Emotional Hostage

I haven't written for over a month. The holidays got to me, obligations, deadlines, responsibility. Vacation also got to me, in a cold and snowy way that only my home of Utah can provide. I spent time with my family. I detached from reality for a while. I remembered how much I love red wine with holiday fare and I found my passion for skiing waiting for me once more at the top of a cold mountain peak.

And for a number of reasons I won't get into here, I became extremely stressed out. I recognized some of the signs of cortisol overload in my system, but wasn't able to do much about them. My period of stress lasted too long, to the point where everything seemed hard. Nothing seemed fun, joyous, or worthwhile -- everything felt like an obligation. Hiking felt like an obligation. Breakfast -- obligation. I thought to myself, "Why would I write about this? I'm not doing a very good job at being an Intuitive Healer right now. I'm doing it all wrong. What could I possibly have to share with others right now."

I've noticed a tendency for me to get very caught up in doing something all the way. Being a purist, you might say. For example, I feel guilty calling myself a yogi if I'm not practicing everyday, or a runner if I'm not running X miles a week. I feel guilty calling myself a healer if I get a little out of whack every now and then. After speaking to a good friend, I realized that I don't really need to be a yogi, or a runner, or a healer. I can just be me, and I can practice yoga, or go running, or offer healing. This is the place I am practicing from now.

But last month, I got off track. Things got difficult. My relationships suffered. My part-time job suffered. The compassionate space I usually hold for others shrunk and I felt very caught up in the dramas inside my body and mind. For the first time in a while, I actually felt despair. And I thought, "Seriously? Despair? I don't have enough bad things in my life to feel despair!" I also had no context for working through it, since it's an emotion that our culture fears, holding it at arms length, turning it into a clinical diagnosis, and throwing anti-depressants at it.

On a field trip in college, we went to the Berkeley Pit. The Pit is an old copper mine in Butte, Montana. It is more than a mile wide and feels like a mile deep. Birds flock to the water-filled bottom on their migrational flight, only to be killed instantly by the acidic conditions of the water. The mine created the biggest Superfund site in the entire US, largely due to the trailings that polluted the Clark Fork River downstream. When I stood on the side of the pit, I felt the despair of the earth and her creatures and was stunned to shock.

Sometimes, I feel like there is a hole inside of me where despair resides. Lots of little things build until the whole tower falls and becomes despair -- the challenge living my values, maintaining my relationships, working on projects that feel like a waste of time so I can pay the bills while I try to make my dreams fill my bank account. Cultural despair, the fights of freedom and equality for all above bigotry and intolerance. Environmental despair, as I watch the health of the planet deteriorate along with the health of human bodies and cry out in frustration as we fail to see the connection.

We live in a time when cultural, environmental, racial and social despair is real. Yet we don't allow ourselves to feel it because it's so painful and there are such wonderful distractions -- social media, reality TV, happy hour, legalized marijuana, porn, exercise, gossip, movies and CNN.

Some days, I can watch this pit of despair as any other energy that I would watch and manage. I notice how it's influenced, how it grows, what makes it bigger, what lessens its impact, and how I can channel this despair and transform it toward positive emotion and action. Other days, I feel raw. I feel like I can see every inequity, every shadow side, every hard line and each piece of trash on the highway. On days like those, it is easy to think that I AM despair, or that the despair is me.

Emotions are real. The create chemical changes in our bodies and we feel different with different emotions. The stronger the emotion, the more it screams for our attention until we may start to feel like our emotion is our reality, that we ARE the emotion. But we're not. We are not our emotions, any more than we are our bodies. They belong to us, like the clothes that we wear, but they are not us.

We are spirits, energetic beings, in human bodies having human experiences. When we can remember this, really remember it, then we can start the process of detaching just enough from our emotions so that we can begin the process of emotional alchemy -- transforming darker emotions like fear, despair and grief into things like hope, faith and joy. But first we must remember that our true nature is spirit so that we can detach just enough to see that the emotion belongs to us but isn't who we are.

We are love, light, pure consciousness combined with pure potential for action and creativity. We are the creative force in the Universe and also the watcher of the creation. We live in human bodies -- just like any place we live, we are bound in some way by the structure around us. If we live in an apartment, for example, we have limited space to create gardens or grow food. If we live in the country, we might have miles between our nearest neighbor. Similarly, living as spirits in human bodies has it's limitations. We must experience time linearly, whereas our spirits do not. We experience physical and emotional pain, drama, betrayal and violence. We are confined to the ideas of the mind that tell us that we're separate, alone, too much of one thing and not enough of the other. Sometimes it can feel that our bodies or minds are out to get us, that they are pushing us around.

Luckily, we have the ability not only to experience life inside a body and mind but also to observe it. We have the ability to detach from the pain for just a moment and to recognize that we aren't the pain, it's just an experience that we're having. This can help us detach from the story that our mind tells us about our pain and form a new context and story about our experience as a human.

If we can learn to detach, watch and tell a new story, we can start to thread together a tapestry for our lives that weaves together a stronger framework for understanding our lives. We may not finish the tapestry, but we can weave beautiful patterns of truth as we go.

Why should you listen to me anyway?

For a lot of my clients, their journey with me starts with a story about pain. Chronic pain, aching pain, lightning pain, hot pain, nerve pain, turned-me-into-a-different-person pain. Pain that has created two very distinct phases of their life -- before pain and after pain. Or, their story tells of discomfort, of health issues that are uncomfortable and embarrassing, or of issues that sound "weird" or don't make sense to the medical world.

