self acceptance.

In reference to the questions I listed above choices abound. The first choice that I want to suggest is one of not changing anything but simply stating what is present for you. Sometimes the most powerful conversations to transform something in ourselves happen when we realize we don’t have to be perfect to get what we need. Feeling interested and accepted in the midst of our own imperfection is more healing than performing to receive this basic need without truth.

If that is not available to you, there are choices within the answers to the questions that might also shift your own perspective and make you more available on behalf of someone else. For instance, if your state of breath is shallow or holding, can you deepen or shift into a breath that is more alive or flowing. If you have an agenda, can you state it out loud, let it go, or work with it as part of the situation. Can you shift the quality of your listening and listen into something or find interest in the nature of your listening? As I list the choices here there’s a fluidity that arises in self and relational potential.

Choice creates space. Choice allows you find space to be you and creates more space for other to be other. You can’t demand homogeneity in the medium of relational assessment. You can individualize permission to be present as your own unique and ever changing self. You don’t have to victimize your own attention span. Rather allow the voice of who you want to be to be a support to meetable change in the moment. Being imperfect but present to your imperfections creates healthy relating. Instead of tapping into an exhausted potential in self, meet the self that has grounded desire to embrace truth.

Remember that expectation and idealization kill authenticity. To be relatable, two accessible people need to be in front of each other being themselves. Notice I am not using words like grounded, centered, happy, open hearted, etc in reference to relatability. Because while these ways of being might improve what happens in any given relational conversation, they are actually not necessary to be relationally available. Self honesty is required to assess that there is perspective. The rest is all expectation unless you continue to be self honest. You can say a part of you is shut down and by letting it be a part of you that is present in the conversation you are actually more present!

Negative Reactions in the Midst of Conversation

Sometimes presence and honesty may make it so the other person loses relational capability (see question 11!). That’s on them though and their own container. Yours needs to simply be yours and track what happens when your honesty creates a loss of relational capacity in who you are talking to. If you feel like you suffer a loss from their ability to not be relational with something that is going on inside you, that’s on you to change. You have a choice. Either you can stay unmalleable and create a wall (where there might need to be a door or window) or you can choose again to assess and flow from a different state of being.

Now I’m having thoughts about ease versus trouble in relationships. Relationships are vital and erotic when two people can stay in relatable states of being at least some of the time. They hit the land of bleh and resentment when there are habitual feelings of being overlooked, ignored, and yes fixed. This post is an invitation for you to consider that YOU are in charge here of any relational potential. The other person’s reaction or lack thereof means that you can choose to relate differently or step out and reassess who you are relating with.

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Ok. I went in a few directions there. From basic needs to acceptance of self to a short reminder that presence needs to stay in a state of tracking to actively be relational. The following is a short guided meditation through the litmus test questions so that you can assess more clearly where you are at before you engage in hard conversations.

Litmus Test Meditation

I suggest before doing this meditation that you imagine a person, a conversation, or a situation and breathe yourself into that space. From there, listen to the meditation and receive your answers to the questions.

Today, I am offering a microcosmic solution. The idea?

Eventually in our life we are going to be called to look at that thing we are trying our hardest to fix about ourselves while simultaneously wanting to ignore whatever it is with all of our being.

We all have a place inside us that we believe is broken or inherently flawed.

If you immediately defend yourself when reading that statement…you are in denial of your own shadow. I don’t care how much work you’ve done, how much you have evolved, how deep you know yourself. Eventually you will be ready to face, understand, and accept your unloved self as a permanent aspect of your being that will need attention for as long as you are human.

Anyone who spiritually bypasses or overly fixates on disease and diagnosis is going to fight the need to go into the unloved self. It’s hard to admit that there’s always going to be a spiraling in that as part of the dilemma of being human. It’s also a gift - the paradox and the fight.

When you can work with your unloved self and understand it has value and is giving you something essential to your life and light, the charge you have against it decreases. Instead of feeling hatred, acceptance can arise (over time, be patient). Curiosity can develop. The feelings of shame and guilt and rejection can be ridden through like a storm instead of used as a place to act. Once accepted, clarity and peace become part of our life experience. Our “I am” doesn’t have to push, it can simply flow and accept.

I recognize that this feels like a big ask. My last two posts have talked about how HARD this all can be. There’s a lot of softening, breathing, and not fixing that has to go into this type of deep awakening. The loudest aspects of ego and the undercurrents of fear can actually just BE and not be controlled.

You don’t have to be fixed.

You don’t have to be healed.

You can simply be aware and make choices as you are…a perfectly imperfect and ordinary human.

Conscious Regulation

Here goes. The following video is an explanation of the ideas behind consciously regulating on behalf of another. Conscious regulation is an act of meeting the unloved self in another with a presence that is flowing and open, transforming defense into compassion. The unloved self is by nature dysregulated. The unloved self by nature feeds off of an inability to settle into truth. Simply by allowing the unloved self space to express while still feeling the deep presence of another creates possibility. It bridges our unloved self into the capacity to feel who we are with light.

Next…a chance to experience what conscious regulation looks like and feels like in your system.

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Today I am writing about hatred, rejection, death currents, and the internal monster WE ALL HAVE INSIDE US. No one is free from this human dilemma. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t somehow resonate with what is happening in the external world. Be brave. Look within. Find the parts of yourself that scream, “GO AWAY!” Use them to discover the parts of you that want protection.

Bring your adult consciousness into the scarier aspects of being alive. When you do the work of true shadow acknowledgement, you can begin to hold yourself and others in a new way. When you can meet shadow with compassion, safety, and acceptance that you it has not yet received, you are healing a hidden rift that deserves attention.

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Everyone has a part of themself that gets rejected, is hated, or is put away and not consciously explored. Some of us we might be so used to holding it all together that we don’t even recognize we have a part of ourselves we don’t let anyone else see or ourselves feel. The monster self is a coping mechanism to acknowledge the rejected self without actually doing the work of owning the shadow aspects of hatred, separation, rejection, pride, and fear.

The monster self leads is into our pathways of self sabotage. We use the monster as a way of expression, as a test, and as a means to push people away. Those who somatically process turn the monster inward. Self hatred gets projected onto the physical body. Disease is used to internalize the pain of inherent rejection. What you do with this part of yourself and how you do it is a product of how you were raised and rejected.

Take a moment to touch into all the negativity you experience in your life. Your struggles, your tendencies to self sabotage, your physical pain, and even your own death fantasy. Can you handle simply holding these negative currents in your body without making them go away? Can you notice them without being what you fear?

