Preparing to Deep Dive

Let’s back up a moment and set a healthy container for our emotional self-care exploration. Our sensitivities, weaknesses, places where we have been most wounded and afraid are coming up to be cleansed and healed.

It can feel all over the place. If things feels negative, heavy, dense there’s something based on falsehood, and is ripe for releasing! The truth feels light, joyful, and buoyant.

If emotions get backed up, it can feel overwhelming and frightening, which is why keeping things moving (whether externally or internally) is so important right now.

None of us want to carry around emotional baggage, and we are all doing the best we can. Yet, sometimes things get sticky and hang on, and shame and guilt can get piled on and…well can feel like this truck…not fun!

We all feel things in our own ways, and no one will ever understand the totality of our experience as beings. We can shape our culture by having compassion for our shared human experience in our uniqueness. Unity in diversity!

If we get too emotionally backlogged, however, the feeling that no one else could understand (or not wanting to bother anyone and wanting to ‘do it all on my own’) just makes things worse.

Being hard on yourself keeps patterns stuck in gear. Things can start heading in a negative spiral of emotional overwhelm instead of a positive upward spiral of emotional growth and possibility.

Getting angry and frustrated just piles on, compounding the situation, so what can we do? Let’s start by breathing in together, real deep…all the way down…hold it. Intend to gather all that baggage, and let it go…let it ALL go…ahhhh. One mindful breath can change your whole day!

Good News:

Positive Spirals can be generated by such a simple action as one breath! Every step you take in a positive and healthy direction matters more than you know.

“Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it.” – M.K. Gandhi

Your baggage is the raw material of your transformation. Allow your resistance to become fertilizer for your process. Resistance is a natural part of the healing and creative process, if you run into it, you can be sure there’s buried treasure behind it.

It’s a beautiful humbling moment where we can see where we’ve been wrong, wounded, growing, and it’s all divinely perfect so please let yourself off the hook! We as humanity are rising to the occasion, and we are being called to do our part and trust that everyone else has an equal sovereignty and innate power to do the same for themselves.

Seize this transformative moment by allowing it ALL air out with some love and sunshine in so it can move out! Hydrate, ground, breathe, eat fresh clean foods, dance, do whatever you need to keep the energy moving.

Cue: The Fifth Dimension Let the Sunshine

Let’s face it, we are all way too hard on ourselves, and that ends up projecting out onto others if left untended. There’s no shame in growing and we all learn through experience, which is something we people all have in common.

It’s safe to go in and listen. Allow yourself to relax, to be spiritually supported, to experience catharsis.

The energetic waves are titanic right now, so if you need to, please give yourself permission to pause and release, center, ground, and be gentle with yourself. It’s a time of actively letting go and it can feel intense. We are going through a profound rebirth, unprecedented in human experience.

Diving In

If, in your self-reflection, you realize you’ve emotionally over extended yourself in the past, over given, over shared…most importantly please be kind & loving with yourself. Awareness is the first step to self-mastery.

This can be challenging if you feel people have come to expect a certain level of emotional giving from you and those are still active relationships in your life.

If this is the case, you may need to take the necessary time to allow your feelings and to become centered in yourself, allowing repressed emotions to surface and pass.

People naturally adjust to us when we make adjustments. We are all constantly changing and adapting, a beautiful aspect of our capacity to evolve.

In some situations it may be helpful to communicate to others that you’re changing and becoming healthier, and while you love that person there may be some adjustments, like in the amount of time you’re available, etc. Other times, letting it happen naturally and gracefully is sufficient.

Your intuition and feelings will let you know where boundaries need to be set. If something is nagging at you or negativity is creeping in, that’s a clear indication boundaries could use some tinkering. Often this means changing how we are expending our energy mentally, emotionally and physically.

It takes courage to grow. Let’s together create a supportive culture by giving ourselves grace as we learn in our own respective ways as best we can.

Your Highest Good is In Everyone’s Highest Good – Win – Win - Win

I find it helpful to keep in mind that what is the in the highest and best good for you is also in the highest and best good for everyone else.

So, if at a human level people get their feathers ruffled because you are being proactive about creating a healthy life, it’s simply not your business or responsibility to care take others emotional well-being. Ultimately, that’s their job.

Showing kindness, gentleness, and respect goes a long way. I can certainly appreciate (especially in retrospect!) the grace people have given me at my biggest turning points of emotional growth.

I feel this grace is culminating at this convergence of transformation now. We can each choose to be our best selves and show up that way as best we can, knowing that we are all going through our own growth process. Life is in full support of our evolution and opening our hearts. .

We can love and support one another without taking on things and attempting to do things for others, which just doesn’t work, and leads to tangled codependent messes. In healing, we are moving from energy draining to energy sustaining.

We are adaptable & people will adjust to your healthier behavior, or maybe if it’s a relationship that’s served it’s purposes then it’s time to peacefully move forward. Life tends to sort things out when we do what we are each respectively guided to and engage with life. No need to stress about the rest!

For support in the process of unraveling emotions, I highly recommend Melody Beatty’s wonderful “The Language of Letting Go”, a beautiful book with daily reflections on having a healthy life free from unhealthy codependency.

Self-Compassion = Emotional Mastery

Below is the process by which we become masterful learners. This process applies to emotional intelligence as much as anything:

Unconscious Competence -> Conscious Incompetence -> Conscious Competence -> Unconscious Competence

It’s always smart to keep an open heart! It is also a prerequisite/integral to feeling compassion and empathy. If you are feeling the need to nurture your own emotional well-being garden, please give yourself permission to feel compassion and take your foot of the empathy gas if need be.

Simply, if you need space to feel your own feelings, then by all loving means, life is supporting you. Your emotional well-being is essential. There’s no shame in that!

Allow yourself to be loving in whatever ways are most appropriate for the well-being of your soul in the context of your current life experience. And have compassion on yourself for doing the best you could in any given situation. In sharing that grace with everyone, you receive it many times over.

By giving yourself permission to be emotionally healthy empowers others to do the same for themselves, which is a gift. What truly world-changing things can happen when we are emotionally healthy!

Whatever you are feeling emotionally, what is one thing you can do to support your emotional processing? It’s empowering to savor simple things like calming your nervous system with an epsom salt bath, some lavender tea or essential oil, writing yourself a kind note. Wishing you peace & serenity!