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Self Practice Supports Us!

For deep change, we require gentleness and compassion from ourselves and others.

Without gentleness and compassion, we evoke change through force, threats, shame, fear, bribery or manipulation. Any of these can work, but these partially unconscious approaches to change also bring instability and stress. 

However we have been motivating ourselves till now, we want to introduce or increase our dosages of gentleness and compassion for ourselves and others.

Self Practice Supports Us!

It feels like everything is wrong, but it’s just not true. 

Sure, there are lots of challenges and problems in me, 

in my life and in the world around me.

But there is also a lot that is good.

I love and I am loved.

I act in ways that are helpful as do the people around me.

Learning to disbelieve this feeling that “Everything is wrong!” will actually help me to better address the things that need to be changed.

It feels like everything is wrong and I know it is not true.

There is much that is good.

I soften into knowing there is much that is good.

I soften, and that which is good embraces me.

Hello all my beloveds!!

Whew, I was afraid to look but I did anyway and it’s been four months since my last newsletter.

This newsletter is a health update and a health-related PSA (public service announcement) that may be relevant for some of my audience.

I have been experiencing a bout of really over the top fatigue, worse than my usual baseline of moderate fatigue (which is why you have not heard from me). There are a range of root causes for sure, but I discovered one key culprit and that made a huge difference. I stopped taking my multi-vitamin and I felt relief within just a day or so.

Proof of Life

Why would a multi-vitamin cause crippling fatigue? Because this one (and it turns out many other multivitamins and many other supplements) includes an ingredient called Alpha-Lipoic Acic (ALA).

What is ALA and why would that cause crippling fatigue?

ALA is a powerful antioxidant, used for treating diabetic neuropathy and for general anti-oxidation. That’s good, right? For a lot of people, it’s great.

But ALA is also a mercury chelator. What does that mean? It means that for someone who has mercury in their body, ALA will find the mercury, grab hold of it, and carry it away from wherever it was stashed.

Continue reading “PSA: Mercury (not retrograde! – worse) 😓 Ackk!”

Self Practice Supports Us!

With a neutral and curious stance, I scan my environment with my eyes, ears, sense of smell, and spidey-sense.

I invite my body to actively notice the lack of any immediate threat, and to soften.

I breathe, I feel gravity pulling me down and I feel the bed or chair holding me up.

I pause and rest here, tracking my breath and noticing what neutral feels like, gently nudging away (best I can) the impulse to engage with alarm. 

Breath. Support. Neutral. Rest.

Self Practice Supports Us!

I am noticing discomfort. I don’t feel good.

The emotion in the discomfort seems to be (feeling).

I make space for the feeling of (feeling) AND I connect with my calm strength at my core.

I direct my focus of attention to my calm strength.

I feel the support of my ancestors at my back.

I don’t need for the (feeling) to go away

(though that would be nice).

I connect to the quiet, even as I allow the feeling of (feeling) to just be.

Self Practice Supports Us!

There is something in my life that bothers me, hurts me, or destabilizes me when I encounter it. I will call it my trigger situation. [Many of us have several big ones.]

I soften and open to the understanding that the emotional pain I feel in my trigger situation is mostly not about my trigger situation and not about present time.

I recognize that I have resources and support that I did not have in the past.

Connected to my heart, my roots, my belly, and my third eye,

I gently turn and look at my trigger situation straight on, inviting my body to recognize that I can feel this pain and remain standing.

I breathe and know that I will be ok.

Whatever the helplessness, terror, overwhelm, pain, rage, grief or loneliness, I can hold the feelings because I know that they are not telling me the truth about me and my life, even though they always seem to have a compelling argument.

Self Practice Supports Us!

I soften and open to the experience
of the trees greeting me,
welcoming me, smiling at me
and being happy that I am here.

I soften and open to the experience
of greeting the trees,
welcoming them, smiling at them
and being happy that they are here.
And the flowers and the lightposts and the automobiles and the humans.

Self Practice Supports Us!
I feel how
I don’t know who I am
I don’t know how
I am meant to fit in
I invite myself to be with this gently,
without stress or panic,
in a way that is neutral and curious.
There is freedom and possibility here.

Hi, Lovely Human and all of my amazing friends and contacts,

There is a lot that is challenging, disturbing and frightening right now in the world around us.

For some of us this shakes us up and makes everything worse.

For others, the overt violence and pain in the news matches the threat and distress we were feeling in our bodies all along, and sometimes matches – or at least parallels – the actual threat that we or people we care about live with all the time. That might exaggerate our distress or it might paradoxically make us a little more comfortable.

I hope that you are navigating well and that you and your family members are healthy and safe.

I know I find myself asking these questions in relation to the Russian invasion into Ukraine and to the poverty, racism and inequity that shows up in so many ways in our US culture.

“Am I doing enough?”
“Am I making a difference?”
“What do I need?”
“Is it ok to be focusing on what I need when there is so much need all around me?”

These questions interact with the nagging questions, thoughts and feelings that my developmental trauma history planted in me:

“I know there’s something I’m supposed to be doing that I’m not doing.”
“Who am I failing today?”
“It’s just all too much.”
“But I have to push on and keep performing the best I can.”
“Am I an utter failure or just a mediocre failure?”
“Am I allowed to feel good or have hope when I am clearly not living up to my intentions?”

