About Being Energetically Owned By My Work

12.27.12

Yesterday I woke up alone in my parents' house to the patter of Florida rain. I woke up with the familiar tension of responsibility. Christmas was over and I had told myself today I would get back to work. So I entered the day as I have for so long, with a sense of tension and unhappiness. Then remembering to attempt to stand outside of the response and see through the illusion of conditioned emotion, I decided to order my day differently. See how my soul reacted.

All I know, to start with, is this: I have had three days off – given by myself – from my work. I usually can't stop thinking about work for long. Anyone with their own business and a perfectionist, fear-based response to life probably suffers the same. But because of Christmas, having family around to distract me, and being in a different location from my office, it was easier than usual.

The cruel irony is that, being a freelancer, I can take three days off of work whenever I want. But I don't. Why? Taking time "off" doesn’t mean I’d actually be able to let go of work. I think about work while going on hikes, hanging out with my boyfriend, watching TV. Saturdays and Sundays are almost painful for me, trying to not do work, so I'd begun filling them up with different kinds of productivity.

But I figured if there were three consecutive days in a whole year that I could pull off true relaxation, if would be during Christmas at my parents' house. And I was right.

Having three days to truly break up the constant attachment to work productivity, I feel significantly less energetically owned by my idea of ‘what has to be done.’ I feel there is some more space between me and it.

Every year I get a Christmas miracle, and this year's was this: a bit of relief from the prison I keep myself in the rest of the year. It has nothing to do with my clients - who are wonderful - it has to do with something in the way I perceive my life.

So I tried something I haven't tried in a long time: I chose to do my own writing first.

I opened my computer and the next thing I knew I was checking email, Facebook, even Perez Hilton. I also checked my work email, telling myself I just waned to see what was waiting for me. And you know what? There was nothing new. After all it is just the first day after Christmas.

And then I started journaling. And it was so good to hear my own inner voice. To start to clear up and clear out a lot of that muck and confusion, needless worry, and lack of faith in the universe.

Because here is the truth: if you are miserable, it is your soul telling you to find your joy. Find your joy. That is the only thing in life that is real. Everything else is illusion.

It will be steps. The tick to go online, check email, use Facebook, these are things I have done every single day for six years now at least.

And there are other psychological traps. A voice that says I could turn this into a blog post. A nice way to share an honest part of myself on the blog. Already, not 300 words in, it was saying it. I was saying it. And here it is. A blog post. And maybe it was meant to be one. But it can't start out as one, you know?

My mind is slower and cleaner today that it has been in a long time. Slow almost like the day I wrote "A Bird in the Hand," an article for the January 2011 issue of Follow Your Bliss and the piece I am most proud of. This sanity is the true goal. This connection with myself. And yet I am not there yet – writing to explore, to go beyond, not aiming everything at some end of sharing it with people.

Steps, it will take steps.

Maybe more than that, it will take a shift – sitting and writing until I shift into the other mind where the words come through me and for the universe.

Why Not Do Things Out of Love Instead of Fear?

Fear is not necessary. There is the idea that fear is good for us, that it is beneficial and has all kinds of hidden, mysterious values. People will look back and rationalize how fear got them to do this and do that, and all I can say is, "Too bad." 

Too bad they did not do it out of love for themselves or for their fellow human beings. Too bad that they did not do it out of love for life itself, love for their own aliveness, and love for their body. Why not do things for our body out of love for it instead of out of fear of the consequences? Why not keep it healthy and happy because we love and value it, not because we are afraid of a heart attack or something else?  -David R. Hawkins 

Today Our Hearts Are Broken, But Tomorrow They Will Heal

I wrote yesterday about the negativity that can plague even us light-chasers who work diligently to self-heal, heal others, and create a better world.

Today, in the wake of the shooting in Connecticut, I am sitting in my little office, listening to President Obama address the country, saying "Our hearts are broken" and I feel it when I look at my Facebook feed. Every single post is an outpouring of anger or sadness.

