Tag: trauma

Enthusiasm

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This week in the book The Artist’s Way  I came across the word Enthusiasm and its definition. The word enthusiasm is derived from two Greek words, en and theos. Theos is the Greek word for God. Enthusiasm literally means “Filled with God.” How freaking beautiful is that? Anyone who has spent any time around me has felt my enthusiasm for the things I love.  People tell me all the time that my enthusiasm is contagious. I get excited! I get excited about the things I love and I want to share those things with others. Now I know why I get so damn excited! I KNEW I was connected and divinely guided. So what am I excited about this week? EVERYTHING! I’ve mentioned before that I’m not like “normal” people. Whatever that means. This is a big week in the studio. You know how musicians and movie stars excite people? Well, I am not that girl. Healers who do awesome work excite me.  And authors. I love healers and writers. And, really, some musicians. So, I’m most likely not that weird at all. Whatever.  This week a psychologist who is doing awesome work and has written 5 books is coming to the studio! What?! I am already about to jump out of my skin with excitement. Here’s the backstory on that. Because social media spies on me and knows what I like, a book about EMDR and Mindfulness came to me in a FB ad. I am sure it was because I had just written a blog about EMDR therapy. You can read it here. Basically, the blog was about how much I suck at EMDR. When I saw this book, it occurred to me that while I may suck at EMDR, I am really good at mindfulness. I thought maybe the book could help me be better (the best) at EMDR. I bought the book, but it wasn’t for me. The book was written for professionals. I knew the book ended up in my hands specifically so I could give it to my therapist. She was so excited to get the book from me.  She showed me her calendar and had the weekend blocked off to take that particular EMDR and Mindfulness training from Dr Jamie Marich, the author of the book.  Synchronicity!  Unfortunately, circumstances beyond her control made it impossible to make the training and she had to cancel that weekend.  But, she had the book!  I then began my social media stalking, like I do, and friended the psychologist/author. I bought two of her other books and kind of fell in love with her. I sent her a message and awkwardly told her way too much about myself, again, like I do. Sometimes I still lack a filter. I explained to her that I am not a therapist, but I l have spent tons of time IN therapy. 😊 I told her I had bought her EMDR book and how much my therapist loved it. I invited her to come teach something, anything at Rebel Soul Yoga. And she responded immediately with a YES! We made a plan, put it on the calendar and it’s finally here! AND it’s DANCING! You can check out Dancing Mindfulness here. Soooooooo freaking excited! While the rest of the world is paranoid and pissed off that social media is spying on them, I’m over here loving it. Spy on and keep connecting me to great things and people!

But wait there’s more………..

I have a beautiful friend in Wilmington who wanted to bring her healing energy and help our community. We put our heads together and Mental Health Monday was born. Next week we will be co-facilitating a two hour healing session for those who are feeling the post-Florence trauma as a gift to the community. I will be leading us in a yoga practice to bring us into our bodies and open us up to feel our feelings and then we will roll right into a group therapy session to process together. (She’s a psychologist.). How freaking amazeballs is that? I am most excited to observe her group process.   She inspires me in so many ways and I am honored to co-create a beautiful and healing event with her. Enthusiasm is an understatement.

I love my life and the people in it. I can’t say it enough because I am constantly amazed. My gratitude game is strong! The right people cross my path at exactly the right time. I might not always recognize it immediately, but I am getting better at paying attention. I am connected and divinely guided at all times. I know I am being guided in a direction that I’m not quite ready to share with the world yet, but my soul knows. It’s just a matter of pushing the fear to the side, or most likely, doing it scared.  I am getting closer every day. In the meantime I will just be over here being Enthusiastic about every single thing in my life. Starting with the cacao ceremony and kirtan I am going to today!

