It’s Your Choice
We sometimes want to over complicate healing. I found myself for months saying things like "Ill focus on this later" or "I don't have the time/money/energy right now". I would put things off until the end of the day just to realize I'm too tired. I made my healing somewhat of a chore. I felt so much resistance in my body to "all of the things" that came with healing.
I want to tell you what was really happening. My mind was making everything such a big deal as a way to avoid seeing the truth of the matter. As a way of avoiding my own pain. I made "healing" such a chore in my mind that I never wanted to do it.
When it comes to healing, all it is is really just a choice. A choice to go inward or to look outward. When we get triggered, we use many things to look outward for comfort. We use things(food, TV, gym) or people(spouse, parent, child) to avoid feeling what is happening within us. To avoid the stress, the anxiety, the loneliness, the fear, the anger etc. We look outward to take our attention off of what we are experiencing because we have been taught our whole lives that we are not powerful enough to feel the emotional pain arising. We see ourselves as smaller than our pain and if that is how we see ourselves, that will be our reality. We will end up spending our whole lives choosing people and things to avoid these feelings. Our whole life literally becomes a reflection of the way we run away from our feelings or a way we try to cope or compensate for limiting beliefs we have about ourselves to make ourselves feel better.
When I started seeing every trigger that I had as a choice, a choice to drop into my heart space, to love and nurture myself through the pain while staying connected to my heart, I felt serious shifts happening in my life. And no, it wasn't because I went on a three day intensive retreat or spent hours alone processing past trauma. It started with opening my heart and staying connected for a few minutes here and there throughout the day (longer if I had time) after my coworker triggered shame within me, as my partner triggered powerlessness within me, as my child triggered a fear of losing control. Seeing the emotion as a part of myself that is showing up to be loved instead of getting lost in it or fighting it. Don't get me wrong, you can do amazing work on yourself when you can take the time to go deep within and have the time to process and heal deep layers but healing does not need to be confined to the once a week or just the times you have a lot of time for just you(which lets be honest, many of us don't). All it takes is a choice to open instead of close. To process instead of project. To take a step back and ask yourself the "why". "Why am I doing this?" "Why am I feeling this way?" "Why am I thinking these thoughts?". When your mind wants to make it more complicated than that, ask yourself why? Where is the avoidance coming from? Where is the fear? Then honor and love what is showing up.
Open, Feel, Connect and Heal.
With love,
Madison
