April 01, 2018
Are You Still Apologizing For Your Existence?
Tags: Fear of Judgement, Self Empowerment, Taking Responsibility, Asking Permission
You decide to wear something a little daring today but in your head you hear “Take it off, you will call attention to yourself, what will people think?” But some other voice inside says “DO IT!” So you do, but all the way to work you prepare for all the apologizing you will have to do today. Or maybe you volunteer to do something at work, or in your social circles, that calls the spotlight to you. That voice inside you starts asking who the heck you think you are, and you scramble to find reasons to justify your actions. Maybe you take a stand on a spiritual or political belief that is different from those among you, or perhaps you are just saying “No!” to something that is not right for you. It can even be the way you raise your children. Why must you always apologize?
The fear of judgement, conflict, not belonging, and of losing love makes us quick to retract our self expression. Many of us were shut down as children, and told not to be so loud or sensitive, for example. We were rewarded instead, for being the children our parents wanted us to be. Fearing a loss of love, or a feeling of ostracization, we begrudgingly complied. We will not ever be able to reach for the stars, however, if we are still trying to please an imaginary counsel of naysayers in our heads. When we express ourselves, people who feel threatened by it will judge us, there is no way around that. It is what people do in fear, they judge and control. The work for us is not in kowtowing to the demands of their low self esteem, however, it is in digging out what our fears of expressing ourselves are, and sorting through our own shame. What is it rooted in?
Read More
February 01, 2016
Fight Flight Or Freeze
Tags: Anxiety, SuperCeptor, Highly Sensitive Person, Fear, Spiritual Angst, Depression, Fight or Flight, HPA Axis
One of the most crippling side effects of being highly sensitive is running high levels of anxiety. Sensitives, or SuperCeptors, are highly tuned to pick up on the nuances of their environments, keeping their bodies forever on alert. They are not the only ones, however. Anyone who has been imprinted by a stressful or traumatic period in their life, also has a brain tempered for further stress.
In the first five years of our lives everyone’s brain is being “tuned” for how it is going to react to the world. If those first years are filled with high levels of stress, we develop a brain prepared for more. Unfortunately, this creates a “trigger happy” stress response ready for danger behind every corner.
Read More
June 10, 2014
The Walls Of Protection
Tags: Isolation, fear, us vs them, True Self
The walls we build around ourselves are the walls that keep us in fear and isolation. They create the illusion of an us... and them... and fill the trenches between the two with fear. Ask yourself what you are protecting by erecting them... chances are it is only a phantom image of your true self, a wisp of smoke caught in a mirror... Your True Self is a part of the whole, it is both the us and the them.
December 18, 2013
Cockroaches and Termites
Tags: awareness, Collusion, control, Ego, Emotions, evolution, Fear, Guilt, judgment, Negativity, Projection, Separation, Shadow, Shame, Truth
We are remodeling my bathroom to put in a tub (!)...but as we tore out the old nasty shower stall and uprooted the flooring we found the pipes had been leaking for years... the old wall wood was riddled with termites... and under the flooring lived a colony of cockroaches... It got me to thinking about shadow.
Read More
September 17, 2013
Colluding With Violence
Tags: Anger, Being Present, blame, Bullying, Collusion, control, Emotions, Fear, Guilt, imprints, Projection, victim, Violence
I saw a strange thing yesterday: A young guy in a Mustang whipped around a corner and hit a middle age guy in an SUV. The SUV, however, was straddling both lanes of a narrow passageway so technically he was at fault for being in the wrong lane. It was all fender bender kind of damage but adrenaline does strange things...The SUV driver came steaming out of the SUV yelling and screaming into the face of the young Mustang driver... The young guy started crying and apologizing, in total shock. He seemed totally convinced he was in the wrong... It made me think about how often we collude with bullies and people who are angry because we are so rattled by their violence.
September 15, 2013
We Are Not Our Our Brother’s Judgments
Tags: awareness, Fear, judgment, Perception, self respect, victim
People judge. It is the intellect's way of protecting itself from threatening or uncomfortable situations. As we awaken we learn to step back from judgement and use discernment instead. Discernment is different from judgement in that there is not an emotionally based classification made, there is just a yes/no evaluation. Yes that feels like the right thing to do, no I don't resonate with that person. We cannot make others stop judging us but we can be comfortable enough with ourselves to not collude with other people's opinions of us. Judgements are not personal, they are made from within the mind of a person evaluating the safety of their environment based on their lifetime of experiences. They have everything to do with the perceiver and very little to do with the perceived. When we collude with their judgements we can lose sight of our uniqueness and strengths and feel the lessor. This often stops us from standing in our light and pushing through our fears. We cannot stop people from judging but we can choose to hold true to ourselves and maintain our course.
September 12, 2013
Is it Love or An Attachment?
Tags: attachment, awareness, Emotions, Fear, Love, possessions, Scarcity
There is a difference between love and our attachments to what we love. Love is like the water in a clear spring fed pool, our attachments are us grasping at it and trying to put it in a jar. Within the jar it is safe and we know where it is; we can take it out and use it whenever we please. But when the jar breaks we believe we lost the love. We haven't. It is still all around us and we can always go back to that pool. It is only the jar that we have lost. It is our attachment to that jar that hurts. Attachment comes from the ego identifying with something and claiming ownership over it. The emotional investment of ownership is not love. The pain of losing is not love. The challenge is to love, truly love, without being attached, to swim in that pool but not need to contain it.