Tolerate your negative self for a moment. You KNOW this place in you, even if you avoid it. Let it simply sit and be present in your conscious reality. Don’t make it anything but what it is - the unloved and rejected parts of yourself that no one has held with compassion and acceptance.

Monster Origin Story

Rejection of aspects of self starts early on in life. We all had times in our childhood when we were told to “go to our room” or the equivalent, right? Then there’s the times that we were used as an example for how not to do something or be a certain way. Spirited children with energy and emotional expression are not comfortable to raise. They certainly aren’t easy to put in classrooms or get to sit still at family dinners. Add in the emotional, physical, or sexual abuse aspect of innocent childhood that has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with an adult in your life not being safe. Even caring and present parents couldn’t shield their children from the reactions of teachers, caregivers, or worse…peers.

Needless to say, there is a lot of room for feeling unloved and rejected in childhood.

Some of us had parents that supported us during hard times and made us feel loved, accepted, and essential. For those of us who had an adult accepting us and supporting us through these hard emotional reactions, we may hold it together a bit better or be able to hold compassion for the unloved inside us. Those of us with parents who were intensely emotional, abusive, narcissistic or shut down don’t have that cushion. This is when intense self hate might not have a voice of love or care attached to it at all.

The inability to know what to do with the part of you that didn’t fit inside the family body, social norms, or was abused and abandoned didn’t just go away. It had to go somewhere. The way we were punished and how we reacted to that punishment created our coping mechanisms towards our own hatreds, our fear of rejection, and our tendency to sabotage.

Your monster is complicated in it’s defense but actually completely simple in it’s underlying needs. All monsters want to know they aren’t alone. Inside the monster is a child feeling the pain of not being loved.

To Express?

How did you cope? What did you do with which aspects of yourself to survive? Do you know? Do you simply choose to live your life never going there and wondering why you always have a lingering sense of being off or not right? Have you labeled yourself in some way that gives you permission to never explore the “DO NOT CROSS” boundary you created internally?

All this not okayness and rejection and abandonment had to go somewhere. It all amalgamated together and created a part of you that doesn’t know how to be safe, seen, and secure. This is the source of your unloved and unlovable fortress.

The fortress is your monster, protecting your hurt self from further harm.

Having an extreme reaction to a situation and being ostracized in the midst of it creates confusion in a child. Experiencing negativity (abuse, trauma, or simply being yelled at) without knowing what was done to cause the problem creates a different sort of confusion. The reaction we have to this kind of treatment is inevitably painful. We reject our own self in an attempt to avoid further pain.

Confusion and chaos, remember, are aspects of the lower self. When we get confused we are aligning with the part of ourself that believes it needs to hide to survive. When we get chaotic we are aligning with the part of ourself that needs regulation but does not understand how to regulate. Both chaos and confusion are the fuel the monster self uses to recreate what it is trying to avoid over and over again. It uses chaos and confusion to keep what it is protecting inside safe.

Do you remember what you did as a child when you were hurt? Did you continue to express and flip out and reap the consequences? Or did you suppress and contain all those reactions to fit into the mold you were being taught was acceptable? Did you get quiet or did you get loud? Most likely there was a bit of both going on.

BUT. All this rationalizing might be putting an adult spin on how things really happened inside you.

As children, there’s no thought process transpiring in the midst of any extreme emotional outburst or punishment. There is simply survival instinct…taking over…expressing itself in chaos or control.

• When being rejected (and made to be alone) for being too emotional or intense, eventually calm would come. Then calm noticed something was even worse. No one stuck with us. We were not loved THROUGH the outburst.

• When being punished, we learned that we’d rather be in control of our own hurt than allow someone else to hurt us. This gets pretty convoluted in that we decide to start to hurt ourselves rather than be hurt without understanding why. This is a huge source of sabotage behavior.

• When being irrationally abused without cause, we started to think that simply by being ourselves we we were not acceptable being who we are and needed to become way more vigilant to control other’s reactions towards us.

Our adult self needs us to start to rewire all of this confusion and chaos. We need to cultivate an ability to send a different message to ourself. Often we don’t know how to do any of this because our child self’s defense and reactions are so strong. This is confusing because our child self and monster self seem were capable of saving us. Often we don’t actually realize we need help when our monster is activated.

There are times in life when emotions TAKE OVER. This is our monster’s unregulated way of seeking help. Chaos and confusion reign when our child consciousness has the stage. When a monster goes into expression mode, it uses extreme emotional eruption to push people away and create what it fears. This is related to when we expressed and faced consequences in our childhood. Volcanic emotional expression nails in the coffin for creating the expected rejection, abandonment, or punishment as a result of our behavior. Of course anyone we love is going to get the brunt of this expectation when the monster unleashes the truth of what it has to express.

The attention/rejection dysfunction of emotional freaking out is one a lot of us have experienced in relationships. The outward freaking out, “I need to emote” type of negativity is easy to reject. Really…how many of us are actually comfortable with angry eruptions and hurtful comments?

People who tend towards over containing (no reacting, holding it all together, going cold) and under containing (emotional outbursts, mean accusations, not holding it together, running hot) in emotional situations tend to attract each other. This is an unconscious push/pull energetic that will need to be brought out of shadow through attention to both people’s emotions, not simply the obvious emoter. If only the emotionally loud person gets attention and space, then resentment and shut down is going to build in the other.

An inability to have an emotional reaction needs everything an ability to have an emotional reaction needs - attention, love, care, compassion support.

The emote/rejection cycle is a total trap, especially for those of us who tend to attract relational dynamics where one person emotes and one person stays quiet. After all, the quiet person has a monster as well. There are always the children that get locked in a room alone and then live their lives expecting to be left alone forever. Those children go cold in their expressions to try to avoid rejection.

Or Suppress?

The less obvious but more devious side of our survival monster is found in its suppression aspect. Suppress can mean to simply go numb. Suppress can also mean to become hyper vigilant. Suppression instincts over compensate survival in an attempt to hide the rejected self and control the environment into safety.

Suppression is scarier than expression in reference to what it creates in our monster self. When we suppress we can get really tricky and subversive in the ways our monster acts out. Suppression is where we are more likely to sabotage, get sick (somatically processing our negativity) or too closed off in an effort to protect the self from the unwanted results of being unloved. Remember lack of emotion is suppressed emotion. Suppression means that emotion is going to come out somehow and that somehow is rooted in destruction.

The suppressed monster is one in which a person pretends to have it all together while inwardly freaking out or vigilanty style safety scanning. These are the people we might even turn to when feeling emotionally turbulent because they can hold everything together. A false self ideal is found here. We feel good by holding it all together while inwardly being terrifed of what would happen if we responded authentically.