When I mourn the loss of those children and teachers, I feel catapulted out of my own world of issues, my little dragons, and into an outer space of our connectedness and with it, our shared pain.

And I don't think this pain only surfaces during a tragedy. I think a lot of us are carrying the collective pains of many. The unspoken, unprocessed, unconscious ones.

Many of us adults live rather steady, love-filled lives. We have everything we need. But then we can be overcome by negativity with no specific trigger. We think it might be something from our past, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it is our own stuff.

But sometimes I think that much of the negativity we process day to day isn't just our own. And maybe as we learn to "shake out" our own traumas, we help shake out the traumas of our collective psyche.

Guy Raz, in a special coverage from NPR News, was just speaking with an expert whose name I didn't catch, who said that there are teams on the way to help the students work through the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) but that there is still a lot scientists don't know about how trauma works.

However, he says, we do know this: allow the children to express their feelings, to revisit the event and try and find meaning. Try and make sense of the the tragedy, put it into a framework. Part of what terror is is that it's incomprehensible. Putting it into a narrative gives us some control over the events.

As for the rest of us, he advises us to, "Step back and ask what really affects us most of the time. School shootings aren't one of those things." He also said that the thing about trauma is a lot of people come out the other end whole. There is lots of resilience in the human character.

My thoughts go to the parents and families of the people who died today. May their hearts, and our hearts, not be broken forever.

Shake It Out, Shake It Out

Shake it out, shake it out
Shake it out, shake it out, ooh whoa
And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off

Anxious, hypervigilant, unable to relax, hypersensitive, overprotective, fearful, avoidant. 

It can be embarrassing to admit how much we stuck in emotional chains, no matter how much we achieve, help others, or work on ourselves.

2012 was a year of leveling up for me and many people I know. The end of the world was really more like a significant spiritual shift that forced a lot of us to grow of old thinking patterns.

One of the most important things I learned was that you don't have to be shell shocked or have suffered severe abuse to have PTSD. Most people I know carry with them feelings from difficult childhood situations that they could not accept or release. That is trauma.

Today I'd like to share with you what I find to be very helpful passages about the psychology behind trauma, how it gets trapped in the body, and how it can be released physically.


from Conscious Medicine: Creating Health and Well-Being in a Conscious Universe 
by Gill Edwards

Peter Levine, a psychologist, medical biologist, and former stress consultant to NASA observed that wild animals that have been traumatized into the freeze response, yet survived the ordeal, will always shake violently afterwards. They literally shake the trauma out of their energy system. After this their physiology returns to normal, as if nothing ever happened. In fact, research suggests that trauma builds resilience - and that avoiding change and stress is not necessarily good for us. Both animals and humans become stronger after trauma, as long as it is discharged.

***

Neurologist Bob Scaer, building upon Peter Levine's work, believes that most disease results from undischarged trauma - in other words - going beyond fight or flight to the freeze response and getting stuck there. If it is not discharged, trauma remains locked in your energy system, and you cycle between the fight-flight and freeze responses. You might have emotional symptoms such as being anxious, hypervigilant unable to relax, hypersensitive, overprotective, fearful and avoidant, along with characteristic feelings of shame, guilt and inadequacy.

          ***

So next time you have a shock - whether emotional or physical - let your body shake! And if you have traumas from the past that need to be released, shaking medicine which taps into your innate healing wisdom is one way of removing trauma from your bodymind.

          ***

Put on some drumming or dancing music with a strong rhythmical beat, then let your body do its own thing. Focus your mind on a trauma from the past, then shake to the music.

For me, anxiety, inability to relax, hypersenstivity and avoidance have made it very difficult to fully enjoy the abundance of love, creativity, and freedom in my life. As a writer I am language-oriented and many of my truths come in the form of mental, discursive narratives. But you can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it.

So I have been learning EFT (tapping), writing and dancing to shamanic beats, and of the deep healing available through soul retrievals. I can't wait to tell you more about them in future posts.

What works for you?