My own trauma shadows dance with the shadows from current events and everything seems muddled and confused. Do I even know who am I and the basics of what I am meant to be doing in this life?

For me, this adds up to another reminder to do self-practices, like the “I am who also” practice:

I am an insightful healer who also struggles with fear, guilt and the feeling that I should be doing and giving more.

I invite you to visit my blog or my Instagram feed (links below) and pick out a self-practice or two and just try them. There has not been much activity for the past several months but there’s a lot there from earlier.

Shortly after my last newsletter went out in December, I contracted Covid for the second time. I am more or less recovered from that infection but I am still persistently and unreasonably tired. I’m doing my best to balance activity and rest and I’m pursuing various avenues of diagnosis and treatment for the fatigue.

Shifting gears to insights on developmental trauma healing.

I woke up a couple of mornings ago with an insight about anger that unfolded from my dreaming. The message I took from the dream was this:  “My anger needs to be balanced and in the right place.”

Like many people who experienced developmental trauma, I have a habit of suppressing my anger, of not even allowing myself to know that I am angry.

Angry, annoyed, irritated, impatient, frustrated. I block myself from having those feelings.

And this folds into my relationship with demands. My body-mind system believes that everybody is placing demands on me all the time. I feel the pressure of expectations from others that I know are either exaggerated or not even there at all. But I still feel the pressure and it tends to live just under the surface, so I don’t know why but I know I feel stressed and ill-at-ease. 

With all of those unreasonable demands on me, of course I feel angry!

Obviously I don’t want to be angry at the people I care about, support, and work with. Plus I’m aware that these demands that I’m feeling are not actually real.

If you click on this button it will take you to a recording of the little song I sing to myself to help my body remember this:

What to do with this? The people in my life in general are generous, patient, forgiving, flexible and supportive. They are not perfect but they are pretty great. But I feel like everyone is making demands on me. And I know that I feel angry about those demands and that I hide that anger from myself because I don’t want to be a terrible awful bad angry person.

I used to believe that I just didn’t have anger. “I’m a superior enlightened being with no anger, only love and generosity.”  That’s how committed I was to hiding these feelings.

I need to give myself permission to feel anger, even if its basis is bogus, so I don’t have to keep suppressing those feelings and thus suppressing my life force. 

Because there are deeper stories that are legit.

There are plenty of totally valid reasons for me to feel anger: violations, insults and abandonments that happened when I was young and helpless. Ultimately I want to connect with that deeper anger in a safe way. Making space for the anger that is closer to the surface and not reality-based (without actively buying into the content of the anger) is a healthy step toward making space for the deeper anger that is reality-based.

Which brings us back to those demands.

Because of a history of demands placed on my when I was very young, I feel like I have to constantly perform to precise standards. It’s all unconscious but very powerful.

Feeling like I have to perform makes me angry.

But I’m not allowed to feel angry because I still believe that I have to perform.

Which makes me angry.

All in my unconscious, all in a perpetual loop.

That is the cycle that I have to break. You may have the same cycle or a different flavor of cycle.

And just to point out that this is not a one-time process, where I find the false belief and cycle of thoughts and behaviors, I break it down and now I am free of that pattern. It doesn’t work like that.

Again using myself as an example, I remember about 15 years ago that whenever I would sit down in a group meeting or yoga class, I felt like I was being watched and judged for where I sat, who I sat next to, how much I did or did not conform to the activities that were going on in the class or group. I felt constantly on the spot.

It’s not like that at all anymore. These days I’m fairly comfortable in groups. I have permission to be who I am and to be different from other people.

So I’ve come a long way in terms of the level of demand that I feel. The pattern is still there, and I’m cycling through it at a deeper level now.

I wrote the bulk of this newsletter a week ago, and I want to share with you a practice I’ve been doing during the intervening week to work with my own anger.

Anger Flash Cards!

I’ve been gently inviting myself to scan my bodymind for hints of anger, and then to ask the anger what it has to say. 
When I hear some words, I write them down on an index card.
The once or a few times throughout the day, I pick a card, read the message (silently or out loud), and invite myself to feel what that feels like in my body-mind-energy system and self.

Stop it! Stay away from me!

I’m not trying to dive deep, I’m not trying to find some sort of profound and transformational healing moment here. Note that I’m not diminishing the value of those life-changing healing moments. I have experienced that sort of amazing shift sometimes in past work I’ve done in groups and with facilitators. But that’s not what this is.

With this practice, I’m seeking to gently soften the protective barrier between me and feeling anger. I touch the anger a little bit, I let it run through my body, and I get on with my day.

My body discovers that it’s possible to feel anger without any punishment or backlash.

Gradually that should allow my fierce unconscious defense against feeling my anger to become smaller and to eventually crumble away.

If this feels interesting to you, I invite you to try it out for yourself. The most important ingredients are curiosity, kindness, patience, and forgiveness.

Much love to you through this chaotic and demanding time.

Love to your love, love to your fear, love to your anger, love to your hope.

Self Practice Supports Us!

Be Lovingly Curious about your Grandiosity and Spiritual Bypass – and then Translate

In what ways do I pretend to myself that I am super-human and not subject to the emotional constraints of mere mortals?

My old super-human self story:
“I am a superior enlightened being with no anger, only love and generosity”

I remind myself that I came to these beliefs as part of an important need to survive the intolerable.

My new translation:
“It is important to me to be loving and generous. I make space for my anger and pain and for the anger and pain of others.”