Inner Independence

Today is the day to Celebrate Your Inner Independence!

Are you INDEPENDENT of the limitations and tyranny from your past or do old inner enemies made up of wounds and limiting beliefs rooted in the past sometimes stop you from the freedom you deserve?

A long while back, a new client arrived for her first private session. She’d recently heard how powerfully healing and liberating the yoga process was. I recall how excited and eager she was to schedule her session just a few weeks earlier. Yet, from the time she arrived, I felt her reluctance. When I asked her about the reluctance I was sensing, she confessed that she had been listening to Eckhart Tolle in the car on the way to over and was getting tired of dealing with the past and just wanted to learn to be present.

“All Emotional pain that is not fully faced, felt and accepted becomes part of the pain body.” ~Eckhart Tolle

The term 'pain body' has been around for a while and recently been made famous by Eckhart Tolle’s work. A pain body is formed when the ego experiences something it cannot process, something so horrific or over-whelming happens that it can’t be faced.  The negative energy of the experience becomes stuck somewhere in the body. Most of us can relate to having painful circumstances in our childhoods that often affect our response to life as adults today, particularly in our closest relationships. The adult ego will usually try to hide these early hurts through either avoidance or overcompensation. Yet they remain unresolved in the mind and energetically stuck the body. Until healed and released, the unconscious will continue to create self sabotaging circumstances that hijack us from the present moment and reinforce our emotional pain. It is as if the stuck energy has a gravitational pull that attracts people and circumstances into the persons life for the purpose of the hurt being experienced and finally released, yet the protective ego wont allow this to happen.

We can never totally remain in the present moment when we have old wounds that are the source of our ego-reactions today. These wounds when triggered call us out of the present moment and into the past. We may think that we are upset about something in the present, but it is actually a ghost from the past. Before we can move forward, emotional wounds must be healed and the energy that surrounds them in the pain body released. To do anything else is to further suppress our emotions and take us further from the present moment kind of living that we seek. Again, the past is only the past when we become present to it and release all energy around it.  Not yet buying it? Think of all the crazies that happen while in pigeon or how about coming back to Warrior 2 after 50+ breaths in side angle!

“Whatever is not conscious will be experienced as fate” ~Carl Jung

Here’s a typical example: A young boy grows up in a strict home of high achievers. There is constant pressure for him to be the best; make all A’s, be a star on the ball field and be as good at math as his father. His father’s attitude is, “average is unacceptable in this family.”  Well, although he tries, he’s not as gifted in math or baseball as his father. His pain body becomes filled with shame and the mind adopts the story, “I’ll never measure up.”  As an adult he overcompensates by needing to appear successful, impressive, winning at all cost, preoccupied with acquisitions, drawing attention to and even exaggerating his accomplishments. All extrinsic motivations. Or, he goes in the opposite direction of avoidance, having given up, he hides behind drugs, alcohol or some other form of escape. He may shift back and forth between the two. Until he is ready to wake up, the last thing he will do is become present to the emotional pain of his pain body by conscious choice. In one way or another the happiness and wholeness that he really seeks will allude him. Know anyone like this? When he finally has the courage to fully face, feel and accept his actual experience of hurt and shame with compassionate presence, it dissolves and he is free.

Why are people so afraid to experience their hurt feelings of fear, shame, anger and sadness?

1. The mistaken belief that the pain will be greater than is actually so.
2. Fear that the feelings will overtake them and they may not be able to recover, remaining stuck in the discomfort.
3. Fear of being or appearing week.

One of my greatest discoveries, both personally and professionally, is that any emotional pain or limiting belief that is experienced fully, for just one moment, is healed and released,  permanently.I believe that each of us comes into adulthood with past wounds crying out to be healed and a divine purpose from God calling out to be fulfilled. Whatever we resist persists. Yet, whatever we have the courage to fully face, feel and embrace becomes grace.

Upward & Onward.

Lesson Learned

“What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher.” ~Chuck Palahniuk 

Life has a funny way of teaching us lessons. When there is something you need to learn, something that you need to work on, the same situation will continue to repeat itself until you either learn your lesson or find a healthy way of dealing with that particular issue.