The suppressed monster lives alone. It repeats thoughts obsessively to find a solution to the problem. It holds onto resentments. It thrives in its secret life. Those who love us spend period of time living with the sense of an explosion waiting to happen. We fear the barbed comments targeted to push loved ones away. Suppressed monsters thrive on hurt and hate (often self hate). They unconsciously want others to hurt as much as they do.

Hidden monsters are mean. They are machiavellian in the way they go about creating their own pain and suffering to prove to everyone who loves them that their survival is necessary.

The Monster Dynamic

The Shadow…The Demand…The Unconscious…or The Conscious?

Now here’s the thing. A monster actually WANTS the people around them to become monsters too. Monsters feel safer with other monsters! This can be conscious or unconscious…but it is absolutely present in the monster body. The way a chaotic and confused person feels safe with the intensity of the emotions inside them is by causing similar intense emotions to be felt by everyone around them. That’s how they feel not alone, not abandoned. It’s also how the monster justifies its existance.

This is especially true the more we care about someone. Of course our own monster is going to start to feel pretty activated when we risk loving more, sharing ourself more, and being vulnerable to our own fear of being unloved and abandonable. Living with the fear of rejection leads to nervous system stress and eventual explosion to relieve that stress. That’s part of the appeal in the monster dynamic. It lives with an unconscious expectation. How long will it take for the hidden monster to explode and prove itself to be necessary?

The pull to become a monster can be as tricky inside ourselves as another person’s demand is tricky. It may look like innocently defending yourself, justifying your own reaction, rationalizing your behavior, or trying to prove your loved one wrong. Either way when you respond by becoming your own version of monster (or perhaps your elevated ego state of NOT monster aka suppressed monster) the monsters in both of you have won. They aren’t going anywhere. They are simply digging into the trenches of the belief that you are rejectable and abandonable. They are clearly proving you are not worthy of love as your imperfect self.

Relational Impulse

If you experience someone else’s monster, your impulse is going to be activate your own monster. In fact, many of us AS parents do or did what our parents did to us simply because our own monster gets triggered and activated without any control. Because the nature of chaos, confusion, or suppressed calm is all rooted in the negative self, we will not feel loved in this space until we are actively capable of acknowledging that our monster is not, in fact, creating what we think it is going to create - rejection, punishment, abandonment or even death.

Rereading that paragraph after I wrote it, I tried to edit it. No luck. I can’t take anything out and I would add to much to this post if I put more in. It’s potent. Try reading it a few times.

The place inside all of us that believes no one can possibly love us as we are feels safer when it is not alone.

People around us and in relation to us are going to respond to this side of us with their own negativity. That’s why couples fight and completely miss each other. This is why friendships end suddenly. This is the source in you that burns bridges and cuts ties rather than sticks around to work things out. We lose staying power in relationship not because of all of the myriad rationalizations for separation that we might believe to be true. We lose the desire to stay when our monster tells us it is threatened.

Not having a desire to be compassionate with ourselves in our own monster means we will never believe another can love us through it. We let the monster win whenever we love someone and defend against caring more, needing more, or wanting more.

Just like the “good” parts of us, this monster part of us needs to know our important relationships can love us through it. Holding the container of lack of defense on behalf of another is the place where we can begin to heal the bridge between the part of us we cannot control or act out from to the part of us that actually is okay and knows how to interact with others.

Monster Rewiring

The thing to remember in the midst of any monster style defense response is that relationship is not available in the moment of the defense. When a person is in their own rejection current, they are not capable of relating honestly and clearly. All there is space for is to emote, feel, let go, express, shut down, turn off, or become unavailable. The monster is simply not capable of feeling relational, mutual, interested, or curious.

When you are in relationship with someone and your actions push the monster button, you cannot fix their defenses by engaging directly with the monster. The challenge is to simply pay attention and maintain you own clarity. You have to pay attention and not merge with their unconscious demand to become a monster yourself. Monster rewiring is a mutual experience of breath and flow into the body when one person is capable and the other person is not.

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To heal your own monster, you are going to have to admit to yourself you are interested in putting in the work of learning how to stand the process of healing other people’s monsters. Monster healing is one of those situations where transformation can only happen together. This work can not be done alone. Alone, you’re just proving your monster right by putting it back on the shelf of ignorance when you don’t need it. What I am talking about here is one of the most profound and necessary aspects of healing the self that can only happen in relationships where people care so deeply about each other that they want to grow each other into their core selves.

I’m going to create an embodiment video on regulation for my next post. My sense though is that this post has enough to think about that I need to pause here.

These days, our endocrine systems are on overload. We are exposed to so much that’s hard to digest. Additives, toxicities, pesticides, scents, cell waves (to name a few)…we simply live in a world that is harder on our hormonal system to keep in balance than we ever realize. When things are more complicated than we realize, it means we’re also taking for granted all the innate work our body is doing to keep us healthy. A breath practice that helps balance our endocrine system takes the pressure off the body and let’s us get a different sense of our own baseline embodiment.

When you’re stressed out, you actually don’t know what is real and what is reaction. It’s crucial to your own embodiment to have tools that give you a way to reset and come out of autonomic stress responses.

All of my embodiment lessons incorporate the vital concept of becoming alive to your own body without having to take a lot of time to do it.

Welcome to the ninth lesson in my series teaching you simple steps towards Embodiment or, as I like to call it:

Embodiment Practices and Teachings for Less Than 15 Minutes A Day!

Before I go too much further, I invite you to like my work, add a comment, or share this post. That’s how us writing folk gain an audience for the work we do.

To actively start to commit to any embodiment practice, it’s important to gain more and more tools that support your own capacity to consciously breathe. This means PRACTICE…AND practice in my world means PLAY!

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Do you believe me? (Because I’m curious about what reading this brings up for you.)

I can’t talk about 30 years of learned transformational relationship dynamics in one post. You’d be reading for a year or so at least. My intention today is to give a bit of a ground to those of you who have someone in your life that makes you think,

“hmmm. I might be able to relate deeper here.”

Last month a friend of mine described my relationship with my husband as “enlightened.” Another friend recently told me she couldn’t believe how honest my husband and I talk about ourselves and our relationship in front of each other. She was noticeable uncomfortable with our ability to share our struggles openly with acceptance and clarity. Something clicked for me as a result of these unexpected feedback statements. Afterall, I’ve been in this relationship for decades. I’m more likely to take it for granted than appreciate it.

