Tag: #selfgrowth

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.

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.