My Voice

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Warning. I fully intend to talk about monster phlegm today. If you are tired of hearing about my monster phlegm or have an aversion to the term, this post might not be for you. Here we go. Last week I hosted a moon circle. Like I do. It was fabulous as they all are in their own way. During the circle I was leading a guided meditation. I don’t practice or have a script, I just lead from my heart. I let spirit flow through me. Sometimes it’s smoother than others. This particular evening was extremely smooth. I was connected and divinely guided. I led everyone out of their heads and into their hearts. I asked them to drop the protective walls that we put in place and just allow themselves to FEEL whatever is in their hearts. For the first time, maybe ever, I felt my wall drop and I sat in that circle feeling wide open and vulnerable. It felt really good and as I noticed it, my throat suddenly closed up and I had an attack of “monster phlegm.” This is never a good thing when leading meditation because the next few seconds are spent clearing my throat loudly. It sucks, but I’m human. I was well aware that there was a connection to what I was feeling and that sudden attack to my throat, but the circle wasn’t the place to figure all of that out.  Or maybe it was and I just didn’t. And then I kind of let it go and moved on. Then, on Wednesday, it happened again. This time I was with my therapist who I trust completely. She said something I didn’t necessarily want to hear and my heart got hurt a little. Immediately, my throat was attacked by monster phlegm. This woman is smart.  She asked me what I wasn’t saying. Because she knew. I acted like a 5 year old and said “nothing.’ She asked me to go into my body and feel what was there. Again, I acted like a 5 year old and said “nothing is there, and there’s nothing I’m not saying.” I hate that I did that. The reality is that there was something I wasn’t saying and I knew my heart hurt. I wasn’t ready to talk about it and she completely respected that and gave me the space I needed.  I was so aggravated with myself on the drive home and for the rest of the evening for not being better at expressing myself.  I am my own worst critic and I can still be harsh with myself at times.  I did send her a text to tell her the thing I wouldn’t say while I was on her couch, which made me feel better, but the whole choking in the moment episode really bothered me. I was determined to love myself a little harder the next day. I called a friend who is an amazing healer and told her about the two instances of monster phlegm. She completely understood and explained it to me so simply. Simple if you are into chakras that is. I happen to be into chakras. Our Sacral Chakra is our center for emotions. When I supress emotions (which is always), it manifests in my throat. The two chakras are connected. I am blocked from speaking my truth because somewhere along the way, I received the message that it’s not safe for me to express my emotions. This is why I suppress my emotions in the first place. Makes perfect sense. I took my new knowledge and went to my Artist’s Way group. I shared this knowledge with them and when I had a monster phlegm attack and couldn’t share some of the triggering things I had written for the course, they understood and loved me just the same. The beauty of this Artist’s Way course is that it’s connecting me to my happy inner child.  Almost everything that comes up as I remember her is the joyful stuff.  This particular exercise that triggered me was a letter from my 8 year old self to my today self. My 8 year old had a lot to say, but the one thing she really wanted me to hear was “Find our voice.” With all the trouble I have had with that this week, it broke my heart. After the group I went to lunch with two friends. I dissociated a few times during lunch and they kept bringing me back. That’s the awesome thing about hanging out with people in recovery. They never even batted an eye or acted like it was a big deal at all. I guess it wasn’t really a big deal, but I did think I was past that. I was hoping so anyway. It bothered me to be in that space and to have people notice it.  I taught yoga after lunch and it put me right back in my body. Always a good place to be. Friday I got over myself and decided to love myself even harder. I accepted that this is just where I am right now and it’s REALLY not that big of a deal. I spent the day with a friend doing awesome things and spent the evening ecstatic dancing in my studio with people I love. So much fun and such a healthy way for me to move emotions through my body.  Saturday morning I taught an 8 am class. I had everyone in class pull an oracle card. My card hit me right in the feels. “As I express my thoughts, feelings and ideas, they are welcomed and easily comprehended by others.” BOOM. And just because I am not constantly “working on myself,” I rested like a boss the rest of the day.  This morning I went to yoga church and an amazing thing happened. I found my voice. I was able to speak up and speak my truth when I knew I needed to. Confidently. With no monster phlegm. Wouldn’t it be nice if this was all behind me now and everyday for the rest of my life I could easily express my emotions. The reality is that I have this beautiful new awareness and something to practice. It will get easier and I WILL find my voice. It might not happen this week, but it will happen. Awareness is everything.  It IS safe for me to experience AND express my emotions.

Dancing is my favorite thing. This week.