By cultivating a relationship that prioritizes working through triggers, giving space for triggers, and allowing for personal autonomy; my husband and I have something that others want for themselves. It’s kind of silly that I don’t realize in the day to day living just how special my relationship is. We’ve spent over 15 years in transformational programs and psychotherapeutic training. Often together. It’s not like what we have together is surprising. Yet people’s reflections have me thinking… what do we do for each other that goes beyond the relationships that I see all around me.

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In my line of work I feel blessed to say that I have also worked with some couples (not always romantic) that have a similar commitment to honesty and growing into each other through their triggers. These relationships need to be honored for how truly rare they are.

Couples, family bonds, and deep friendship can all hold the potential for a transformational relationship. Many of us humans have major issues around one gender specifically or can only attract a certain type of person that seems repetitively toxic. When this is the case, it’s important to give space for other relationships to have a potential of transformation instead of over fixating on the need to find the perfect match or soul mate ideal.

A transformational relationship requires equal power.

The only relationships in our lives that can give us the freedom to be our fullest selves need to be completely 100% clear in regards to a power differential.

Many relationships’ innate power dynamics undermine the ability to mutually enlighten.

Feel into or think into this concept of power for a bit. It’s an edgy topic to write about and definitely an edgy one to think about. I wouldn’t even know if it to be true if I wasn’t blessed with the mutual interest in transformation that exists in my own relationship. Since I work on the other side of the power deferential too, I have the contrast necessary to know that the power differential is a limit to uninhibited transformational growth.

Teacher to student, therapist (or coach or healer or medium) to client, doctor to patient, guru to the masses, self help book writer (or influencer or pod cast creator or substack writer) to an audience.

Every single one of these relationships have an innate power dynamic. A power differential of over and under.

The contract that exists in these relationships is that the practitioner has done the work to have a specific expertise in regards to wholeness and health. The client relies on that work to find health and wellness for themselves. Don’t misread me. There’s a benefit to these relationships. I’m simply not writing about that benefit today.

Mutual conscious transformation cannot be cultivated whenever there is an agreed upon power dynamic (or a shadow power dynamic that is fueling emotional triggers). When this power dynamic exists, we are going to keep a part of ourself separate from the other.

That part we keep separate? No matter how it is expressed or what we think it is, it ultimately relates to the part of the self that feels like we are innately unlovable.

Transformation in relationships have a flavor of disassociation similar to personal growth. In personal process we want change to happen but we don’t want to be there for the process of change. In relationships that flips a bit. It becomes, “You do your work. I’ll do mine. We’ll see if we still want to be together on the other side.”

Great idea.

BUT.

Divided, you’re missing something epic!

You are unquestionably missing an essential concept in any thought process you engage in that requires separation to transform. A deeper unknown is being avoided. Some underlying separation dynamics to get curious about here.

• There could be shadow power dynamics present as an undercurrent playing themselves out in your relationship or your relational fears. Uh oh…FYI. These will always haunt a relationship until they are mined into the surface of consciousness and equalized.

• There could be an aspect of self sabotage within the desire to hide a piece of yourself away from your partner.

• There could be codependent merging that you are trying to escape from.

• There could be a competition for needs/space/attention that is controlling your ability to take up space.

• There could be an aspect of your unloved self wound that does not trust your partner to love you through or in spite of what you find within your own work. Did I say “could”? For this one, I should probably say “is.”

While there is value in engaging in individual work, demanding it of the other or not being interested in each other’s process is a red flag.

Hiding any part of your psyche from a person you deeply care for is a choice to engage with the limiting belief that not all of you is capable of being loved for who you are.

A question: Where can your dark sides transform into something ordinary and accepted if not in the relationships most important to you?

Most relationships have a boundary that says to your unconscious shame and hatred, “you are not welcome here.” Your internal monsters are set free in your own mind but never let out into the air of safe mutual relating.

Worse, is when we use our internal monsters to self sabotage and push people away, thus proving the point that we are incapable of being loved for all of who we are.

Relationships need relational acceptance for both the ordinary and the worst aspects of yourself to feel completely loved.

And

Relationships need relational interest in the ordinary and the worst aspects of yourself to fully love yourself.

Showing up for another person in a relationship can’t happen without an all inclusive crucible of cultivating an ability to love and feel loved AND WHOLE by self and other.

This is a tall order. I know. But think about it.

You are never going to be safe to be fully yourself or feel deeply connected to others if you don’t believe you can trust others with the worst parts of you. That part of you that is NOT your friend inside, that thinks mean thoughts about you, that does not let yourself be fully known to those you love is going to hunker down and control your experience into sabotage and separation.

If you want to feel free in relationships to be yourself, you need to be able to accept all of who you are. Everyone deserves to have someone in their life who accepts all of who they are. The work starts within. Then that work reflects without.

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One of the traps I notice about embodiment is that there is an inclination to push listening TO the body. However, being relational to your body is a two way street. There is a tendency to need to learn “how” to listen to the body without recognizing what may come easier or require less push. Talking to the body, for many of you, may be much simpler than taking that quieter more prolonged time to listen to the body that so often involves a leap of faith into the unknown.

A lot of times what we struggle with in relationship with others is also a struggle within ourselves. These struggles show up in our embodiment. How we embody reflects your ability to be in relationship with self, others, and the divine.

Example: If you find yourself having a hard time finding compassion for others, perhaps you first need to learn how to give compassion to your body or your pain. If you over give compassion to others, there’s probably a part of your body that you refuse to check in with and be in relationship with that is fueling the urge to caretake.

Today’s post is an invitation to remember that you have the power to be in deeper relationship with your body through talking to it, emoting towards it, and being curious about what it needs to hear. Your body needs communication towards itself just as much as you may need words sometimes to clarify path, intention, or desire to move in the outside world.

I know that the holidays are busy for most people. Instead of writing too much more (the longer post I have been working on is going to wait until next week to go out!), I’ll keep today’s post short and simple. Watch the video included in the post if you want a directed experience of talking to your body. If that doesn’t feel right, just try it on your own and see how it goes.

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Abundance is a current that many of us struggle with, wanting to pigeon hole the word into society’s addiction to money. Yet an abundant life is so much greater than the ability to transact our lives in the medium of things and stuff.

I love teaching abundance practices. My joy comes as I witness these practices giving people space to be true to who they are and the space they take up. The practice drops us out of beliefs around competition for resources and reminds us that everything we need is already here, in our lives, waiting for us to take note and absorb what we can.

I am a total fan of irony. So after saying all that, the practice itself and the rest of this post is for paid subscribers!

