Category: Healing

Motherhood as a Spiritual Practice: Not Knowing

November 15, 2019 / Ashley

Oh mama, there is so much we don’t know… To engage in the spiritual practice of ‘Not Knowing’ simply means embracing that much of life is uncertain. In fact, we know almost nothing for certain, despite the fact that we live under the illusion of certainty in many areas. Really the only thing we know for sure is that we die, and that we need water, oxygen and food to survive (although there are even instances of these things being questioned). We think we know a lot of other things… like that the sun will keep rising, that our car will turn on in the morning, that its good to eat veggies,…etc. But we actually don’t know these things for sure. We know very little for sure. And while these beliefs are very helpful and healthy, (and i’m not saying we shouldn’t have them!) there is spiritual growth to be found in questioning these beliefs. Or at least in questioning the way we hold so tightly to our beliefs.

How does the opportunity to practice ‘not knowing’ show up in motherhood?

There are countless instances in motherhood where you just don’t know what is going on and you have to live with that. You don’t know why your baby is crying, you don’t know if they are scared, hungry, cold, expressing themselves, tired, hurt, or anything else. You don’t know if it is better to sleep train them or not. You don’t know if you should breastfeed past 6 months, past a year. You don’t know if it actually is healthier in general, or for your specific baby to breastfeed, to use formula, to give them dairy milk. You don’t know if it is better to leave them alone so they can learn to self soothe, or if you should respond promptly to every call so they learn they can get their needs met. You don’t know the exact right combination of independence and dependence. You don’t know if they will get some horrible disease from playing outside, from playing with other kids. You don’t know if you should give them every vaccine on schedule, or do it slower, or not do it at all. The list goes on and on… we really don’t ultimately know what is right and wrong, and though we have a lot of good data to support certain decisions over others- there is always conflicting evidence and probably individual differences that make it so what is considered right for most, may not be right for you or your baby. There is just no way to know all of these things, and yet we want to do the best for our babies and so there is a strong desire to know what will be best.

So this is where the practice comes in. We have to try our best to do what we think is best, with all the information we have, and all the abilities we do and don’t have- BUT we also have to embrace the fact that we don’t know. Its something you can sit with many times a day if you are being conscious while raising your child. For example, your 6 wk old cries, you wonder, are they hungry? cold? tired? you try to feed them, but its unclear if they want it or not. You could keep pushing the food, under the assumption that they are hungry, or you could stop trying under the assumption that it was something else making them cry. Perhaps you will choose to believe one of those situations in order to feel comfortable and in control. But alternately, you could pay attention to the fact that- you just don’t know. You can’t ultimately know why the baby was crying. Even if they ARE soothed by a bottle, it may not mean that they were hungry. We are so eager to know things (and that is not a bad thing! ) that we often try hard to ignore the feeling of ‘not knowing’. But it will come up again and again and again through being a parent and so I encourage you to practice sitting in that discomfort of not knowing, and still doing your best. Instead of telling yourself ‘oh they were just hungry’, you could say ‘perhaps they were hungry, but I really don’t know. I really don’t know what is going on with my child, but i will do my best to put together the clues and respond accordingly. I can act and make the best choice, even though I don’t know what is going on’.

This practice, like much spiritual practice may not be comfortable. But it is ultimately liberating and will prepare you to accept many more instances of letting go that life throws at you. And to be clear, the goal is not to throw your hands up and say ‘ well i have no idea what is real so i’ll just do whatever is easy and comfortable’. This is not the goal. We still pay attention to all the information out there, including our intuitive sense of a situation, and we still make what we consider the best decision with all the information available. But the way we think about it is different. Rather than thinking- ‘I have come to the truth, the right decision, the ultimately fact about this situation’, we think- ‘ i am making the decision that i think is best, even though i don’t ultimately know if what i’m doing is right. i still participate in life and do my best, but i don’t really know if what i’m doing is right’. This perspective shift can free you from fears that you may be wrong, from needing to justify your choices and from spending a lot of time and energy trying to confirm that you were correct. It can be incredibly freeing- although life is still a lot of work 🙂

Motherhood as a Spiritual Teacher: Endurance

July 30, 2019 / Ashley

motherhood requires endurance.

don’t you know it!

there are so many scenarios where a mama’s endurance is demanded, tried and tested, and therefore, so many instances to work with all that endurance asks of us.

