We are being called forward, when we become parents, to heal. It is our children who are our awakeners. It is because of them that you see yourself, with all of the wounds, clearly in the mirror for the first time. It is hard to look at these wounds, but if we do not look at them then we are ignoring the self. Do not ignore the self. See yourself, see your beauty, see your unique gifts and see that you are able to heal.
Whatever it is you need to go through in order to heal is not going to be scarier than what happened initially to cause the wounds in the first place.
To heal we take a look inside of our self. There is nothing outside that will heal you. You may find support to help you along the way, to help you help yourself, but the bottom line is that you must heal your heart and pain. We must not be afraid to see it, hug it and love it. If our heart is in pain, then the work we have work to do is ours. The goal is to reconnect with your heart. And in doing so, you reconnect to yourself.
So how do we begin to heal and reconnect with our own heart? We do this by pausing, feeling, looking inside, honoring our pain body, as Eckhart Tolle says. We take time to see which part needs love, attention, compassion and forgiveness
In order to truly connect to another, we must first connect to our self. How much of the day do we spend “doing?” We do chores, run errands, do tasks, and do things for other people yet we do not take time to just be.
In order to connect to your heart, to stay connected and plugged in we must take time for self-care. To spend time with yourself engaged in activities that light you up and refuel your tank when it gets empty. We cannot connect to our children authentically and give them what they need if our tank is empty and we are first not giving to ourselves.
I am going to focus on mother’s here for a moment, but this applies to everyone. There is a belief in society that taking care of yourself, especially as a mom, is selfish. That somehow when mother’s self-sacrifice, it is exalted, and we say what a good mother she is. She is always doing for the kids, PTA, scouts, bake sales, sports, etc. It has somehow been held up as an ideal- this kind of self-sacrifice. However, did you know that the original meaning of the word sacrifice is to make sacred. I wonder how this has become turned upside down. Where and when did the mother get lost and left with no time to make herself sacred.
Ask yourself, when was the last time that you stopped and checked in with you? Pause here. Take a slow, deep breath. Check in for a moment with your heart, your passion, with what you care about deeply. Do you set aside time for self-explorations and self-discovery?
When was the last time you connected to you?
When did you last sit down with a cup of tea, or coffee to journal and just write and let yourself explore the musings of your mind? When was the last time you actually asked your body what she needed? And if you have, did you listen to her? If not, did you not stop until you were forced to because you became ill?
Women and mothers, in particular, are professionals at ignoring the self. We push things under the rug that we don’t want to see, feel, acknowledge, know, admit to and experience. We believe, “If I just push it away it won’t hurt me.”
The truth is, these silent hurts sneak up on you in other ways.
It shows up when your feelings get hurt, when you yell at your kids, when you procrastinate, when you don’t eat well, when you don’t move your body, or use your mind and ignore your own needs.
We are called into parenting, by our children, they are calling us to heal our wounds, our pain, our lack. When we heal, we can then support them to thrive as their own independent being.
So how do we do this, you ask? It all starts with you.
We stop running from ourselves. We stop ignoring our needs, health, time, self-care.
Self-care does not mean massages and manicures. Those are external. Self-care means taking care of the inside. Self-care means exercise, connecting to nature and using your creativity. It means meditation, journaling, inner reflection and listening to what your body is telling you.
All of our emotions are stored in our physical body. We feel feelings inside but then we label them and they become emotions and emotions have stories and beliefs attached to them which keep us stuck. For example, I get a feeling of shortness of breath under my rib cage. That is all it is, a feeling. But instead of letting it pass, as feelings do, I label it fear or anxiety, tell myself a story about it, and then I panic. The goal is not to panic it is to just feel the feeling, it will pass.
We must learn to pause, breathe, and allow. You take time to meditate, journal, go for a walk and allow yourself to explore what is happening inside of you. This is reconnecting. It also means unplugging from technology-which keeps us disconnected from our hearts and others.
Below are journal prompts to help you discover what is going on inside of you, to help identify the parts that need to heal, enabling you to make yourself sacred once again.
Journal Prompts:
Where in my body do I feel uncomfortable?
If I could draw a picture of it, what would it look like?
How big is it?
What color is it?
What physical organs is it affecting?
What is this discomfort communicating to me?
Have I felt this before? If yes, when? Why is it showing up again?
If no, why is it showing up now?
What younger part of me knows this feeling?
What is the story attached to this feeling?
What did the younger self come to believe because of this story?
How does this story show up in my life now?
Can my adult self now, understand why my younger self then, made up this story?
Can you see now that this story was made up in order to survive?
Are you able to forgive that younger self for the story, understanding she did the best she could do at that time with the resources she had available to her?
Tell the younger one what is the truth about who I am now and where I am in my life now?
Let her know you are excited to be connected to her once again.
Imagine sending your love out to her, from your heart, just like the love you send your child or another child in your life, and allow her to receive it and let her know the next time she feels upset you will be there for her, that she is safe, she survived.
As a result of connecting with this younger self you have allowed a part of you to heal. You will continue to heal each and every time you meditate and tune in to the part of your body which is calling out to you. As a result of your healing you are more deeply connected to yourself, your essence and your truth. When you connect to your heart you make yourself sacred.
If you want to work with Janet, explore this more, and are ready to make yourself sacred once again reach out to her through her website @JanetPhilbin.com.