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With all the inner child work I have been doing, I forget that child wants to play. This week I let her do just that. On Sunday, I met up with friends and danced at the Buddhist temple. At least for a bit. On Tuesday I played on the beach, chanting, singing and not giving a fuck what anyone thought. I’ve been busy levitating everywhere. That’s really fun to do. Wednesday I locked the studio and had the BEST solo dance party ever. That’s really what I came here to write about. Who knew dance could be so healing? Except, my dance teacher friends and therapist friends. I know they knew. I always did love to dance. When I was drinking. I stopped dancing when I stopped drinking. The dancing stopped because the going out to bars and clubs stopped. The parties on my top deck stopped. It never occurred to me to have a sober dance party in my living room. Until recently. Living room dance parties have been a thing for me all summer long. And the singing! LOL My husband told me last week that all I do is sing and dance these days. How freaking awesome is that? Of course, he’s wrong, but I do A LOT of singing and dancing. Pure joy. That’s my inner child at play. I told the Universe (and my friends) that I wanted to dance and guess what happened? All the dancing. All the time. The Rebel Soul schedule is FULL of all kinds of dancing! Ecstatic Dance. Belly Dancing. Dancing Mindfulness. Qoya. I’m guessing you’ve never heard of Qoya, because I hadn’t either. Let me tell you, I love it already and I haven’t even tried it. Tonight I am leading a moon circle and you can bet your ass that we will be dancing. I have always known that movement heals. It wasn’t until I took a trauma informed yoga training in January that I understood why. Then I read “The Body Keeps the Score” and just WOW. Mind Blown. Really. Then, because I am who I am, I read everything I could find on healing trauma through movement. I struggled to get sober and I’ve known since day one that I needed more than just a 12 step program. 12 Step programs are great and I am in no way knocking them. 12 step programs do a great job addressing the mind and spirit piece, but they don’t address the body. We are whole beings. Mind, body and spirit. To truly heal, we have to address these all. My yoga journey began in a treatment center. Most of you know how much I hated yoga in the beginning. Maybe for the first year. Nobody explained to me why it made me cry, and if they did, I wasn’t listening. I just know that I hated crying in front of people and I felt like such a freak. I thought something was truly wrong with me. Today I understand that I was releasing years of trauma and emotions that were locked in my body. It all came flooding out in tears and anger and sadness and even rage that I didn’t know what to do with. So I sat with it. Holy shit did I sit with it. In reading an old blog post, I realized that this was the beginning of repressed memories resurfacing for me. Only I wasn’t ready to deal with them back then, so I filed them away and completely forgot they were there. Aren’t humans fascinating? I live in my head way more than I probably “should.” My therapist reminds me every week to try to feel my way through things. You might assume I would be good at that by now as much as I practice and TEACH yoga and meditation, but it’s not my natural state. I am forever trying to figure everything out in my mind. And honestly, sometimes I get busy and forget to get on my mat and drop into my body. Dancing has been a great way to do just that and it’s a nice compliment to all of my other practices. Plus, it’s FUN. When I said I had a dance party on Wednesday, what I really mean is that I experienced myself from the inside out through movement and music. A personal Dancing Mindfulness practice. I closed my eyes and connected to my breath. I witnessed my mind and let go of judgement. You feel me meditators? Then I began to move to the music. The intention was to stay focused on my breath and my body and for the most part I was able to do that. Emotions came up and I was able to move them through my body by feeling them rather than thinking about them. It was very similar to the way yoga works for me, but it was dance. No alignment. No sequence. I danced for two hours with a few breaks when I needed to rest. In no way did I solve all the worlds problems, but I had peace, clarity and serenity when I was through. So beautiful.

Also, hair flipping and booty shaking fucking rocks.

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It’s always about the inner child.

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This week in the “I went to a healer and this is what happened” saga. I have been seeing an Integrative Energy Medicine Therapist for a while now. I find it’s a nice compliment to therapy. I call her an energy healer, but she’s all the things. She’s very loving and sweet. She’s also a Shaman. She’s one of the few healers in my community that I didn’t really know before I started sessions with her. Which is exactly why I picked her. It has taken me a while to get comfortable with her. I’m mostly there. As open as I am when I am writing, or even in a circle (if I am leading), I am actually quite guarded one on one. I even notice it with my therapist when we talk about uncomfortable things and I trust her completely. This week I had a Soul Retrieval session. I was online reading all the cool things that Shamans do, looking for the next new thing that is going to heal me when I came upon an article about Soul Retrieval. What I read wasn’t exactly what I experienced, but what I experienced was incredible. I was expecting to lie on the table while this healer did all of her woo-woo magic and brought back every little piece of my soul that escaped each and every time I dissociated throughout my life. Again I was surprised that it really wasn’t woo-woo at all. Maybe slightly, depending on the world you live in and how open you are. I’m wide open. Rather than her doing a bunch of magic while I relaxed, we started with a seated, guided meditation. She spent a long time guiding me through each of my chakras. This particular woman has an amazing ability to guide me into that sweet space between sleep and consciousness. I love it there. It feels like sleeping while I’m awake. Maybe that’s her woo woo magic! After that I did get onto the table where I am sure she put some crystals on and around me. Then the magic happened. Not really, but kind of. She guided me back to the memory of little girl me. The inner child that I have always felt so disconnected from. The little girl who was full of joy and light. The little girl who was whole. From there we moved on to the moment things changed and that little girl became “broken.” I was there with that little girl in that first moment she gave her power away. I was able to connect with her, hold her, love her and nurture her. I was able to tell her that she was not broken. I was able to be there for her and give her what she needed in that moment. It was quite powerful. I was able to do all of this without being verbal throughout the process. She held the space and guided me while I did what I needed to do. The whole experience was beautiful. I went to an inner child healing workshop two weeks ago hoping for an experience like this, but it didn’t happen for me. Funny that I wasn’t expecting to connect with my inner child during this experience and the entire session was just that. Two and a half hours of just that. We get what we need exactly when we need it and I guess two weeks ago wasn’t my time. Ultimately what I got from my Soul Retrieval session is the understanding that whether or not I picked the specific circumstances to learn the lessons I’ve learned in this life, they are the lessons I needed to learn. I am here to share and teach and I have always had everything I need right inside of me. I am a seeker and a searcher and I have been looking for the person who would wave that magic wand to make me what I already am. WHOLE. I keep getting directed back to this again and again. I teach this regularly. I KNOW it in my head and just maybe it is starting to sink in to my heart.
One more little tidbit of information that I want to share, because I find it fascinating. Most of you know that I am facilitating an Artist’s Way group. I am doing this because I need the accountability of a group to finish it. Never have I ever made it past week nine on my own. A friend recently asked me what week nine is about. Why do I jump ship at week nine? I honestly had no idea, nor had it ever occurred to me that there might be a reason I couldn’t get past that week. Each week has a theme. I peeked ahead in the book. Week 9 “We will undertake healing the shame of past failures. We will gain compasssion as we reparent the frightened artist child.” Mind. Blown. Everything keeps coming back to the inner child.