example one:
you are working on getting your baby to sleep. you are rocking, walking, patting, bouncing, swaying, swinging, shhhh-ing, humming, singing, or whatever the very specific thing is that you have found your baby is soothed by. you have been walking back and forth for an hour, and your baby finally gets close to sleep- but then suddenly, mysteriously wiggles and wakes up again. why? who knows why? it appears that sleep is not something we all come here knowing how to do. and so your task isn’t over. your baby writhes in your arms. *sigh* (but not too loud or you’ll wake baby up even more). you start walking again. you are sweaty, because postpartum hormone changes make you sweaty, plus babies are just warm, and you heat each other up with your body contact, plus you are a little bit stressed, the cortisol is flowing because a) you haven’t slept well b) your baby won’t fall asleep and you don’t know why and you don’t know how much longer you can do it c) you’re hungry but can’t go eat until the baby is asleep……………… AHH!

All this put together leads you think “I can’t do this anymore, I really just can’t, I’m done.” But then you think of your options (all the while still doing your ‘soothe the baby’ work out): 1) You could put the baby down, let them scream and cry as long as they want..but then you’ll be worried about them, and they might not ever go to sleep- which means you wouldn’t be able to go to sleep either, and your baby could potentially be feeling really scared, alone, angry and confused. We just don’t know for sure how long term crying affects brain development and therefore a child’s future psychology. Some say its fine, some say it causes harm. So the truth is, we just don’t know. 2) You could put baby down for a little bit while you go eat something and just chill for a sec…but again, then baby could get more worked up and more tired…leading to the over-tired baby state which is the worst. Even worse than this situation! So you realize, the best option is to KEEP GOING. You dig deeper and find you actually do have more in your reserve. Even though you thought you were totally empty, like more exhausted than you ever have been in your life…you do have more strength. You do have more stamina. You have more! This is something that women get to experience through the challenges of child brith (regardless of what kind of birth you have) and parenting– we have so much more power in us that we realize. This is an amazing gift of these situations that push us to the brink. They show us that we have more in us than we knew. But we don’t get to revel in that fact just yet, because we are still trying to get the baby to sleep…

So you keep walking, patting, humming…whatever, doing the thing, 10 more minutes, baby seems asleep. you are soaking with sweat, starving and arms tired from holding baby…so you set them down ever soo carefully, trying to keep them asleep…success!! you start to creep away, feel yourself relaxing, begin to think about how good your dinner is gonna taste…and then all of a sudden they startle awake. You think “I can’t do this anymore!! Like seriously no way. No wonder that guy wrote that book ‘Go The F*ck to Sleep.” But again you think of the options and realize the best thing for everyone involved (even you) is for you to pick baby up again and repeat the whole thing until they are asleep. So you do- 10 more minutes, then you put baby down again. This time they stay asleep while you creep out of the room and close the door. ahhhhhh yesss!!! time for food! and movies! and cooling off!! so you go grab some food and plop down on the couch. after 5 minutes you feel a deeper relaxation starting to seep through you. And then baby cries “ohhh may goddddd, i seriously can’t doooo this!!! i’m going to explode!” you think. But once again, you DO! You get up, almost on the verge of tears yourself, go in and pick up your baby….still hungry, still tired, still achy and hot….you dig deep and find the strength. Its somehow there. In the amazing deep reserve of life force that we don’t know we have until we are truly tested.

Maybe this wasn’t an area that tested you as a mother. Maybe sleep wasn’t any issue. It sure was for me, and I had many nights like the one I just described. But this is just one of the ways that endurance is needed as a mother. There are so many more! Endurance is found in giving birth, when you find strength and energy you never knew you had to actually birth another human being. Endurance is found when you wake up every few hours for months (or years) on end to feed and comfort your baby. It’s found when you haven’t slept well in years and you still wake up at dawn (thanks to baby), to feed them, dress them, clean them, entertain them and teach them things, to do the laundry, clean the house, go to work and maybe spend some time on a hobby. Its truly amazing! This is what life is like as a new parent. Whether you think you have the strength or not, you find it, you do it, you keep going. And its just a lot of work.

