Isn’t that the problem that everything starts with? I don’t know – I am no expert and also not a bible person but honestly looking at myself I am the most critical and judgemental towards myself. I don’t know if I have ever been this hard on anyone as I have been on myself when I have had a bad day, screwed up or failed at something. It looks to me, that “love others as you love yourself” should only happen if you really love yourself 😀
I had this epiphany last night of “ohh this is why I got headaches and not back pain/gut problems”. It really discouraging if you are trying to figure out why you have all this pain when someone goes “oh you must think too much”. Like what? that seems a little too easy.
There are all kinds of different types of pain and reasons for it. Nicole Sachs talks about how stuck negative emotionals can cause real physical pain. Which has been SO true for me! Pain is always always there to help us and never to harm us. It actually tries to protect us. Even though it almost always feels like it hinders us from exactly the thing that we need/want/enjoy. Why though does it not always show up in the same place? Always the back or gut or head but is different from person to person?
It goes where I will notice it! I had all these negative stuck emotions, hurt und trauma in me but was so unaware of it and was truly, with all my selfawareness that I possesed, not seeing it. So pain showed up and all of the sudden I was forced to look at that pain and really myself. Which at first will look like the reason for my pain is a physical cause but if I am lucky I will figure it out sooner rather than later that the cause is something else.
I was always big on my gut feeling/intuition but everything I excelt at in life at that point was driven by my head and my thinking. Take that away it stopped me dead in my tracks almost literally. My emotional pain was screaming at me “NOTICE ME” but I still went “I DID NOTHING WRONG. MY LIFE WAS SO GOOD, WHY DO YOU TAKE EVERYTHING AWAY NOW? WHAT IS THE LESSON TO LEARN HERE?”
It forced me to stop, put everything on hold and look at the pain that I was unintentionally trying SO HARD to not see. It took me years of utmost pain but once I grasped this concept I was “oh this was there all this time?”
For someone else it might me the gut and you start having food allergies and because of that you lack the capacity to concentrate or strenght to do your work – you are forced to look deeper into what wants to be seen and healed.
It seems like a logical thing but I really had this moment of “ohhh I see” yesterday so I wanted to share it 😀
A lot of trauma work or any healing work for that matter seems to be to release stuck/burried emotions in order to be able to feel joy and love and all sorts of wonderful things.
VIEW POST
One of the things I have struggled the most with over the years is how trauma steals your light! It´s actually the one thing I have worked my absolute hardest against – I didn´t want to also end up being depressed, feeling down or having a negative outlook on life on top of having a lot of pain. I can take all the physical pain but having my inner light and positivety taken away from me has been crushing! But I couldn´t really do anything to prevent it and that has crushed me even more. It felt like a personal failure!
VIEW POST
“Another way in which we can transform our darkness and “easter” the life of the new self is by holding the painful tension within us – the tugs between what the ego wants and that to which the True Self calls us.
The first step towards growth is to enter these tensions, embracing and exploring the pain and ambiguity within rather than running from them, concealing them, or anesthetizing them. Few choose this path, however. We´re more apt to try to quell the conflict by banishing the unwanted side of the opposites.”
Page 160-161 of WHEN THE HEART WAITS by Sue Monk Kidd
I have struggled to hold the tension! It did not know how to bear the connection to my inner self! It felt too heavy, too dark and too painful.
It felt so unfair! Hadn´t I suffered enough? Couldn´t I just shut the door and forget about the last very painful 8 years? I felt like I could not bear it so I ran from it. But by running from it I ran from myself and the more I was doing that the more I longed for me to be “happy, healthy and succesfull”.
The question ‚how are you?‘ is one I am honestly lost on how to answer. I‘m better than I have been for the last 8 years, I‘m exhausted to the deepest part and core of myself, I‘m lost of all strenght and power to really get anything done and wondering ‚what, at the heart of it, caused this deep burn out ‘ but I am also doing good. For the most part I am at peace – or I try to be.
There are days where I just wish I knew where all this was talking me. Where I knew what I will study/work/do with my life or at least have the strenght to do anything to figure it all out. I am the first to want to work but here I am and can‘t.
There really is no point in doing anything else, because I quite simply physically cant. I am waiting – actively waiting. Trying not to rush through this time of rest and reflection, learning and becoming.
Instead I am still waiting – resting – becoming whole not through something I do but through everything I am.
Instead I am – still unable to do as I wish but this time at least without pain.
My thoughts circle back to being/feeling incredible lonely regularly. Its part of trauma I have come to know. Feeling isolated, different than ‚others‘ and questioning ‚God‘/the Universe/fate. Its a feeling that sucks the joy out of my life quicker than anything else and brings me to my knees more than any pain will ever be able to.
VIEW POST
Something interesting happened 4 weeks ago – it all of the sudden clicked and I knew what I am supposed to study and where to go with my life!
Nothing has kept me more up at night or has made me question myself than realizing that where I am at right now, what I am set to have my diploma in is not what brings me joy or brings me life. It was this weird thing of ‚I can still imagine myself studying and working in that field. I know I am and will be good at and the people at my school are seriously awesome human beings‘ but at the same time it gave me so much anxiety and imagining to go back there in September felt like something I was dreading. At the same I had absolutely NO CLUE what else I was supposed to study or work in/at and that left me standing there very confused and frankly very scared. What if its me? What if I’ll never be able to have enough energy and life in me to work/study joyfully? What if from here on everything will be only half ok and I will always have to fight against anxiety and fear of failing and the fear of having it all taken away without me being able to have a say in it?
And then all of the sudden it clicked..VIEW POST
I’m exhausted to the point that I don’t even know how to describe it or put it into words. It feels like I am drained to the point that I can’t find my strength again without something coming from something else than me. VIEW POST
I was talking to a friend the other day and it became so clear how we all tend to just share the good or paint a picture of someone else’s life and forget to fill in the blanks. The blanks that are the struggle, the hard and scary moments, the courage it took to get to that moment. The pain, the grief or simply doubt. You can see achievements and moments of highs but we all have doubts and experience hard times that test us.VIEW POST