Owning It

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I have no intention of spending my entire adult life healing from my past, but I do have every intention of doing the work as thoroughly and deeply as I can for as long as it takes because I AM worth it. In the rooms of AA I have often heard it said that at 5 years the “real work” starts. I have to assume that means 5 years is around the time people start figuring out what the Hell happened in their lives to cause them to seek solace in a substance to begin with. There are those who strictly feel that nothing happened and they were born with the gene. That may be true for them. I am certain I was born with that gene. My family is full of alcoholics and addicts. Throw some “complex trauma” into the mix and I really didn’t stand a chance. Gene or no gene. As many times as I have been in therapy in my life, never have I ever addressed that complex trauma. Until recently. The complex trauma I am referring to is ongoing childhood sexual abuse. Things that were never my fault, but affected me for a lifetime. I’ve eluded to it here before but never came right out with the words. Because they are hard words to write about. I know the statistics, and I know that I am NOT the only one. Not even close. I am not writing about it for sympathy, I am writing about it because sharing my truth with the world is the best thing I can do for ME. I won’t go into details, but I will say that it seemed to me like I grew up with a stamp on my head indicating that I was the one to be used in this way. I was the one. It was OK to do these things to me. And I always wondered why. I thought something was wrong with me. I KNEW something was wrong with me. Today I know that this is just the way it goes with a child who has been sexually abused. We are either stuck in the vibration of being a victim or our body language changes in such a way that we are an easy target. And it happens again and again. To so many children. I’ve always been resistant to processing it in therapy, because I am an adult and these were things from my childhood. It seemed silly for me to go back and dig shit up. Especially since I didn’t necessarily think it was still affecting me. But, then those repressed memories started flooding back and I really had no choice. I have talked about EMDR therapy before and the fact that I suck at it. I wish I could process that way, because it seems like a quicker solution to me. I always say I suck at EMDR, but the reality is that I don’t suck at it, I just don’t seem to process that way. I happen to be really good at psychodynamic therapy. Maybe I’m even the best at it. Because that’s important. 😉 Two weeks ago my therapist and I were talking about some things that were “heavy.” That’s the only way I can describe how it feels to process those events. It feels like heavy energy weighing down on me. It’s shame. I know that today. I still have a lot of shame associated with that abuse. Intellectually, I KNOW that it’s not mine to carry and that I didn’t do anything wrong, but emotionally, it’s still there. Sometimes more so than others. This was one of those days. I left her office feeling bad about myself. I didn’t share that with her at the time. I drove myself straight to the tattoo shop. I just knew I needed a new tattoo right then and there. I was so disappointed when the tattoo shop was closed. This ended up being a blessing in disguise. I didn’t see it at that moment. It gave me an opportunity to figure out exactly what that need was about. At first I thought it meant I felt the need to hurt myself. But, now I realize that I just wanted to feel something different than what I was feeling. I have spent a lifetime wanting to feel something different than I was feeling. I am in no way against getting more tattoos, but I do realize impulsivity is something I need to be aware of. I really thought I was past that need to escape and I was good to go with “sitting with my feelings.” That experience was an eye opener for me and a reminder of what recovery is all about. It’s about healing on every level. It’s about being with uncomfortable experiences and staying present. I am not sure when those feelings of shame go away. I have read every Brené Brown book. I have read John Bradshaw’s books. I have a full understanding of how shame works. I just haven’t quite figured out how to completely move past it. I do all the reading, writing, meditating, energy work, therapy and body work. It isn’t a feeling that’s constantly there. But, when it hits, it hits hard as feelings of unworthiness. That’s a feeling that’s hard to sit with. I’ve heard the phrase “feelings aren’t facts” and it rings true here. I am worthy, simply because I AM. My hope is that sharing my truth is a step toward letting go of shame and a step toward empowerment. Empowerment is where it’s at.