Motherhood requires endurance. New kinds of energy output that we have never experienced. And when we fight against this requirement, it is much harder. We waste our previous energy bemoaning the situation we are in. When we lament the fact that we are exhausted, then life is more of a struggle. But when we can experience all of these requirements as opportunities to grow, as times to learn about what it feels like to dig deeper than we believed was possible, then we can expand spiritually. I don’t mean not to complain, or fall apart, or feel downright pissed off at your situation sometimes. My husband would attest to the fact that I complained and cried and fell on the floor like a screaming toddler sometimes. But I also try to engage with the challenge as a way to grow. By saying, well this is what I have before me, this is what life is, and I can stop wishing it was different and be kind of amazed at how powerful I am. I feel like shit, but I really am a warrior goddess I guess.

see we have these limits we have set on ourselves. we have things we think we can and cannot do. we are used to getting to rest after a certain amount of time. we are used to getting to eat after a certain amount of hunger. and yet we are so much more capable than we know. we have so much more ability to regrow, to transform, to rebirth than we know. it can feel absolutely horrible when you are bumping up against those limits- feeling more tired than you ever have, more hot, hungry, achy, teary, angry, needy… it can feel like the end…because it is a limit, a boundary of ourself that we have never crossed. but once we push past it (or are forced to push past it by a crying baby who you feel chemically driven to take care of) we find more strength, more life force is there deep within us.
this is endurance.

through these first 9 months of motherhood i have come to believe in myself so much more. i know that i can withstand a lot. i know that when it feels like i can’t go on, i really can. and that there will be a time to rest, a time to heal, a time to eat, eventually. and if i approach the challenges with curiosity, as opportunities to PRACTICE endurance, then i am in a much better head space. when i am rocking the baby to sleep feeling at my wits ends and i think “okay, i feel like i can’t do this anymore, but i am going to practice enduring” then I feel my stress level decrease just a little. when i’m not fighting against reality, i feel much better. and i also am strengthening my muscle of resilience. this resilience will spread into other areas of life, and will also be something i can pass on to my children and those close to me. cuz, life is hard. no matter your situation, life is hard and so its good to develop traits like endurance. and luckily, life gives us all plenty of opportunities to practice endurance and motherhood is one of those opportunities.

Motherhood as a Spiritual Teacher Series

July 16, 2019 / Ashley

There is so much opportunity for spiritual growth through being a mother. And like all growth, it isn’t necessarily easy or comfortable, or even what you want sometimes, but it is the nature of life- either growing or decaying, never standing still, so we might as well embrace the growing when we can. Each week I will write about one topic of spiritual growth that shows up in being a mother. Its not that you ‘should’ be doing these things. Being a mother is hard enough. But chances are, you have or will encounter each of these things in your journey of mothering. These are not things to strive for, or to try to achieve, but things to just notice, and bring awareness to.

These ‘teachers’ will most likely show up as obstacles on the journey of motherhood. For instance, when we are stuck with some parenting challenge- like getting your child to eat, it is natural to react and resist the situation. We might respond by fighting the situation, by pushing harder for what we want (“no you have to have the rest of this bottle or you won’t have enough milk to stay asleep!” shoves bottle nipple in baby’s mouth), or we might emotionally run away from the situation (“ugh fine whatever, i guess you won’t eat now and will just be fussy all night” puts bottle down and picks up phone to distract from uncomfortable feelings and anxiety about the future). These are basic stress responses- fight or flight responses to a stressful situation. And situations like these happen CONSTANTLY as a mother. Yet in these instances of stress are the opportunities for growth. We could pause and ask ourselves what we are stumbling up against. It could be fear of our child dying or not thriving, it could be desire for a sense of control, it could be anxiety about not knowing what is right… Any of these things could be the emotional reason we perceive of our child not eating as a stress. And whatever that emotional reason is- that is the place where we can grow.

We can practice sitting with the anxiety of not knowing, or practice letting go of some control. See, these things are valuable things to do because in reality- we don’t really know much about life, and we actually have control over very little. We live under the illusion that we know how things are, and that we can control life. But this is not ultimately true. And we can find more calm, presence, joy, connection and fulfillment when we are not resisting the way things are. Just like was said in The Tao of Pooh (wonderful short, entertaining, informative and enlightening book), accepting “The way things are” is a foundation for happiness and health. This doesn’t mean we can’t work to change things, this doesn’t mean we can’t be angry at the injustices of the world, and this doesn’t mean we can’t wish desperately that our child would sleep a little longer, it just means that we are not denying or pushing away whatever really exists in the present. We start by accepting the reality, of not knowing, of not being in control, and then we act from a more open, wise, and empowered place.

