IS LIFE HAPPENING FOR YOU OR TO YOU?
Say this question out loud: Is life happening FOR me or TO me? Take some deep breaths into your body give your self some space and notice ……..… What feels true for you?
For me life definitely used to happen to me. It was tough in many ways even though I was not even aware. I was very much living from my unconscious beliefs and I was often occupying myself with the I am not good enough belief. I spent a lot of energy trying to find ways to make myself feel good enough. Working hard, getting a high education, being loving and kind to others, starving myself, working hard at they gym, buying lots of things that would make me look better and the list goes on. No matter what I “did” it still didn’t make me feel enough.
LOVING YOURSELF
So we all sort of know that the root of all our problems come from not loving ourselves, but what the f… does that really mean?
As a young adult I did not understand what love was. I needed someone to love me to feel enough and as you can imagine it was never enough. It meant that I lost myself trying to give to others because deep down I felt unworthy of having my needs met. It all happened unconsciously and I wasn’t even aware what my needs were, everyone (including me) thought I was this easy going person that would go with and do what everyone else wanted.
RADICAL SELF RESPONSIBILITY
I have many amazing clients but one in particular has been on a long, windy, beautiful, painful, pleasurable, vulnerable, expansive journey with me over the last few years. If I was to describe him without using his name the words gentle man spring to mind.
So gentle man came to me, I imagine, searching for growth, knowing there was something more available than what he had experienced in life so far. Like so many of my clients he was in a relationship where his female partner no longer was interested or wanted sex. They had a beautiful close loving relationship, more of a companionship but he felt that he needed more than that.
BEYOND ORGASM
We often think of orgasm as something pleasurable that happens in the body, normally in our genitals. Yes we can make peak orgasms happen but if we are looking to move into states of expansion and seeing this as a spiritual path back home to ourselves we need to unlock the key to our heart.
It doesn’t matter how much we focus on preparing our body for orgasm, if we’re not addressing our hearts and the relationships we have with ourselves, the body will remain stuck in old patterns!
Our bodies do have all the answers we need but most often we don’t want to hear them or don’t know how to. We may want to fix, change etc what is there to “make” us feel better. When doing that we are listening to our old beliefs and patterns around not being enough most likely passed down from our parents.
THE ART OF LISTENING
Do you feel that people don’t really listen to you? That they are more interested in sharing what is going on their life, almost as though they are waiting for you to finish so they and jump in. Maybe they are giving you solutions to your issues when you didn’t ask for them. Maybe you ask for something and the other person agrees to doing it but never does or they don’t do it the way you want it (that forever happened with my kids). Maybe you find that others only listen to you when you have some juicy gossip or a good story. Maybe you find that what you really want to speak about others don’t want to listen do, they may judge you are weird. Or maybe your experience of not being heard is something very different.
And when the table turns are you truly able to listen? Or do you go into any of the above or something different.
RELEARNING HOW TO FEEL
From before we learn to speak, we are trained to go along with things we don’t want. We are conditioned to believe that what is happening is more important than how we feel about it!!
Seriously get your head around that! We learn to change how we feel to adapt to situations we don’t like. This can be something small but it can also be major like abuse. We have learnt to devalue and ignore our gut feeling and instincts. We can’t hear our internal navigations system and we are lead by others.
These can be really subtle patterns that are very difficult to notice or they may be obvious. My experience is the deeper I go into myself the more I am able to feel. When I slow down, breath and ask for guidance the answers come to me.
MAKING MYSELF FEEL CONTROLLED
Do you feel as though you are controlled? Even in a subtle way. That things just happen, that you have to go along with things you don’t really want to do. Could be something small like having to take the dog out every day or wash your plate after a meal. It could be getting on the same bus every day or walking the same route to take you somewhere. It could be doing things for other people that you feel you have to for all sorts of different reasons. As if you are on autopilot, you don’t stop up and ask yourself is this something I really want to do and if not what do I really want.
FEELING MY WAY THROUGH CHALLENGES
If you have read my previous blog you will know that I felt that loving my breasts including my implants seemed to be the way forward for me. In this blog I am going to share a little about how difficult that really is for me.
I have been spending a lot of time connecting and “trying” to love my breasts. Well trying doesn’t work does it, unless you can fake it until you make it, and I feel if I do that I am overriding what is actually going on inside me, so that is not something I want do. I know that my emotions and feelings are a way of guiding me deeper into my true self, bringing up beautiful feelings but also all the not so nice ones I have stuffed down most of my life.
SOMEONE’S POISON MAY BE YOUR MEDICINE
Many of us reach out to teachers, books, courses etc to expand and grow. Yes there is definitely some amazing teachings there however one thing I have learnt on this journey is that what is right for one, may not be right for another. The challenge is to look inside for the answers.
I would like to share a deep and personal story around this that carries a lot of emotions for me amongst them shame in the hope that sharing will help support you in some way by reading it and also help me by putting it out there.
I AM A PREDATOR
I do feel a little bit of shame around this subject and I imagine it is more shameful for men as it is less accepted to be a male predator.
I know that unless I fully accept EVERY part of me, the so called “good” and the so called “bad” I can never truly love and accept myself for who I am. I also know that behind every “bad” part of me there is a good intention and a part of me that is trying to keep me safe. I have built these walls for a reason and now I am willing to gently break them down.
I check out men when I walk into a room. I also check out women, but that’s another topic for another time. On the streets I do the same, even on social media I find myself looking at photos of guys. I may engage with men for seconds, minutes, hours, months or years until