Here is something I ache deeply for you to know. Working with you has given me profound insights into what I am experiencing within my therapeutic work describable only as a global kind of sadness.
To the women experiencing this it presents as an ambiguous, tough to articulate, difficult to locate and hard to get at kind of low grade melancholy, diffuse and pervasive and increasingly part of everyday inner experience of life. I have felt it and shared it with every single one of my clients. Through the process of therapy, the global, i.e whole body, whole life experience of it starts to become individual, accurate, precise, locatable. Our feelings start to become homing devices for our soul to find her way in this strange human existence we called forth. Your feelings can be parlayed into three categories: Sensations, Moods and Emotions – each have a distinct quality and character and bit by bit we can really start to hear how each fraction of our feelingscape creates a vista we can recognise and begin to really enjoy traversing. Sensations have a primary location in our body, moods have a distinct resonance in our minds and emotions emminant from a combination of both. The reason we dip into global sadness is usually because of our as yet untapped ability to distinguish and decipher what’s at play within our process. Deeper still are the trickiest feelings of all, our unfelt feelings. This simply means that there are sensations, moods and emotions within us which lie outside of our own awareness. These type of feelings are always present in our lives and yet we don’t always realise that they are there. Our believes and wishes are often at the core of our unfelt feelings. We cannot accept or express our negative emotions for example if there is no belief or wish to support them. We have to believe certain things about reality and wish for certain things in order to form an idea of who we are and what is allowed for us. It’s no surprise then that our beliefs and wishes are to quite a large extend contingent on the culture and society we live in. Our unfelt feelings are actually the combination of the beliefs and wishes and their accompanying feelings which are not within our awareness. So what does this mean for us as women? It means we desperately need to upgrade our beliefs and wishes to include a deep and resonding conscious awareness of what's actually driving us. The ultimate change that is required for us to thrive is within our own perceptions. In the work that I do with women I have come to known some common desires we all share... We want to feel purposeful We want meaningful and nourishing relationships We want to love our bodies We want to feel good about our life choices We wanted to feel at peace We want life to feel easier We want to be understood We want to be held and heard We want to feel passionate and empassioned We crave deep and meaningful connection Instead so many of us are on the brink of giving up on ourselves, disowning our deepest desires and resigning ourselves to mediocrity. We are flirting with the belief that our time has passed, that our energy is insufficient and that we don't have what it takes to feel truly alive. We wonder if it's all over for us. We ache to feel more capable and be recognised for our ability to hold and carry so much. We are desperately needing each other. We are hungry for support and encouragement. We deeply crave a life that feels abundant and full of juiciness. Yet our depletion, burnout, overwhelm and disconnect threaten to convince us that we are on the scrap heap. Yet in our attempts to find relief and ease we are coming to a threshold which holds much promise. Instead of giving up on ourselves we are increasingly willing to give up on the beliefs and wishes which no longer serve. Working harder and doing more have not yielded the results we crave and so... our giving up is in fact giving way to something life-altering for each and all of us. We are readying ourselves for the unreasonable and the impossible. We are preparing ourselves for miraculous outcomes. We want to clean up the paradox and the contradiction... You feel sad - but it presents as anger You feel inadequate - but it presents as self-loathing You feel incapable - but it presents as overwhelm You feel unproductive - but it presents as procrastination You feel purposeless - but it presents as lostness You feel resentful - but it presents as jealously You feel joyless - but it presents as numbness You feel denied - but it presents You feel unheard - but it presents as despair You feel unseen - but it presents as lonliness It wasn’t so long ago that I wondered if my dreams were available to me anymore. I had reached some incredible milestones in my life with the advent of marriage and motherhood and the fledgling stages of building the kind of family life I’d always longed for. I wondered if this was it for me. If there was some neat pocket for all my hunger and passion to fit into so that I could just be content where I was. It felt wrong that I could be so deeply blessed to have my growing family and dare to want anything more. It felt like a betrayal to want something outside of that beautiful bubble – everyone kept reminding me of how precious it is and how quickly it would be gone. In truth once we are awake to our deepest desires, we are on a radically different life path. We no longer accept our limits or limitations. We want to consciously create lives that feel beautiful to us. Our contentment resides in the passion with which we engage in our lives. We are collectively shedding the guilt and shame that has kept us playing small for so long. In truth we do long for the simple pleasures of life, to slow to the pace of being and to come home to our present lives. We don't want to escape or evade anything anymore, we want to transform ourselves so that everything else can be transformed. We no longer want to do it all, we've been killing ourselves trying. We've come to the understanding instead, perhaps a sweeter and more sacred version of it that acknowledges that we can have anything but not everything we desire and that we are okay with that if it means slower, softer, simpler and more satisfying in the process. 1. We no longer want the consequences of our misdirected thoughts and actions. Once we are at this point our belief systems alter dramatically and we begin to evaluate our lives is internally rather than externally. We clean up our own act. We become conscious of the power and potency of every word, thought, emotion and deed and we take full responsibility for how it will impact us. Question whether you wish for things and other people to change before you can... 2. We come home to the truth that every Thought IS an action We are wise enough to known and accept that what we think creates the world we experience around us and with that we choose to believe in what feels good to us, so that what we wish for can be in support of our inspired action in life. Question whether your thoughts create the kind of choices, behaviours and actions that feels good to you and leave you feeling good about yourself... We no longer wish things were different and believe the answer lies outside of us. And that has been the work that has changed my life and the incredible women I work with who have surrendered everything that no longer feels good so that they can feel good about everything!
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Author: Clare WildsArchivesCategories |