So, I look forward to sharing with you the ‘teachers’ I have encountered since becoming a mother. I’d love to hear about you experience with these challenges and what other things you have faced and learned from your journey. It’s some hard work, growing is. But it is the way of life. I look forward to sharing it with you.

What is Healing?

July 16, 2019 / Ashley

Healing. Heal what? Am I broken? I don’t have an illness..or a broken bone…so do I need to heal? Does this mean there’s something wrong with me? Thats not very positive or supportive to say. That’s not very accepting, or spiritual, or kind, or inclusive, or chill!

Healing means more than healing from the flu, healing from a broken heart, healing from a skinned knee. Healing means becoming more whole and we all can do this because we all are fragmented in some way. We are individuated consciousnesses that remember being part of the whole. We were once inside our mother’s womb. We have cellular memory of what it feels like to be completely surrounded and supported by another. We are also literally made up of particles that have been on this planet, in this universe forever. This speaks to a profound connectedness between all life. And some part of us imagines, remembers, knows, and longs for this connectedness. Perhaps there is another memory of wholeness from sometime before or beyond our birth. Perhaps we were once part of some greater Universal spirit. Perhaps we were once united with God/Goddess/Budda/Allah/Tao/Gaia/Atman/ or whatever you call it. Perhaps we were and perhaps we weren’t. We don’t know! We will most likely never know for absolute sure. And that really doesn’t matter. We don’t have to know for sure. Whether it is fact of fiction, the story of merging with something greater is a valuable story. The popularity of this story also speaks to that memory or longing for wholeness that is real for many of us.

So, this is what I mean by healing. Becoming more whole, integrating more of yourself, more of life into your consciousness.

A crucial part of health and happiness (for individuals and for the human species as a whole) is for people to be who they are. To be all of who you are, to integrate with yourself. We are all unique, combinations of genes, earth matter, sea matter, star dust, and spirit in arrangements that have never existed before and never will again! There will never, ever be another you. We don’t know what the meaning of life is. We don’t know what will become of everything. But it appears that life is moving more and more in the direction of wholeness, and inclusion and so the more we can align ourselves with that energy, the better we will feel, and the more we will help the whole world. On the individual and on the global, we need to work towards more integration, balance and acceptance of all that life is. And this includes the stuff in the shadows….

Some people believe there are parts of life, parts of our psyche that we need to repress, kill, and keep in the shadows. What do you think?

Habits of Stuck-ness

June 23, 2019 / Ashley

We get stuck. Its just one of the ways that energy moves (or doesn’t move) in life. Sometimes we don’t know we are stuck, because sometimes things got blocked up without us knowing. Maybe certain psychological barriers got put up when we were kids, and our worldview and sense of self were still incredibly receptive. Maybe we inherited some limiting beliefs from our ancestors, or when something traumatizing happened and we weren’t able to heal from it. There are lots of ways these little holding patterns in our consciousness can develop, and it can be useful to trace their origin to understand where they came from. But sometimes tracing that origin can become a distraction from healing, another way of staying stuck. So its important to also focus on making new patterns. Sometimes areas of stagnancy clear out on their own, but sometimes they don’t. This is a crucial part of healing, in fact some say it is mainly what healing is all about: clearing out the pathways in our bodies and minds to allow life energy to flow freely. It’s easy to understand how this could happen physically with say….something being stuck in your throat, literally blocking air from flowing, but this can also happen psychologically as thoughts and feelings can get stuck and keep us from growing, being and/or doing what we want.

Here’s an example of how a stuck thought could show up:

Sometimes we have unconscious thoughts that certain parts of us are broken and so we don’t even try to heal them or bring energy or light to them. For some reason (cue any of the things mentioned before i.e. parents, friends, media, trauma) we have the belief ” my hair is bad” or “my stomach is weak” or “I’m bad cooking” and its a because it has been around so long, it is a chronic thought. A chronic thought means we are no longer aware of it. The thought doesn’t stand out to us as separate from us, we have incorporated it into our being and it just floats around with us… ” my hair is bad” is just part of us, so when we go to brush our teeth and wash our face, we just skip over loving our hair. We skip over brushing it with healing. We skip over looking at it lovingly in the mirror. We don’t even consider that it could be slowly getting healthier as we go on. We don’t consider that our hair, just like ALL of life, wants to heal, and is always trying to heal, if we can just provide the right environment. It may be slow, and hard to see, but the healing adds up, slowly but surely. So we have to check in about where we are habitually (and often unconsciously) disallowing healing/growth/life/energy/new thoughts to exist.