Sometimes, people come to me because they're seeking clarity or grounding. They find themselves in a rut, feeling scattered and unable to call enough energy together to make change. They feel like they're in a cycle they can't get out of.

And to all of you out there who haven't yet decided to schedule a session with me, I wanted to tell you more about who I am and why I can help to address these issues and all of the day-to-day things that may bring you in for an Intuitive Coaching session.

I've been there.

I've had pain. I've had the chronic pain, the pain that wakes you up in the night, that doesn't cease in any position, that keeps you from doing everything you love until you don't know if you have the capacity to love anymore. I've had the kind that makes you bitchy, makes you snap at waiters and loved ones and makes you feel like a jerk who should have stayed at home. I've had the kind of pain that defined me and became the backdrop for how I knew myself.

I've also been the one with embarrassing, hard to identify health issues that had every doctor starting their prognosis with, "Well, I've never seen anyone with this reaction before...."

For me, pain manifested as a chronic back injury that blew up in my face one day while rock climbing. It wasn't the rock climbing that did it, mind you (although that twisting, manteling move wasn't exactly spine-friendly), it was the 20 years of overuse, of shutting my pain up with Ibuprofen and muscle relaxers, of never seeing pain as a sign but rather an annoyance to my goals. My body had given me plenty of signals throughout the years, signals to slow down, take a day off and mellow out, but I didn't listen. Then one day, BAM! My body didn't give me a choice that time.

So when people come to me with pain, I tend to imagine that they're telling me this story of pain and believing that I may not know how they feel. Trust me, I've been there. And I'm here to tell you that I got out of my pain and you can, too.

At first, I was desperate to get relief. I still saw my pain as an annoyance, like a brush fire that just needs to be stomped out as quickly as possible. So I threw myself to mainstream medicine -- sports medicine doctors, pain relievers, mainstream physical therapy, all the best recommendations I could find. And I failed. Not more than a week after my official care ended, I was re-injured.

I'd received the best care that my medical doctors could give me, so why had it failed?

My treatment failed because I wasn't listening to my inner voice.

Instead of listening to my inner voice, I was listening to the smaller voices inside of fear, telling me to get to a doctor, a real doctor! Telling me to listen and follow their advice because they always know better than you, they're the healers! And those smaller voices told me to question my intuition about my back because intuition isn't medical and can't help you heal.

I had run out of options. So instead of looking outside of myself and my knowledge base, I decided to look inward. When I did, I realized my body was looking for a very deep kind of healing, healing of the connection between body and spirit. This initial realization scared me, because the little voices in me weren't sure I was capable of this kind of healing. But my True Voice, my Inner Voice, was sure. The more I learned to listen to my inner voice, the more it lead me to healers and specialists who were aligned with my true healing path.

Next, I could tell you the story of how I met an amazing group of women who combine yoga with physical therapy to attain fantastic results. And I could tell you how I was one of the most difficult cases they'd ever seen, and how much work and frustration the healing process was. And it was. I found these healers through listening to my inner voice and sticking to what I believed healing could be. Just as important as finding this team of healers was the internal transformation and healing that took place through continuing to listen to my intuition and my inner voice.

One of my first realizations came in a yoga class that I was teaching. I'd said it over and over to my students, "You have to find the balance between ease and effort." I realized then that my whole life I had practiced effort and loathed to practice ease. Effort to attain good grades, effort in relationships, in friendships, in accommodating others. I always worked and created from a place of effort. Effort was everywhere, there was no ease!

It's not that effort is bad -- just like yoga says, we need both ease and effort. But when I took a closer look at the motivations behind all my effort, I realized that they were all fear based -- run an extra three miles so you don't get fat, do the extra credit even though you have a perfect score so that the teacher will like you, do everything for your partner because that's what good girlfriends do (even if he doesn't reciprocate), eat a perfect diet because it's "healthy" even though it's not fun.

I also realized, through intuitive insight, that this concept of favoring effort over ease had been programmed into me. I realized that somewhere in my development, I began to associate accomplishment with love. So I worked with a lot of effort in order to achieve love and affection. I also applied that same principle to myself -- only if I accomplished great things during the day was I worthy of my own love.

Ouch.

Low back injuries are often a sign of "lack of support or stability." If I couldn't love myself unless I accomplished, no wonder my body felt a lack of support.

I had to learn to be on my own team. I had to learn to balance effort with ease and to replace the old programming that associated accomplishment with love to something that served me better -- like the promise to myself to always support myself and my decisions when following my inner voice. To always gently guide myself back to my path if I have fallen off, and to not berate myself for any mistakes. To choose, instead, to learn from my mistakes and make the next decision in accordance with my higher voice.

Sometimes, our inner voice asks us to do things that are scary. It might ask us to quit that job that keeps us stressed all night, or to leave a partner that makes us feel undervalued, or to separate from friends who aren't in alignment with our highest goals for love and friendship. These changes and seem big and scary. What I have learned is that the inner voice is persistant and patient. It will continue to ask you to change, to move on, to grow. I've also found that when you do listen, and you take the big leap, it can feel scary and uncomfortable for a while, but the inner voice is tapped into the Ultimate Wisdom of the universe and always has a way to catch your fall, even if you can't yet see where you're landing.

I don't have back pain anymore. I experience some discomfort during certain activities, and I use meditation and physical activities to keep my body healthy. I'm still on a healing journey -- and although it can be uncomfortable at times, I don't think I'd have it any other way. This is how I learn to listen to my inner voice and it is through this path that I am able to connect to my clients.

I can continually use my inner voice to guide me to health and healing, and so can you.