Almost 20 years ago I cut a Ziggy cartoon, by Tom Wilson, out of the newspaper. It is a picture of Ziggy standing in front of a door which is partially open, and it says, “Opportunity only knocks on doors that it knows are already open to it.” This cartoon has stood by my side for all of these years and it has become a motto I have come to live by and fully embrace. In fact, if it were not for Ziggy, I would not be writing this blog right now.
Many times, in life we say, “I am waiting for this to happen in order to do that.” We wait for the right time, money, place, people, opportunities. This is a very passive way of being. However, what if what you are waiting for is already waiting for you?
Do you think that if you hope for or wish for something hard enough without putting any action or work into the dream it will just show up? And when it does not just magically appear you become upset. Maybe you have thoughts of, “why do I never get what I want? ” You compare yourself to other people and find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of despair.
Hope, in this scenario, is empty because it means non-action, it means you just wait and wish for something, anything, to come along to rescue you. Hope without the energy of action is wishful hoping. Wishful hoping is a stuck place.
It
is time to move out of the stuck and into the ever flowing and abundant energy
of what is here for you. In the book,
The Slight Edge, the author, Jeff Olson, says, “Hoping for the big break-the
magic bullet- is not only futile, it’s dangerous, because it keeps you from
taking the actions you need to create the results you want.” We are the ones in the driver’s seat of
manifestation. It is up to us to get the
energy moving by taking the action steps for the creation of our dreams.
Imagine you are the one who is able to transverse time and space. Your inner reflection and clarity is what is needed to prepare you for the answers.
It is ok to not know. To embrace not knowing yet flowing into the unknown with confidence and grace. Hold onto the trust of yourself and trust in the universe that you will be guided to the exact right destination. And that destination will be your new being state until you are ready to travel again. As long as you travel with trust in your heart for yourself you cannot land in the wrong space.
The trust must be placed inward and not on expectation that someone or something outside of yourself will have to change in order for you to change.
We are all energy. Our bodies are energetic beings. We emit energy and we attract energy. For some this may be a new idea or something you feel you have heard before and do not believe. The fact that we are energy has been studied, researched and proven. Can you begin to believe it and allow for its truth in your awareness?
Now,
as energy, we emit vibes. I am sure you
have experienced meeting someone new and feeling that you like their energy, in
fact, you decide you want to spend more time with them because when you do
their “good vibe” rubs off on you and you leave feeling better. And I am also sure that you have had the
opposite experience, where someone’s negative vibe is one you do not want to be
around.
Well, that same energy, is what we use and harness to bring to us what we want as we transform in our life. We want to transform the formless into form. In order to do this you first must stop passively waiting and wishfully hoping and instead step into actively doing.
We
must begin to ask questions of our self.
We must ask:
What is it you want to change, achieve or manifest in
your life?
How would your life improve if this were to happen?
Who can I become when I let go of the old and let
something new in?
What if I start saying yes, instead of no, to new
opportunities?
In
order to bring something new in, it sometimes means we must let go of something
old. The old that you hold onto may feel
like a security blanket to you, but it has kept you small and stuck and in a
place of fear. It has become a belief
which lives inside of you that you cannot be who you are without it. However, I challenge you to explore, who can
I become when I let go of this belief?
That
brings me to the fifth question: What do
I need to release in order to grow, create and manifest?
You
may be wondering; how do I begin to answer these questions? My answer to you is to look inside. In order to look inside we must quiet the
mind.
The
mind is a very busy, active place.
Thoughts fly through it at lightning speed. We jump from one thought to the next without
even having conscious awareness that we have done so.
The first step is to pause, take a nice deep breath in, and if you want to, place your hand over your heart and take that moment to reconnect to your beating heart and the rhythm of your breath. Can do that just for a moment right now?
And from this place where you have slowed down let’s go back to the five questions from above. When we pause, we need to take our time and not race through these questions and answers. How often do you sit and physically connect to the pulsing of your own energetic being? I invite you to sit with each question while you are in the pause. One question at a time and allow the answer to come to you.
1.What is it you want to change, achieve or manifest in your life?
2.How would your life improve if this were to happen?
3.Who can I become when I let go of the old and let something new in?
4.What if I start saying yes, instead of no, to new opportunities?
5.What do I need to release in order to grow, create and manifest?
It is in the space between our thoughts that we access the voice of our soul. This is the space where we hear the messages that are ours. In fact, these messages have always been there but most do not sit long enough to hear them. When you sit and quiet your mind then you are able to hear the messages. This is the knowing of your soul.
We are one and the messages are universal. They are there for the rising of the vibration for all of us. It is like a road map of light to enter into the knowing.
Once
you have your answers, or even some of the answers, then you can map out a plan
or path to begin to take action. And you
can take action from a place of alignment with your truth without the shackles
of holding on to an old belief.
By pausing, by tuning in, we raise our vibration. We invite in a new partner of creativity to be by our side and allow for manifestation of what we are waiting for. All we want, desire, hope and dream for is already here for us. It may not show up in the form we were looking for, but it is there. By expanding your awareness, by raising your vibration, by stepping out of your own way and into the space we create by pausing we make room for what is waiting for us to see it.
Once we see it, we are ready to open the door all the way and step through the threshold. To bring the formless energy into the form of being. To allow for transformation, growth, healing and manifestation of your dreams. We must allow our self to embrace our own becoming and in doing so to embrace all of the open doors. To be the door that is open, to be the opportunity that awaits when we are already open to it, as the wisdom of Ziggy has so wisely teaches. It may have even been there the whole time but we refused to see it because it did not look how our mind decided it should.
Step out of your own shadow. Step into your light. What you are waiting for is already waiting for you.