This habitual and often unconscious limitation of our self can happen in so many places of our being. Often we do have these habitual limiting beliefs about parts of our body, but just as often we have these beliefs about our mind, our personality, our abilities, and sadly even our worth. In psychology this could be called ‘core beliefs‘. We often inherit them from childhood, but not always. It can be useful to think about where these beliefs come from, but you don’t have to know where they come from in order to change them. As I said early, sometimes trying to understand exactly where they came from can be time consuming, sometimes impossible to know for sure, and often can just keep us stuck as they can confirm why we are stuck in the first place. So just remember, you don’t have to know why something developed in order to heal it, although it can also bring a lot of insight into your life and a sense of affirmation to understand why you are feeling a certain way. Just make sure if you are going to spend time digging into the past to understand where something came from, that you don’t get stuck there. Just remember to also be doing something in the present to change your relationship to that limiting belief.

The first step in changing these limiting beliefs (or habits of stagnancy as I called them), is to know that they exist. To start to see these beliefs as just what they are; a belief, and not a finite part of reality. They are not an inherent part of you, like your heart or bones… even though they can feel that way when we are so used to them and aren’t even aware they are there. So again, the first step is to become aware of what habitual thoughts we are carrying around…especially the ones that are hurting or limiting us.

About Me

June 23, 2019 / Ashley

For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to the wild places of life. Wild waters, wild forests, and wild flowers always my favorites. Long wild hair. Bare feet. Sun-kissed skin with no make-up. I always loved fields of wild flowers more than manicured gardens. We all have some connection to the wild, for that is where we come from. Nature and my own wild instinct have been some of the greatest teachers and guides in my life. And I believe that healing and wholeness are only possibly when we embrace and act from the wild wisdom in and around us. It is my wish to lift and light people up to reclaim their wild knowing and their heart’s wisdom, as this is an essential ingredient in creating a healthy, happy and sustainable life on earth.

Some of the more structured learning I have done includes earning a MA in Child and Adolescent Psychology from the University of Washington and a degree in Montessori education. Currently I work as a psychotherapist specializing in anxiety and related disorders, as well as early childhood social-emotional development, and parenting support. I previously worked as a Montessori teacher in the infant and toddler age group, where I most loved helping with early social-emotional development, emotion regulation and attachment in the early years of life. I am also a 200hr RYT yoga teacher, and spent a year living and studying yoga/meditation in India.

I first started studying astrology in 2008, when I learned that there was something called a moon sign and that mine was in virgo. I had never “believed” in astrology, growing up only knowing about sun signs and really not feeling like all the gemini descriptions I read. When I read about a virgo moon, a seed of curiosity was planted, for a suddenly felt the description was me. From then on its been a journey of “believing” more and more in this ancient science as a powerful way to know about oneself and life. As the great astrologer Steven Forrest said (paraphrasing): you could practice yoga and go to therapy for your entire lives to come to certain realizations that astrology can give you in just one reading. While I very much believe in practicing yoga and going to therapy (as those are my two other vocations in life), I think it is true that astrology can accelerate self knowledge and healing, and I hope for everyone to have that opportunity.

“Only through our connectedness with others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness with others.” – Sandra Day O’Connor

We live in a time where it is all too easy to be disconnected from each other and from ourselves. Being a parent can be especially isolating, and yet this is a time when we need people more than ever. It can be hard to take a first step and reach out to someone, but feeling seen, heard and understood is as necessary as water and sunlight for our wellbeing. So I hope if you feel any spark of longing to share something, to ask a question, or to reach out in need, you do.