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We all have a place that we go inside our head that is totally not helpful to anything we want to become or achieve. And yet, it is so alluring to stay there, to listen to the voices, to heed the call of the ever so powerful negative.

The thoughts that won’t stop.

The scenarios that haunt your insomniac mind in the middle of the night.

The flashes of fear based outcomes that cannot be stopped.

The should have/would have/could have revisions of a scenario that already happened.

Extreme versions and habitual versions of a self that thrives on worst case cogitations can catch you aware…or unaware.

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As far as I can tell the socially approved solution to the negative mind doesn’t actually face the negative mind.

Think positive.

Control your thoughts to be what you want to experience.

Focus on what you want.

Feel the good in your life.

Well, I’m not going to say these methods don’t work. I will say that they aren’t very embodied. They are ignoring a lurking current in your thought stream, your emotional awareness, and most importantly your body’s energy.

By ignoring the negative place you have inside you, you really are not gaining anything you desire in life. A bandaid positive fixation point that exists in the hopes of changing something doesn’t accomplish much. The negative won’t go away unless it is faced, not ignored.

Is there a way to work with the negative that isn’t overly focused on the positive?

Absolutely. But a warning, it involves not only facing your negative mind but curiously learning about it.

Whenever we have parts of our psyche that we want to instinctually ignore or avoid it’s best to befriend them instead. By the way we may want to consider that these parts of ourself come back to visit us when we are in a weakened state for somer reason and control us more strongly than if we had just faced them head on.

This word. Befriend. What do I mean by it? When we meet someone for the first time, we tend to get to know them to figure out if we want to deepen into a relationship with them or avoid them moving forward, right?

The hardest part about this negative mind thing is that we really can’t do the oh so comfortable avoiding thing. We are inevitably going to run into this part of ourselves over and over and over again. Embracing this fact requires acknowledging the inevitable.

Since you are never going to get away from this part of yourself, the only thing you can do is deepen into relationship with it.

There is simply no other solution.

Tolerate, willfully ignore, pretend it doesn’t exist, or get to know it and figure out how to work together with it.

The choice is yours, as usual.

Free the Beast!!!

The negative mind needs to be heard, not corralled.

The second you start to try to put your negative mind away into its safe little box, you’re feeding its power.

It WILL take over when you are down, out, or incapable of controlling it.

When you hyper focus on thinking positive, you aren’t doing anything with the negative itself. It still exists. It is simply lying dormant. This is why the negative comes out when you least expect it or don’t want it.

By learning how it thinks, how it gets triggered, how it gets activated you can start to come to a certain sense of self acceptance that is greater than only accepting the parts of yourself you like or want or are easy to accept.

Getting creative with hearing the negative’s own style of thought, and forcing yourself to actually listen to it, creates a sense of wholeness and space for all of who you are.

This negativity inside you? It’s not going to go anywhere except into trauma, disease, and suffering…unless you face it head on.

There is a specific kind of bravery in people that do true transformational work. They can say to themselves, “I know what it is to hate.” Or “I understand the instinct to die right now.” When it comes down to it, we all have a death current. We all have a hate current. Through these currents we will eventually, if we choose to engage with them, also learn how to surrender into our own light. This surrender does not occur in spite of the negative thoughts. It certainly won’t happen by avoiding them. It only happens in accepting ourselves as whole beings, negative mind intact.

Bodies And Minds NEED Bridging.

Thoughts NEED Space to be Heard and Aired.

To give space for these negative mind thoughts to come up and into the light creates the bridge. However, I am going to twist this here into my own flavor of important information. Pay attention.

The negative mind is best freed to express itself when you aren’t triggered, stressed, emotional, anxious, etc. The negative mind is better to explore when you are as close to ground zero as you can be (a horse therapy term that I hope translates in this case). Here is where your negative mind become a clear aspect of yourself instead of an all consuming identity that has taken over control of your mind.

Know Thyself

At this point, it might be good to mention that negative mind cycling comes up more in certain situations than others, usually when you feel unsure or insecure. Knowing that, it’s beyond important to get to know what triggers your negative mind beyond the obvious.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to point out to women that their negative mind gains more power before they bleed or during their cycle. That’s just one example of a trigger. Perhaps there’s a birth or death day of a loved one that cyclically creates an alliance with the negative mind. Maybe there’s a certain feeling (positive or negative) that feeds it’s flames. Negative mind definitely gains traction in circumstances where there is abuse triggers or boundary encroachments. When you feel like you can’t be you and stifle yourself, your negative mind usually has something to think about it.

You could have a lot of triggers that you don’t understand or realize are there. This keeps the negative mind powerful and unconscious. Only by bringing your own personal triggers into curious awareness can you start to see patterns.

• Write down your triggers.

• Keep a calendar if you can’t catch a more cyclical type of cycle.

• Notice what makes your negative mind flare.

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Seeking Interest and Common Ground

Befriending the negative mind means that you have to treat this aspect of yourself like it is something worth getting to know better.

There is likely a part of you that is going to be challenged by this process. Just like getting to know someone you kind of don’t want to get to know any better, the negative mind will push you past your edges and teach you something about yourself that you never would have learned without engaging in the relationship.

When I talk about befriending the negative mind, I am asking you to consider actually cultivating a true interest in how yours works. Mine is different than yours. Yours is different than anyone else’s. Each of our negative minds are built on the foundation of our own insecurities, defenses, and internalized negative emotions.

Your negative mind is just as uniquely you as your creative waves, your gifts, and your true to self way of expressing.

Once again, REMEMBER. One of the best ways to engage befriending the negative mind is to NOT do it when there is some sort of real attachment to what is going on.

I use kundalini yoga and meditation to befriend my own negative mind. Maintaining a pose or a movement within a pose is a place where the tension of the pose and the negative voice meet each other. I can feel my negative mind activate in it’s own way. I can feel my somatic negative response in my body. I learn through my practice to slowly accept my negative thoughts and the sensations that arise with them as an aspect of self instead of all of myself. This ability to separate and observe gives me a greater capacity to run more than one stream of consciousness when life does create a challenge or a trigger.

Physical Challenge + Rhythm = Mental Understanding

Your negative mind attracts negativity.

This means that with the thoughts that come in, there is going to be a strong emotional and somatic pull to those thoughts. The thoughts are the tip of the iceberg as far as the body is concerned. The body believes some of these negative mind creations to its core. Or that is what we are going to believe if we don’t also learn to challenge the negative mind. It is very easy for the negative mind to snowball.

