Navigating Mental Health: A Soul’s Perspective.
I was 5 when my dad left. I figured out from talking to my therapist that this is why I have a fear of abandonment but I know I need to forgive him to move on. I read some books and realized I am anxious attached. I communicate this to my partner so he knows not to do certain things that will make me feel that way. When my anxiety does come up, I tell him so he knows to be there for me and reassure me he won't leave. I go to therapy weekly and I vent to my therapist about everything I am thinking and feeling and she told me I need to shift my mindset and find activities that will help me cope when my anxiety comes up such as yoga, meditation, working out and journaling. She told me that I need to put all my focus into something positive. She gave me some affirmations to practice “I am safe” “I am loved” “I am perfect just as I am”. She also mentioned that if things continue to get worse, I should look into antidepressants though I don’t really know how I feel about that, I suppose if she recommends it, that’s what I should do. I like to read self help books and listen to personal growth podcasts because they make me feel better. When my anxiety comes up, I breathe and try to stay positive and convince myself that I am fine, that I am happy. I try to focus on all the good things in my life, what I’m grateful for and then transition to one of my coping strategies.
How many of you can relate to this story? How many of you think this is the path to healing? All of these are common approaches to mental illness and they do not work. They keep you trapped in suffering, repeating dysfunctional patterns in your life over and over again with strategies that temporarily make you feel good but no permanent fixes.
What I see energetically from this example when I feel into to what is underneath the surface is “Because I was abandoned when I was younger, I learn to abandon myself every time my anxiety shows up by pushing it away, distracting myself from it, pretending it is not there and resisting it. I am searching for things that make me feel good so I do not have to acknowledge and face what I am currently feeling. I stay powerless to my anxiety because I constantly look for other people to save me. My anxiety is who I am and I can only learn to cope with it”.
Why does this not work?
Staying trapped in your mind.
When it comes to healing, your mind is absolutely useless and is actually a huge barrier to moving through things. We do not heal from our mind, we heal from our heart because healing is an energetic process. You can feel the difference between mental energy and heart energy. When you are talking to someone and they are in their mind vs. talking to someone who is in their heart, the conversation may be the same and there may be no physical difference, but you can feel the difference energetically. Healing is about alchemizing these lower frequencies we are experiencing with our heart energy. We like to analyze or intellectualize what we are experiencing and oftentimes we do not realize why. We like to “figure things out” because it keeps us from feeling. We begin to feel something and then our mind steps in and sabotages everything. We start to feel the anxiety and then our mind is like “noooope. This isn’t real, it’s only because your dad left, and we forgave him right? Think about something different instead. Change your mindset. Figure out why you are feeling this way. Let’s convince ourselves out of what we are feeling”. All. Mental. Energy. Its a trick! Notice when your mind wants to take you away from your heart. Your mind was a beautiful tool as a child who didn’t know how to process or what to do with all the pain they were experiencing. Who was never taught how to move through all the inevitable challenges and painful experiences of life. But we are adults now, we don’t need our mind to protect us anymore because we are powerful enough to face, to feel, to heal, to alchemize what is keeping us in suffering.
Identifying with the emotion.
In this example we also see the individual identifying with her anxiety. Her “attachment style”. When you identify with something, you become it. When you are attached to your own mental illness, you will always be that. The key is to detach from what you are experiencing because it is not the truth of who you are. I want you to be careful though. When I say detach, I do not mean disconnect or disassociate. You can detach from the emotion, see it for what it is, but still be connected to your heart, to your Soul, to the truth of who you are. They are two separate entities. It is okay if you do not fully understand exactly what I mean by that right now but just know that you can become the observer of your experience vs. getting lost in it. You can become the observer of your experience without disconnecting from your heart. The easiest way to picture this is to imagine that your anxiety is a child in front of you. If the child is experiencing anxiety, what would be the most helpful thing you could do? Would it be to become anxious right with it? To feed into the anxiety and match their energy? Would it be to ignore them, disconnect from them and push them away? Or would it be to be the presence and love and support that they need as they process through what they are experiencing? From the energy of unconditional love, not from the energy of “you need me to be okay”. Very different. What does love look like? I’ll let you decide.
Dependency people outside of you.
I need to talk to my therapist. I need someone to understand. I need my partner to make me feel better. I need someone to make me feel safe and loved. I need someone to help me calm my nervous system. I need someone to show me my worth and my value.
Feel into those words. Does that feel like power to you? No. It feels frantic. It feels small. It feels weak. It is the energy of a wounded child. And it is time we grow up and mature by not outsourcing our power to other people. Period. When you are so dependent on people outside of you to be everything you need, your life is now in their hands. Dependent on their mood. Dependent on their availability. Dependent on circumstances our of your control. As you can imagine, this is not sustainable and will keep you emotionally volatile and trapped.
Coping.
A lot of approaches to mental illness include coping mechanisms. And to be honest, for the majority of my life, I thought that was the extent of it. How well can you “cope” with your current state? What things can you tell yourself, what things can you do to distract yourself from feeling what you are currently experiencing? What things can you do to temporarily make you feel better until the comes back? Go to the gym, eat healthy, find a good friend group, partner, job, go to yoga, journal - All these things are technically “healthy” However, they do not address the underlying energy causing the anxiety/depression/overwhelm. You may feel good temporarily because the energy within you is moving but because you are not healing anything, it all comes back eventually. Coping is not healing. Coping is coping. Healing is literally transforming the energies and wounds within you(that we are taught we are powerless to) to a higher frequency with the power that you are(that we are so disconnected from) so that they do not exist within you in the same form.
Invalidating your experience.