Wishing you peace,

Ashley

ashleypaige2@gmail.com

IG: @mercurymama_

Seattle Washington

June 23, 2019 / Ashley

The universe is full of so many things. So many possibilities. What shall we do with our time everyday? Think of all the directions there are: apples, music, sleeping, CrossFit, chocolate, dogs, massage, root beer, wake early, yelling, silence, water, sex, pencils, loneliness, rainbows…. ok, you get the point. Different things are better or worse for us at different times depending on what we want and what we need, and then our wants and needs interact and build on each other, and we have to sort through all of it to find what is the one right thing to choose to do in this very moment, to keep us going where we want to go. It’s a lot! Our minds are important to help sort through the information- that’s what they are good at after all- organizing and efficiency. But our hearts are needed to orient us in the right direction. Our mind isn’t so good at helping us know which direction leads to our fulfillment, because our minds can see the good and bad in everything. Our mind is kind of like a computer: very efficient at sorting through and organizing information, but not able to have feelings and desires of its own (at least computers can’t do this yet.. and hopefully we will somehow stop developing technology before we get to that point, because that seems scary… I mean haven’t we learned from scary cyborgs like the character Ash in Alien that computers with too much consciousness are scary? But anyways that’s a side rant…). In our case, there has to be something operating the computer, and this is our heart, our inner self, our soul, our gut feeling…whatever you want to call it. The place where we feel our deepest desires, our deepest knowing. I am calling it our ‘heart’.

Our hearts almost always know what we want, what we need, what is right for us. But we might not be able to hear this wisdom from hearts because we aren’t in the practice of listening. Our hearts also can be scarred and wounded, from past hurts, things we heard and/or saw from parents, siblings, teachers, friends, lovers, media, world events. And sometimes it’s none of these things in specific that hurt us, it could just be what we came here with, what we have to deal with in this life. We all have ‘heart scars’ that we are born with. And if we haven’t been able to recognize those hurts for what they are, then they can guide our decisions without us knowing it.

How can these ‘heart scars’ guide our decisions? There are a few things going on here: one is that when we carry these wounds without knowing them, it is like we are carrying a heavy backpack and when our back starts hurting we think we need to sit down and rest, or that we need a massage, or that we are simply too weak to do what we are doing- when in reality, we need to take off the backpack. This is one way that not being aware of our wounds can influence our direction in life- if we don’t know we are carrying this backpack (read: wound) then it will guide us, it will decide our direction, we will spend our time trying to heal that wound but we won’t be able to because we don’t know what the real problem is. We think we have some tight muscles, or that our back is weak- but in fact we have a backpack on. Perhaps we do also have sore muscles and a weak back and those things can be taken into account, but if we don’t first take off the backpack its going to be useless to do the other things.

Not knowing what wounds you have can change your life direction by:

we live life trying to fulfill or avoid those wounds- and that fulfilling or avoiding becomes what we spend our time and energy doing. For example, we were told we are incapable by adults early in our life, so we spend our life trying to prove we are capable and seeking praise and status from the world- rather than spending our energy on the creative projects that we really want to do, or we spend our life believing we are incapable and therefore also not spending energy on the creative projects we want to do because we have the belief that we are incapable. Either way if we could see and understand that we were told we are incapable by our parents but that it may not be true and that it is an attitude we carry due to our upbringing, then we can make choices outside of that belief. We can see it, and we can label it as outside of us. Knowing this attitude we received from our parents allows us to separate ourselves from it, and that sets us free. It may still be with us, it may be in our minds and hearts, but we can see it and label it as separator from us.
without knowing the real source of pain we cannot heal it. as in the backpack analogy if our backs hurt but we don’t know to take the backpack of the pain with not go away. as in early trauma, if we don’t know that our parents told us we are incapable, we might think that our pain is because we don’t have a good job, and so we keep seeking a higher paying more prestigious job but that doesn’t heal the pain. only recognizing that we were told we are incapable and then giving ourselves that love can we heal .

So to bring clarity back to our hearts we have to come into contact with what they (our hearts) are holding–the desires, the joys, and perhaps most importantly the pain. Its not that the pain is more important to know or to experience than the joys, its just that we have a natural aversion to painful things so it is likely that we try to avoid/ignore/block out the pain- and this is where the problem arises. Whatever is pushed away persists. Whatever we are unaware of, rules us and can hold us back. So, we often have to very consciously work to discover and then sit with the pain we carry. Its just not a natural thing to do, we aren’t wired to do that, and we aren’t taught to do that by our culture. But as we take time to be with the pain ( again this is not easy to do, and maybe with a therapist is best) we integrate more and more of it into our consciousness. Which means we integrate more and more of ourselves into our consciousness. Then that heart voice becomes clear and we can more easily see which choice is best … apple, sleep, chocolate, dancing (some things I might choose to do from that list)… Healing the heart, is healing the self, is making more of ourselves conscious, is seeing in the shadows so we can see in the light.
Next time more on the process of doing that heart/self healing.