Think of the movie Groundhog Day. Once Bill Murray realized that he was living the same day over and over again, he came up with ways to fix the things that went wrong before. He learned how to fix the relationship with the object of his affection. He even learned to deal better with the annoying insurance salesman who approached him every morning. It wasn’t until he learned to accept his fate that the cycle of reliving each day ended. He also became more compassionate and more sympathetic—an overall better version of himself.

I hear people say: Why do I keep going through the same things in relationships? I’m with different people, but things always end up being the same, or they act just like someone who I used to know. Some of these people give up, some get stuck in a vicious cycle of their own making, and others don’t even realize that they are basically chasing their tail, repeating the same situation over and over.

A good question to ask is: Am I reliving the same scene, over and over again? What’s my part in that?

It might not be in relationships, but in different situations, like at work for example, when the same issue comes up disguised. If you work with the public it could be the same issue with different customers, until you find a way to deal with it or until you learn the lesson.

Early on in my yoga teaching (and let’s be honest here…..it still happens sometimes in phases of my current life), I have noticed times when every single student (and random person in public) I come across is upset, angry, or annoyed, and at first I would react in a similar way. We are all mirrors of ourselves. After a number of people with the same, or similar issue, came up to me, I started to try to find different ways to resolve the problems—for example, not taking things personally and showing empathy to the person I was helping. A pattern, or lesson, here could be described as: How to stop taking things personally and how to view problems as opportunities. In other words, what is God doing in my life in this moment?

Had I not experienced the same problems with customers and made the necessary changes, I would possibly still be in the process of learning that lesson. I’m still working on this; some lessons take longer than others. Instead of reacting to situations, when something comes up and seems familiar, I try to stand back—if even for a second—to think. For a while it will seem like coincidences playing out, but over time the pattern of your lesson will come up. This is the lesson you need to learn at this time.

What are your current lessons? Pause for a moment and meditate/pray on it. It could be a lesson in humility, or a lesson in gratitude, or maybe you may need to learn empathy to see things from the other person’s point of view. Instead of reacting all the time, every time something challenging comes up it could be an opportunity to learn.

One lesson I’ve needed to learn recently can be summarized with a Shakespeare quote:

“To thine own self be true.”

I’m realizing that, no matter what other people say, do, or think about us, it is our opinions of ourselves and God’s view of us that really matter. And, when making decisions, sometimes it is good to question our own intentions. Think: What am I doing here? Or what am I up to? What is God inviting me into in this moment?

Ultimately the question I’ve needed to ask myself is: Am I being completely honest with myself? What is the particular reason why I’m scared of change? How does my reaction reflect my trust in God?

There are times when opportunities have come up for me to change my residence, or my place of employment, lessen the load of my schedule, or have reached a monumental goal—the peak—and have nothing planned after that………..and I haven’t seized the opportunities of these moments. I’ve stayed in place. Why?

When I started being honest with myself, I realized that this fear of change was a big issue for me. I needed to handle it because, if I did not, situations would continue to come up where I was forced by circumstances to make a decision involving a change. It felt infinitely ungrounding to take the coat of habit—good or bad off and discover what it would be like to live without it.  For me there was so much grief not dealt with.

I learned that not making a decision is in itself a decision—and that my fear of change was actually a fear of failure. Failure that I would no be seen as having it together.  Fear of sitting alone with myself and actually feeling all that I had not dealt with—the death of my brother, the failure of a marriage, the reaching the mountain top goal and then feeling as though there was nothing beyond that because it had been a focus or so long. That was when I noticed the pattern of things breaking, or circumstances changing, forcing me to deal with my inability to sit and grieve.

Find your pattern. Find your lesson.

A good way of recognizing patterns in your life is by listening to your feelings, your intuition. I’ve found that when I am involved in a pattern, my emotions run a bit stronger, kind of like a warning from my subconscious mind (AKA the Holy Spirit) to pay attention to what’s happening.

More often than not, I recognize the pattern when the situation has ended, or changed. Hindsight is 20/20 in this way. It can be difficult to recognize a pattern while it’s playing out. So, usually we realize what happened afterward. And that is okay. In turn, life will continue to send us ways to overcome our patterns and learn our individual lessons.  If not….we are just sent the lesson again.  Might as well get on board rather than reliving your Groundhog Day.

The key is to be alert. When you’re open to recognizing a pattern, you can change it by learning the lesson, and in doing so, change your life.


Onward.

Trish