Earlier I mentioned self abandonment. There are a lot of ways we abandon ourselves and we do not even realize it. As children, a lot of us learned that if we feel certain things or act in a certain way, we are not worthy of someone's love. Either they get mad/irritated, disconnect, ignore us or even leave. We may internalize this as it is not okay to be who I am, so I need to pretend that this part of me does not exist. As humans, we experience the full range of emotions from anger, to sadness to joy to happiness. It is not the anger or frustration that is the problem, it is the belief that they are wrong that results in suppression of part of yourself and allows self abandonment to form.
(Side note: Some of you might hear that and in your dualistic perspective interpret that as me saying that all kids should be allowed to throw tantrums all the time, to get what they want, that they can act/behave however they want and that's okay. And no. That is not the case and honestly is what is the issue with today's society. There is a difference between behavior and emotion. Of manipulation and authenticity. There are times when boundaries and structure is needed but it all depends on the energy you are coming from. The pendulum has swung all the way over from rigid, controlling, suppression of emotions to allowing your emotions to take over you, identifying with the emotions and allowing children to do and behave however they want resulting in entitled, spoiled humans, but that is a different story for a different time.)
We begin to feel something and since we have learned it is not okay, we have learned to abandon ourselves, to distract, to cope, to numb, to avoid feeling what is coming up and in doing so, we abandon ourselves over and over and over again. By “staying positive” but pushing away what we are truly feeling and using “positive affirmations” we are lying to ourselves and invalidating our current experience. We do not want to be what we are. We learned to do all the things to ourselves that were done to us by our primary caregivers.
Trying to control.
This aspect of the story is very common. If I can control my life, If I can prevent any situation from happening that will trigger me into my pain, then I will never have to feel pain. If my partner does everything the way I want and is always in a good mood I won’t ever have to feel the deep pain of being unlovable. If I get the perfect job that offers me financial security and my boss constantly is validating and praising me I won’t have to acknowledge the belief that at my core I am worth nothing. If I am a good person and make sure everyone around me is happy I will never have to feel the shame deep inside of innately being bad. If I can control how I look, go to the gym and eat healthy, I will never have to feel the deep wound of self loathing. If I don’t ever get sick or have a stroke or have serious health concerns I will never have to face the fear of my own mortality. If you haven’t noticed, that's a lot of ifs. When our life is formed from all these points of control, we are powerless to our life circumstances. We generally form a lot of anxiety about things going wrong or not as planned because if they aren’t exactly what we want, we have to face all the pain that these controlled circumstances are hiding. Every person is different. Not everyone has all of the wounds and beliefs I mentioned about but maybe there is one or a few that you may resonate with. Take note of what in your life you may be controlling and why?
So what does true authentic healing look like then?
Let's go back to our earlier example and see through a lens of what it could look like if someone were to be doing the real inner work.
I noticed that when my partner does certain things, it triggers anxiety within me. I take responsibility for healing what is unprocessed within me so I don’t project all my stuff onto him. I drop into and connect to my heart, I become The Way of Presence, The Way of Surrender and The Way of Honoring with this anxiety. I allow it to come up to be seen, to be heard, to be loved by the truest essence of me, my Soul. I am detached from the anxiety as I anchor into my heart energy. I feel this anxiety in my stomach and bring it up to my heart to alchemize. I invite it in and it allows me to see that this is a 5 year old version of me that has a deep fear of being abandoned. I become The Way of Unconditional Love for her and guide her to connect to her own power to heal and transform herself with the love and light that she is because she does not need anyone or anything outside of her to do this for her. I know that whatever comes my way I always have me. I do not need to control my circumstances. I am able to become The Way of Surrender to my life and flow with whatever comes. I take responsibility for myself and how I show up in this world and in doing so am co creating my life with my Soul. I do not consent to staying unconscious to everything, keeping me stuck in these cycles of suffering because I am the power that I need to change my life. I choose to elevate and rise out of old behaviors and thought patterns because it allows me to address and heal the root cause of my pain.
Feel the power in that. This is true authentic healing. Feel the difference in the energy between the two stories. Energy can not be destroyed, it can only be transformed or alchemized. The frequencies/emotions that are stored in your body can not be changed if you do not acknowledge them, if you do not take responsibility for them, if you do not stay connected to your heart while you are feeling them. They do not just go away because you wish them away or “let them go”. They will continue to keep you in suffering, keep you where you are unless you do the real inner work. As you heal, you elevate. As you elevate you heal what is not the real you and you become more aligned with your Soul. It opens up your divine sight so you can see the Truth of what is really going on at an energetic level instead of getting lost in the mind and trying to “figure it out”. You become The Way of Wisdom, being guided in this life by your Soul and not your Ego. This is the process of true awakening.
Most of use being raised in a society where materialism is the main philosophy, we are trained to use only our 5 senses to interpret this life and attempt to make changes, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. We are a Soul having a human experience and just focusing on the physical is denying half of this experience. We need to look beyond the physical, 95% of what is happening is Metaphysical in nature. It is not the words or the actions, it is not the disease or sickness, it is the energy behind the words and actions, it is the energy behind the diseases and sicknesses. We need to recondition ourselves to sense and feel into the root cause of what we see and experience from an energetic level because that is where true change happens. We need to bring awareness to parts of us that we do not want to look at so they do not control our lives by becoming the Master of the Self by learning to detect and transform subtle energies within you. This will completely and drastically change your life. Truly. It’s time to take your life back, to experience what it feels like to live a life in alignment with your Soul. It’s time to elevate to the frequency of that of your Soul by transforming everything within you that is rooted in separation, powerlessness and suffering and consequently, expanding your consciousness to that of Oneness.
With Love,
Madison