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I talked about working with the negative mind when the positive or at least neutral mind has the primary a ground in your body?

This is true for challenging the negative mind as well.

When you are feeling depressed, stressed, or triggered it’s not really helpful to work with the negative mind in challenge. Same is true if you are doing something when you are tired, sick, or fatigued. When you are feeling ok, good, or positive about life; THAT’S the time to engage in learning more about the negative mind through physical challenge.

What do I mean by challenging the Negative Mind?

Challenging the negative mind requires engaging in physical activity (with tension) while simultaneously creating a rhythm to the activity AND also tracking what the negative mind is telling you to feel or do without giving into it.

I personally use breath (of course!) and sustained movement in the kundalini yoga style. There are other methods. Exercise itself, especially rhythmic exercise like running or jumping rope, creates the same challenge as yoga and breath. So can climbing with breath awareness or weight lifting. Go towards what calls to you.

I am married to someone whose negative mind is intensely strong when it comes to engaging in physical exercise. For someone like my husband, the act of challenging the negative mind into action can be almost impossible. Give some space here to not judge. Challenging your negative mind may not even lead to more than a short walk or one yoga pose or simply getting out of bed.

You don’t have to expect yourself to push more than one breath or action that is beyond your capacity.

The idea is to acknowledge the part of you that wants to, in theory, exercise or knows that maybe stretching would make the body feel better, or understands that there should be physical engagement with the body. Then notice as you begin to step towards doing something how hard it actually is to do it. Do something. Anything. Then let yourself feel your body to counteract the extreme power of the negative mind. Do you feel better somehow?

It might be that the simply act of defiance against the negative mind telling you to do nothing is all the challenge that is needed in this example. You are learning how you think and how you respond to how you think while also creating a challenge in yourself of not listening to the negativity 100%.

You have the choice to become different than what the negative mind is telling you who you are.

Regardless of your relationship to exercise, the challenge aspect is to not give in to the negative mind but rather to observe it.

A healthy psyche has the ability to

• witness without judgement of self,

• deepen through inquiry and curiosity, and

• experience whatever is happening in the moment.

In this case the challenge is to pay attention to what the negative mind is saying- NOT WHAT THE BODY IS DOING.

The aspect of challenge is to engage physically, track what the negative mind is telling you, and not give into it.

Eventually, the negative mind will silences itself as you push through it’s strictures. It becomes background noise. It looses power over your actions.

Challenging your negative mind through physicality teaches you how to be with negativity as a part of yourself instead of your whole self and to not always give into the lure of what the negative mind is telling you to do or to quiet the negative mind. The components of physical movement and breath allow you to engage through the physical mind, in spite of it. Rather than giving into to the negative mind, avoiding it, or shutting it up; you can just let it be present without power.

Growth Meter

When the negative mind is a part of the self in given situations or moments, it needs to become less than 100%f your awareness. It has to stop being your only identity in the moment.

When it beocomes a sense of static noise instead of a lurking ultimate power, you are beginning to work with your negative mind as a part of your whole. You can hear the negative mind but choose not to surrender to it or cut it off. You can simply allow it space to be without controlling you. This is growth.

To embrace the negative mind is to honor the fact that your body is not wanting to let go of something, that something is trying to change and your instinct is getting in the way of the current, that the ego wants to hold on and not be present for its own death.

Most importantly embracing the negative mind means that when it shows up you KNOW that GROWTH IS HAPPENING. Change is occurring. You are in the midst of transformation.

Accept, let go, don’t give in but don’t ignore. The negative mind always has something to teach you.

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Welcome to the eighth lesson in my series teaching you simple steps towards Embodiment or, as I like to call it:

Embodiment Practices and Teachings for Less Than 15 Minutes A Day!

Before I go too much further, I invite you to like my work, add a comment, or share this post. That’s how us writing folk gain an audience for the work we do.

To actively start to commit to any embodiment practice, it’s important to gain more and more tools that support your own capacity to consciously breathe. This means PRACTICE…AND practice in my world means PLAY!

Today’s lesson utilizes a simple breathing technique to invite your higher self into your body. This time of year, as the days get shorter and shorter (in the Northern Hemisphere), invites us to connect with our own inner mystery. We come into the self to be able to discover what the longer days have in store for our creative energies and life pulse. It can be too easy to fall into depression or the lure of over stimulating holiday socializing. You are being called into something deeper though…your embodied spiritual self.

I recommend using this breath practice to remember that you are more than your physical reality. By allowing yourself time to contract into your spiritual self, you are embracing the energy of nature.

There is a bonus for my paid subscribers in this post. You’ll get the opportunity to engage in a longer meditation practice using this breath (scroll all the way down). Let me know if you like the longer format…so that I’ll offer it more often to you.

EMBODIMENT LESSON #8

EMBODIMENT EXERCISE #8

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It’s amazing how many of life’s problems can be solved through some sort of mindful embodiment practice. This doesn’t need to be taken very seriously either. It’s just a matter of recognizing that to feel connected in a meaningful way to our lives, we need to feel connected in a meaningful way to our bodies. Step by step, slowing down and playing with the myriad of techniques that exist to support this process is what I am using Substack to teach.

I am a multidimensional being (just like you are by the way). The concepts I share in these videos are a result of years of study and my own practice. Because of this, there is not one specific root to what I teach. The practices you will encounter are based in Energy Medicine, Kundalini Yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Dance, and Breathwork. I will do my best to give sources and credit as required. I have found for myself that by engaging in multiple types of movement and philosophies makes it so I can utilize what is right for my body as it changes. You are invited to do the same. Don’t judge what doesn’t work. Just be open to trying something new!

I hope you enjoyed these videos. Thank you for watching, breathing, and embodying with me. The world needs you.

I am currently working on classes to embellish my embodiment series, so don’t worry if you aren’t called to subscribe to my substack. You’ll be able to purchase a class down the road with extended teachings, videos, exercises, and philosophies.

I welcome any feedback you have in regards to what you want more of, less of, or any questions that develop.

Learn something new here? I’d appreciate an act of giving back. Subscribe. Share. Leave a comment. Give me a heart. Everything is appreciated.

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The sense of self (body, impulses, emotions, reactions, expressions, heart, soul life pulse) as a safehome in which to land seems like it should be a birthright. I wish it were true in the energetic sense. The only time so many of us actually felt permission to be ourselves completely and even knew what that me…

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We are ever changing beings who need to get more comfortable with the nature of our own transformative self.

