Meditation Blog

Insights, Reflections, & Guided Meditations.
Joyfully offered to inspire your path.

Grief and Co-Creating

Grief

I’ve been wondering what to share… am I up for sharing? Is the inner work too cloudy to share on the out side?

We had a death in the family on 8 April. By the time this goes out, we will be in full swing, celebrating the un-timely, peaceful death of my beloved brother at 64yo.

It’s been devastating.
After my nephew told me over the phone, I sat down where I was and started crying.
That went on for a few days.
Even on trail runs, stopping and sitting down on the ground to just weep. Sadness.

When I connect with him I get expansion, freedom, relief. He’s not in chronic pain anymore. This feels wonderful.

We’re not doing so well. It was unexpected. And thus shocking.
I’m better and better as the days pass, as I process the grief and the shock.

And as you can imagine, that’s sparked A LOT of meditation.
Exactly the process that I briefly shared last time. In fact, I finished sharing that process hours before I found out… and dove into it heavily.
Sacred synchronicities.
Makes me smile.

One thing I wasn’t expecting: the grief is making everything else harder.
Seems obvious when I think about it.
It is certainly obvious now. :)

Interestingly, doing sessions has been easy.
The timing of them has been so perfect that they’re benefiting from my increased immersion in the subtle realms.
More sacred synchronicity.

Co-Creating with Reality

A big learning I’m getting from all of this intense practice, is the importance of present moment co-creation.
Super simple.
In any given moment, I just silently ask everything around me, “How can we best co-create this moment together?”
Super profound.

The point is to take whatever is going on, start from here, from where we are, and co-create from here… even if it’s super shite and you really don’t want your brother to be dead.
“How can we take what IS, right here and now, and co-create something beautiful? (or joyful, fulfilling, calming, exciting, restful, or whatever)
It can be really general.
Or specific.

And let that happen, co-create that happening… more consciously.

I’ve been asking for meaning a lot lately.
I hit that existential piece of my personal transformation spiral that asks, “What the hell is the point of me being here?”

And part of swirling around in that particular eddy was this deeper relationships with co-creating. Was realizing that I could be really intentional with it, that I can get clear about my desires and put them out as requests to myself and the universe around me. So, in the middle of this existential crisis, I focused on a very helpful intention, “Help me co-create a deeper knowing of what I am offering here (on this plane, in this time-space).”
Help me co-create meaning, something that makes all of this pain worthwhile.

Co-Creating When Things Suck

The spiritual ninja moves here are to first start where you are: accept, breathe in, settle in. Become as fully conscious as you can be of what is here now. Inside and out. And relax into the being-ness of it.
It is what is.
To help with this, ask yourself, “What am I co-creating right now?” Feel into the answer. On as many levels and layers as you’re able.

No one is saying you have to like it!!
But if you start from what’s actually happening, then you can create based on reality, versus trying to create something new out of something that doesn’t exist to begin with...
See the challenge here?
Starting from, “I want to co-create my brother being alive,” while being a normal stage of loss, probably isn’t the best way to co-create present moment happiness…
Start where you are.
Not always easy!
Extremely useful.

Second, whatever your intention, be open to unfolding it together in ways that you don’t expect. To re-tool a Paul Simon lyric, hold it in the open palm of desire. Give your intention room to grow into something: to move around, to shift, to morph to blossom into something new.
Otherwise, you don’t allow life to happen. You don’t allow all of the other co-creating that’s happening to flow and meld with yours… embellishing it with growth and expansion and freshness.
And more importantly, if you don’t, if you insist on only accepting what you have constructed in your mind as acceptable (which is inevitably based on your past experiences – and thus very limited), you will be unhappy with what is becoming.

These two things are both challenging as biological beings.
Our beautiful bodies crave comfort and safety.
One of the tricks here is to lean into accepting what is as safer than living in the clouds. If for no other reason than I can protect myself better if I see the tsunami in front of me than if I close my eyes and pretend that it is not roaring straight towards me. Fight, flight and freeze are perfectly acceptable reactions to stress in the short term, but living and creating from them leads to all kinds of problems.

Another trick is to realize that no matter how much I want something, my desire is only a part of the co-creation. No matter how much I want something to be exactly a certain way, I’m going to be disappointed. You’ll know this from your own life, that practically nothing turns out exactly how you imagined it, so on a purely practical level, it’s better to assume change than to cling on sameness. And now, this fits neatly into the same vein as the trick above, realizing that change is a part of what is, and accepting that things will be different as time moves on, is actually a safer strategy than wanting them to be like the past or wanting them to fit exactly into your expectations. Your eyes stay open, you will be safer.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.” Brené Brown

Co-Creation Practice

Here’s how I’ve been practicing this.
I start where I am, whatever I’m co-creating now. (Lot’s of sorrow in my case.)
And I relax and am as conscious of as much of it as I can be…
Breathe.
Breathe here.

From here, I set my new intention based on the information that I have about what is and what isn’t working for me. I ask myrself and the Universe, to co-create that, and I am as open as I can be to co-creating what wants to unfold.
I assume that whatever happens is information about me and my relationship with my environment,
and that this too shall pass.

