The power lies within us. Sadly we so often forget that.. We learn to stay as victims, at least I have. We fear taking on our power too, if at one time that threatened others. Also we may look to others for answers that must be found within. This is why meditation and quiet inward centered time is so important in our lives as we heal and learn to connect more deeply and richly and authentically within. Learning who we are, what we feel, what makes us feel more peace and power and less angst and fear and shame.
Being held hostage to others needs or values hurts a lot. It may be a role we took on, like I did with my sisters at times.. That is why as much as I began to pull back last year when I started to keep getting pulled back in towards the second half of the year I ended up doing an injury, it was almost like my body screaming out to me ‘that was too much’. Being inside my sister’s anxious energy field is something that can trigger me, but I do like to believe I am getting better at not taking it all on as much.
Liz Gilbert made some interesting comments about the difference between empathy and compassion in a talk I watched last night. In empathy we can take on other’s pain which is not always helpful, in compassion we can be with the person in the pain, while witnessing it but not taking it on. Some people find compassion difficult. It may not be for everyone. Compassion is a choice and it involves an enlarging or expanding of our heart, as opposed to a closing off and restricting of it.
Lately my guides have been showing me how important it is to ground myself through the soles of my feet. For so long i lacked this grounding.. I also lacked that upright spine, in fact after the head injury trauma I started to ‘spin’ a lot and then to be twisted and this twisting happened even more after moving back to where I now live, which is where I grew and lived until the age of 23 when I left. Grounding through the feet I imagine roots going down into the earth below. I drop my center of gravity down too and feel the anchoring to earth. I then do some Chi Kung movements which involve rotating on my spinal axis and also using the wings of my arms to open the energy around both my chest and my heart.
At the moment we are being asked to become MORE EMBODIED RATHER THAN LESS EMBODIED. In the collective many of us are heads on sticks, we do a lot of thinking and obsessing and judging and ruminating, there is a real need to process our experiences but there is a difference between that and getting stuck in our heads purely at the level of worry and anxiety.. Both are said to be about living in the future or past, but there is a truth that anxiety may also speak of buried life energy seeking release.. We should open our hearts and chests to let it out, we can also softly acknowledge its existance while saying to the traumatized self its okay to be and feel and breathe, that those feelings of fear and anxiety do not need to control us, as overpowering as they so often feel. Reassuring our scared bidy it is safe niw is so important, as trauma makes us run old unsafe scripts.
When I am not grounded I have noticed that I tend to spin out and drop things, my poor dog, sometimes he had to watch where he stands. The spinning or pull may also come from another person’s energy pulling on mine..
As spirits in matter and souls in a body we need to be connected to our body to feel a sense of aliveness, joy, vibrancy and power. In depression all of these are lacking and we hunger and thirst from the lack. The dark night of the soul reminds us of the lost light we sorely need to reignite deep within both our lives and sensibilities. It reminds us that somewhere along we either gave away or allowed our power to be stolen from us. We may do this because we have remained what Alice Miller calls, prisoners of childhood, not allowed the full expression of feeling we come to be shame bound, our muscles contract and tighten as fear rises as we feel a true feeling, it may feel a lot like dying or come with the threat of exile or death (deeply old collective imprints). Working with the incredible amount of anxiety we can feel as all of this begins to vibrate inside of us is not easy. As mentioned it may literally feel like we are dying and that is probably true on one level. For as we shed the old often we have to grieve in response, the grief for what we longed for and lost is both a coming to terms and a shedding of past pain. At midlife we may also have a lot of old or inner demons and ghosts to excommunicate.
As John Bradshaw often said
We cannot heal what we will not allow ourselves to feel,
Fear may be a big part of this as it is so intricately connected so social mores and controls of shaming used to keep us in check. But for many of us truly healing means facing the fact the shame was never ours to own in the first place, was only used by those who wish to restrict our freedom and limit our experience of our true power, sadly later its not them who hold the power of this over us at all IT IS REALLY OUR OWN ISSUE. Facing this truth means we finally take on board the responsibility of letting these old prohibitions and restrictions go.
Emerging From The Dark Night 