As you learn to bridge mind and body more, you’ll eventually be able to feel sensation without needing to immediately turn it into a thought to undertand it. This is what creates the ability to have the body be an unlimited resource for growth into body as teacher and self as embodied being.

I am a multidimensional being (just like you are by the way). The concepts I share in these videos are a result of years of study and my own practice. Because of this, there is not one specific root to what I teach. The practices you will encounter are based in Energy Medicine, Kundalini Yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Dance, and Breathwork. I will do my best to give sources and credit as required. I have found for myself that by engaging in multiple types of movement and philosophies makes it so I can utilize what is right for my body as it changes. You are invited to do the same. Don’t judge what doesn’t work. Just be open to trying something new!

Subscribe now

All of my embodiment posts are meant to be easy to access and non stressful teaching platforms that incorporate the vital concept of becoming alive to your own body.

Welcome to the seventh lesson in my series teaching you simple steps towards Embodiment or, as I like to call it:

Embodiment Practices and Teachings for Less Than 15 Minutes A Day!

Before I go too much further, I invite you to like my work, add a comment, or share this post. That’s how us writing folk gain an audience for the work we do.

To actively start to commit to any embodiment practice, it’s important to gain more and more tools that support your own capacity to consciously breathe. This means PRACTICE…AND practice in my world means PLAY!

This time around, I’m introducing the concept of a quiet mind as a doorway into the body. So often in life we rush through everything. We all know in theory we are moving too fast but in such fast paced lives, taking the time to find quiet is a task that is simply way too overwhelming to engage in. I am not going to write about why we need silence. Nope. Instead, I am going to share with you an incredibly simple breathing technique that creates silence without all the work.

Three minutes to quiet the mind? Really. That’s all it takes. Then you just get to coast into the silence without working so hard to find it. Who knows what you will find?

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As you learn to bridge mind and body more, you’ll eventually be able to feel sensation without needing to immediately turn it into a thought to undertand it. This is what creates the ability to have the body be an unlimited resource for growth into body as teacher and self as embodied being.

I am a multidimensional being (just like you are by the way). The concepts I share in these videos are a result of years of study and my own practice. Because of this, there is not one specific root to what I teach. The practices you will encounter are based in Energy Medicine, Kundalini Yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Dance, and Breathwork. I will do my best to give sources and credit as required. I have found for myself that by engaging in multiple types of movement and philosophies makes it so I can utilize what is right for my body as it changes. You are invited to do the same. Don’t judge what doesn’t work. Just be open to trying something new!

Subscribe now

It’s amazing how many of life’s problems can be solved through some sort of mindful embodiment practice. This doesn’t need to be taken very seriously either. It’s just a matter of recognizing that to feel connected in a meaningful way to our lives, we need to feel connected in a meaningful way to our bodies. Step by step, slowing down and playing with the myriad of techniques that exist to support this process is what I am using Substack to teach.

All of my embodiment posts are meant to be easy to access and non stressful teaching platforms that incorporate the vital concept of becoming alive to your own body.

Welcome to the sixth lesson in my series teaching you simple steps towards Embodiment or, as I like to call it:

Embodiment Practices and Teachings for Less Than 15 Minutes A Day!

Before I go too much further, I invite you to like my work, add a comment, or share this post. That’s how us writing folk gain an audience for the work we do.

To actively start to engage in any embodiment practice, it’s important to gain more and more tools that support your own capacity to consciously breathe. This means PRACTICE. AND practice in my world means PLAY!

By engaging in these short videos with a mind that is willing to just relax and let go and open to see what happens, you will start to bridge that ever so important connection between your brain and sensations in your body that go beyond thoughts.

This post uses a simple technique of creating expectation in the body and witnessing your body’s response. It’s a learning game here to figure out how you uniquely react to change. There are so many ways to play with this exercise. You can use it to learn how you resist change. You can use it to learn how you rush through change. You can use it to learn how you create a mind experience to avoid the sensation of change. The technique I am sharing with you today is one that I played with for over 7 years. In the course of that time, I got so many answers from my body and the sensations in it around my own capacity to sit and be instead of think and act. It’s one of those fun activities you can do anytime you want without any prep. I hope you enjoy it.

I am currently working on classes to embellish my embodiment series, so don’t worry if you aren’t called to subscribe to my substack. You’ll be able to purchase a class down the road with extended teachings, videos, exercises, and philosophies.

Subscribe now

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The roots of being able to self contain or not come from the stability of your root chakra. All issues (physical, emotional, and spiritual) begin with the ground. Your relationship to your own ground creates the foundation for how you relate to boundaries. The issues that you have around trust, sense of self, belonging, and connection are all rooted in your relationship to your root.

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Boundaries and self containment stem from the preverbal ways you learned to feel safe in your body. You learned in the womb how to inhabit your body. Your initial bonding with your mother created the security that allowed you to have permission to reside in your body. This connection takes place somatically in your cells before you can verbalize needs, feelings, emotions or desires. The dilemmas you face in life and the way you work with them all come from a sense of self that is inherent, formed in utero and early life.

This is where you can start at the ground and question the primary sense of reality you have - your sense of self. How do you know you exist? Where do you start and stop in your felt sense of self? How do you feel other people in reflection of your own boundaries? How do you let others feel you? Your ability to be in a boundary that fluctuates through relationships and situationships are reflective of the permission you give yourself to be you.

Boundaries and your EMOTIONAL COMFORT ZONE

Emotions that you are comfortable feeling are the default emotions that you process life through. You have certain emotions you feel, are comfortable feeling, and are able to express. These emotions are felt up to a specific strength. If an emotion goes beyond a comfortable strength, a boundary is going to go up or down. A boundary going up will result in the emotion being suppressed. A boundary going down will result in the emotion being broadcast. Your ability to hold yourself in a contained boundary is reflective of your emotional comfort zone.

• Your emotional comfort zone defines an integral aspect of how you process hurt, trauma, and pain.

• Your emotional comfort zone is the launching point for how you express yourself.

• Your emotional comfort zone reflects when you connect with others and when you disconnect from others.

• Your emotional comfort zone depends on your degree of safety and your willingness to express your authentic self. 

CONNECTION METRICS

Boundaries and the understanding of them have a strong affect on your sense of connection. Boundaries are incredibly complex energetic interactions. Boundaries are never simply spoken words. A comfort with emotion creates boundaries that are contained and relatable. A discomfort with emotion causes chaotic boundaries. Establishing boundaries with ease is a result of comfortable emotional expression. This process is internal and external. It is reflective of what you allow yourself to feel (internal) and what you allow yourself to express (external). When the internal and external are in alignment, boundaries are in alignment as well.

