I turned 23 a few weeks ago (on Valentine’s Day) and as per usual, I set aside a chunk of time to journal about the prior year and some lessons I want to take with me into this new year of life. 22 was a lot, both full of indescribable happiness and bliss and some of the heaviest darkest days. It was truly a year of the highest highs and lowest lows. It was a year of falling in love, of finishing college, of sweet moments spent at home with my mom and dog, of going deeply inward and finding a steadiness and strength within that fortified me and kept me going through the ups and downs. It was also dealing with profound grief and loss such as I’d never experienced, the pain of losing something or someone without any closure, and tremendous uncertainty and disorientation that comes with being launched into a new chapter you had no preparation for.
I find it is healing for me to look for the lessons in the hardships and the pain, some deeper meaning. Not a “why did this happen?” but a “who is it pushing me to become?” I find that the most painful things in my life have always led to some previously unseen glimmer of light. Those experiences have either ushered in some much-needed reorganization and release of what no longer served me, thereby opening the door to new magic, or they served as a chance to become intimate with my inner wisdom and strength and discover something new about myself.
I would like to keep some of the lessons I journaled about private, as they are deeply personal and sacred to my own journey right now. But there is one thing I do feel called to share with you because I think it’s something we all need to prioritize more. Particularly now. In times of uncertainty and hardship and unsteadiness, I want to remind you that you have an unwavering source of light, joy, wisdom, strength, and love that is always yours to access. It can never be taken away or lost. We just sometimes inadvertently block our own perception of it because we build up so many internal walls. We do this as an act of self-preservation because instinctually, we feel we need to protect our vulnerable exposed hearts. That by steeling our minds against certain harsh realities of life, we can bear them better. We walk with gritted teeth and clenched muscles, fists held tightly at our sides, into the storm. We put up barriers around our hearts like the hood of a windbreaker against the fierce gale. We confuse this resistance, this muscling through struggles, this separation from our sensitive soft selves with strength.
And while this approach works to an extent, and allows us to avoid feeling the uncomfortable feelings when they arise, it eventually leads to burnout. Resisting your circumstances and expending constant energy on staying closed is exhausting and also counterproductive. It keeps you stuck in a perpetual cycle of pain and struggle and prevents you from evolving into a better version of you. It may look like strength on the outside, but inside every part of you is holding on for dear life because it feels as though you will fall apart if you let go. More importantly, this approach is not sustainable. Life has a way of making us deal with our demons, one way or another, but we can make that experience so much smoother and more graceful by not struggling against them now. Strength is not found in putting all your energy into holding back the flow of life.
True strength, I have come to realize, lies in softening. In surrender. In letting the walls tumble down, lifting your palms upward, and breathing fully into every painful place. Trusting that your heart can handle ALL of it. Because it can; it really truly can.
I think that was my biggest most important lesson of 2020 – that my heart can handle so much more than I think it can.
And that, rather than needing me to protect and shelter it, my heart can actually serve as a place of refuge and safety for me. A well of wisdom and comfort that I need only place a hand upon and breathe into to feel.
If you’ve spent a long time shielding your heart and resisting any challenging emotions or feelings, this might feel hard to believe. You have spent so long convincing yourself of your heart’s fragility and weakness that it feels impossible that it could possibly withstand the totality of life without any armor.
So for whomever needs to hear it, please know – your heart is so much stronger than you can even imagine. You need not waste time and energy trying to keep it safe or sheltered; doing this only blocks you from the magic within. So open. Sit in stillness with your eyes closed and ask yourself how you really truly feel. Breathe into each feeling as it arises. Don’t be scared; it cannot hurt you. It simply needs to be felt, to be seen, and then it will lift before you’ve had a chance to get used to the discomfort. In its place, it will leave a small treasure. A new insight, a lesson, a reminder of your unwavering strength.
I’ve come to realize that feeling disconnected from myself really just means I am disconnected from my heart. I am deeply entrenched in my mind and body, spending all my time on alternating between focusing on one and then the other. I have allowed myself to become hypnotized by the stories of the mind, without stopping to question them, and then when my body internalizes these stories, I over-fixate on my body. On and on, in an endless feedback loop, perpetuated by my constant attention. There is a feeling of deep overwhelm, juxtaposed with a sense of numbness. I feel simultaneously cut off from myself and the world around me, and also deeply entrenched in myself. Many of us think the solution is an escape.
We use busyness, social media, and information consumption to escape the chatter of the mind, and we use substances and addictive behaviors to escape the body. For a while, these methods seem to work. Those feelings and thoughts you were struggling against are muted for the moment, and in their place is a kind of blunted okayness. It is a poor imitation of the true joy and peace you long for, but it feels so much better than the alternative, so you become dependent on these habits. That numbness that you mistakenly assume is better than the pain underneath becomes your constant reality, and it is only in those rare moments that you are caught without your maladaptive coping mechanisms that you realize the pain never went away and is only lying in wait under the surface. A part of you knows you cannot keep it at bay forever, but you tell yourself you will deal with it one day in the future, when you are stronger than you are now. The catch 22 is that the longer we delay facing the truth, the farther we get from the strength inside, and the harder it becomes to draw upon it when it is needed.
The truth is, we’ve got it backwards. We are trying to fix disconnection by running further away, rather than coming back home. We are trying to create still more distance when this distance is what created the problem in the first place. I am not talking about burrowing deeper into the anxieties of the mind, spending all your time thinking about the things you are terrified of. Nor am I talking about becoming overly fixated on your body, obsessed with optimizing its functioning or changing its shape. I am talking about reconnecting to the third piece of the puzzle that I am guessing has been woefully neglected — your heart.
Your heart is your connection with your intuition, with a force greater than you, with a greater wisdom than that of your mind. When fear and anxiety choke, when the body constricts, the heart offers a soft landing spot, a place of solace and safety, a higher ground from which you can gather a new perspective.
By connecting deeply and regularly to the heart, you can naturally regulate the overactivity in your mind and body. Listen and trust it; it will tell you what to do.
Oftentimes, the anxious thoughts running through my mind can only be calmed by the calm gentle wisdom of my heart. One hand on the heart, one hand on the belly, gently breathing, I marry all three aspects of myself and feel a kind of balance and peace that always seems to elude me when I am toggling between just mind and body.
Now, when I have that feeling of disconnection or numbness, I know it is because I have forgotten to consult with my heart, to give it the space the talk, and to respect it enough to listen. I have put far too much focus on my mind or on my body, forgetting that the loudest voices are not always the most trustworthy. It is when we forsake the heart that we feel truly lonely and lost. We need all three working in harmony, constantly balancing each other out, to move forward in life with grace and joy. It’s simply too impossible otherwise.
I will be back next week with more specific ways I personally use to both connect with my heart and release the feelings once I’ve felt them. Though I originally planned to include these in this post, I realized it was getting quite long, and I think this work is really best approached slowly and incrementally. Personal growth is not a one and done thing, nor is it something you should rush through. There is no destination here; the journey IS the growth. I find that when I rush into implementing new behaviors in my life without first taking the time to internalize and understand the WHY behind them, I end up overwhelming myself and not sticking with the changes I want to make.
So, I will leave it here so that you can take your time and get honest with yourself about your current relationship with your inner world and what shifts you are willing and able to make right now. This is where you plant the seeds for the behaviors you can eventually implement. Then I would love to see you back here for a deeper dive into some concrete examples that I do in my life to reconnect and release.
Thank you as always for your openness and support. Lots of love xx.
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