Boundaries always affect your ability to connect. Your boundaries decide where you connect from and what you connect with. A disconnected boundary happens when you cannot be authentic with your emotional content. When you suppress emotion, you bind into yourself. This state that serves to prevent emotional connection with the self will feel like a disconnect or unavailable to others. When your own connection to your authentic self is off, you have more boundaries. Those boundaries will be felt by others as a separation. Connection is not as possible.

Boundaries when you are unwilling to feel an emotion create a sense of being absent and withdrawn. Over containing happens when you suppress your emotions. When you cannot feel, don’t know how to feel, or do not want to feel you cut yourself off from you and from others with a boundary. There is a large component of unmet or unprocessed self in strong boundaries. The boundary that exists is not just a boundary of keeping people away from self, it is also a way of keeping self away from self. In an over contained boundary there can be suppressed emotion, missing emotion, or overdoing. There is also likely to be a sense of limited space or limited room for self within the boundaries.

Boundaries when you are willing to feel your emotions are connectable and flexible. They reflect the change in your emotional content and your awareness of self. Your willingness to be authentic will create a sense of presence. When you are able to fluidly be with yourself, you invite others into that flow. Optimal relatability happens when there is a combination of interest in others and interest in what is really happening inside the self.

Boundaries when you are lost in your emotions create a different connection meter. Intense or threatening emotional expression reflects a boundary explosion. This explosion is triggered by extreme emotional states as well as a belief that a need is impossible to be met by another. The lack of a boundary coupled with a deep hunger cascades into an overblown reaction that feels necessary to maintain a self identity. Boundary loss is an attempt to find the self through the other. Any way to establish a sense of self autonomy has to be big and loud to be felt and noticed. When this happens you do not know how to have your reaction, your need and your self at the same time. 

In Paradox I Trust

You are likely to hold back when you need to feel and feel when you need to hold back. This is just a human paradigm. An emotion can be felt and experienced without rationalization or thinking. Really. It can. If you are rationalizing or thinking about an emotion, you are creating a boundary that does not match your emotional state. You are not allowing flow. You are holding yourself back.

To have a fluid and relatable boundary, you have to build trust in you body and what it is telling you. This links back to the importance of having a sense of root chakra and ground.

The foundation of self needs to be able to trust sensate processes and see them through fully.

Your container has to trust itself for you to grow.

Surrendering to yourself entails being open to exploring the place inside you that you can’t rationalize, that can only be expressed.

Trusting your own being is not about thinking yourself into being. It is following your own current of life into flow and becoming.

You need to consciously take time to explore self away from the rational mind.

Subtle energies and awarenesses take you into the wounded disconnect from your soul and teaches you how to uniquely heal through your own being.

THIS FOLKS IS WHY I TEACH EMBODIMENT PRACTICES THAT ARE EASILY ACCESSIBLE. WE LITERALLY NEED THEM. THERE’S NO AVOIDING IT.

Authentic Relating = Boundary Awareness

Your ability to be authentic to yourself in relationship is how you will learn to feel fulfilled when interacting with others.

• Boundary awareness requires tolerating the self being different than others and different than your own patterns dictate.

• Boundary awareness requires understanding the reflexive ways you interact and attempting.

• Boundary awareness needs you to be able to allow yourself to feel more emotions.

• Practice ways of finding a deeper relationship to self and ground so you can surrender into who you are and the boundaries that are present.

• Mindfully experiencing sensation and trusting sensation to build into emotions creates boundary awareness.

Play is a great way to build emotional fluidity and boundary awareness. So does putting yourself in paradigm shifting experiences. Allow yourself to try new things and observe how they affect you. Mess up more, think less, try to be open to feeling new emotions. Your emotional resiliency needs to be shaken up to grow you. If you do not consciously do this, life will. Your journey through life is one of awakening and growth. You can either accept it or fight it. Which do you choose?

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Ground Yourself! Meditation

Journal Exercise to Deepen

• What emotions do you allow yourself to feel?

• Is their intensity controlled?

• What emotions do you avoid?

• What ways do you reject emotional expression?

• When do you have too strong of a boundary between self and others?

• Do you recognize when your boundaries are too strong?

• Is there a trigger or is it the strong boundaries itself what soothe you?

• Is there a specific emotion or situation in life that triggers a need to lose control?

• What happens when you let go?

• Does the response of others have any effect on your expression?

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It’s amazing how many of life’s problems can be solved through some sort of mindful embodiment practice. This doesn’t need to be taken very seriously either. It’s just a matter of recognizing that to feel connected in a meaningful way to our lives, we need to feel connected in a meaningful way to our bodies. Step by step, slowing down and playing with the myriad of techniques that exist to support this process is what I am using Substack to teach.

All of my embodiment posts are meant to be easy to access and non stressful teaching platforms that incorporate the vital concept of becoming alive to your own body.

Welcome to the fifth lesson in my series teaching you simple steps towards Embodiment or, as I like to call it:

Embodiment Practices and Teachings for Less Than 15 Minutes A Day!

Before I go too much further, I invite you to like my work, add a comment, or share this post. That’s how us writing folk gain an audience for the work we do.

To actively start to engage in any embodiment practice, it’s important to gain more and more tools that support your own capacity to consciously breathe. This means PRACTICE. AND practice in my world means PLAY!

By engaging in these short videos with a mind that is willing to just relax and let go and open to see what happens, you will start to bridge that ever so important connection between your brain and sensations in your body that go beyond thoughts.

The elevator of breath creates a capacity for learning how to simply touch into sensation without being overwhelmed by it. In this exercise, I am sharing how you can use the breath to take you down and up at will into and out of your mind. When you use intention to bring your consciousness with with breath, you can start to get used to sensations without long body scan meditations or a demand that you have to work hard to get in to yourself. As you pay attention to the result, you will learn that travelling from body to mind is as simple as choosing where you want to be. That’s it.

Using the breath as an elevator up and down into body sensations is such an amazing life tool. It teaches patience. It teaches you how to feel your sensate self without coming to conclusions. It builds vitality by literally shifting the energy in your body. Instead of being a walking and talking head with all the energy being stuck, here is your chance to become a being with flow and connection.

I am currently working on classes to embellish my embodiment series, so don’t worry if you aren’t called to subscribe to my substack. You’ll be able to purchase a class down the road with extended teachings, videos, exercises, and philosophies.

Subscribe now

Read more

All of my embodiment posts are meant to be easy to access and non stressful teaching platforms that incorporate the vital concept of becoming alive to your own body.

Subscribe now

Read more