I keep iterating.
In fact I have to keep iterating.
As we know, we’re co-creating constantly, with more or less consciousness about it.
Again, it’s helpful to let ourselves LEARN and evolve our ideas, vs getting stuck because we want things to be the way we thought they should…

If you do this right now,
if you take a really conscious breath and open up as fully as possible to recognizing what is for you right now (mentally, emotionally, physically, etc.),
and then form an intention of what you would like to be,
and holding that intention in your open palm of desire, expecting to be surprised at what bubbles up,
then silently pose the question: “How can we co-create this?”

… how does that feel?
And how does that change how you co-create?

My hope is that this sparks new ways to play with how you uniquely co-create your life.

May you navigate with increasing ease, and may your tsunamis be full of joy.
Elena

Why You Feel Worse Before You Feel Better

Guided meditation mentioned in this video: Sensational Awareness

Hello, Beautiful Souls.

I want to tell you a little bit about why is it when we’re healing, that things get worse instead of better—or rather, why they get worse before they get better.

This happens really consistently in my personal healing work, and when I’m working with clients. It happens so often, and it’s so unexpected and disorienting, that it’s worth talking about.


THE HOW

So, what’s actually happening?
And why is it that things get worse before they get better when we’re healing?

The short answer is: actually, they don’t get worse.

The more complete answer is that, it’s not getting worse, it’s that we’re finally noticing what’s been here all along… Let me explain. Basically, what happens is that when we have something bad happen, like a trauma, it’s too much to deal with. We process what we can, we do what we can, we feel what we can, we experience what we can… and the rest of it we hold on to- we camp it out somewhere in our system.

We can hold it in the physical body; we can experience it as a physical structure, restriction or even illness in our body. We can also put it out in our field—in the subtle energy field that envelopes and interweaves our physical body.

So that’s what happens when we experience trauma. We’ve got some part of an experience, whatever we weren’t able to process at the time, stored somewhere in our field (physical or subtle).

THE WHY

Then, so that we don’t accidentally stumble upon it and—oops!—start feeling that unprocessed experience out of the blue one day, we do things to ignore it. I think of them as detour signs: “Danger! Don’t go this way! Go another way!!!” And most of us do one of three things to when we start getting close, one of these detours: fight, flight, or freeze.

You’ll probably recognize yourself in one of these… Most of us, when we start moving towards that pain, either get really angry and start fighting, or we get really antsy and start fleeing, or we go numb and start zoning out.

Those are really helpful because that keeps us from accidentally feeling this thing when we’re not ready, when we’re not feeling safe. So, when we get to that space where, “Okay, I’m ready to heal this. I’m ready to process what I couldn’t handle before. I’m ready to feel what I couldn’t feel,” now we stop doing all these things. We stop doing the running, the fleeing, and/or the numbing.
We actually turn our attention towards the thing instead of away from it.

Now we allow ourselves to actually feel what’s here.
And guess what? It really sucks. It feels bad.
We go from not feeling what’s here to feeling what’s here.
And so it feels like it gets worse.
It feels like we didn’t have this pain, this suffering, this horrible thing before- and now that we’re trying to heal, now we have this awful feeling.

The worst part is that we can think we’re doing something wrong! “If I’m healing, aren’t I supposed to be getting better? So, if I’m feeling worse I must not be healing!”

Yes and no.

Understand, that at these moments of the healing process- where you’re actually slowing down, you’re feeling safe enough, and you’re turning towards the thing, you’re feeling the thing that’s always been here for the first time—now you’re going to feel worse.

That’s most of what happens. The next part, once you’ve been strong enough to make it here, is that as you start feeling it, and uncovering it, you allow it to—I don’t know what really happens, but to me it feels like it expands… It actually gets bigger… It does get worse in the sense that it was more compressed before and now it can breathe and expand and unpack and unfold and bloom. And that is a bit worse.

But not much.

Most of the “getting worse” is us just facing it and actually feeling what’s here. In any and all cases, 100% of it was already here. So, we’re not actually making it worse in the sense that we’ve already been living with this thing.

It’s kind of like lancing a boil: I’ve already had this infection. I’ve already been living with it, carrying it, and my system has been dealing with it. What I’m doing now is I’m letting it out, and letting it go. And it’s kind of icky and doesn’t feel great when that happens. It’s not very nice in that sense. On the other hand, once you let it go, it’s so much easier. Now your system doesn’t have to spend so much energy holding it in and ignoring it, however you are ignoring it.

This, my friends, is why we feel worse before we feel better. We’ve been so good at detouring around the pain, that when we turn to face it, it feels new. It feels unexpected.

You’ve likely experienced this before, and next time it happens, you can remember that this is sometimes part of the healing process… and that if it were easy and felt good, you wouldn’t have needed to detour around it all this time…

Take heart. At this stage, even if they feel worse at first, things are getting better.

I hope that helps.
Elena

Healing The High Cost of Blame

Hello, Beautiful Souls.

Many of us have learned the importance of taking responsibility for what’s happening in our lives… for the very practical reason that then we can do something about it!

When I find myself blaming someone for something that’s a sign that there’s something inside I’m not wanting to face. When I calm down enough, I sit with it (do some kind of practice that helps me explore what’s inside, see below for a free guided meditation you can use for this).

Why do we blame others for our problems in the first place? Certainly, many of us were taught to and frankly, it feels good to receive sympathy when things are going bad.

The challenge here is that blame creates helplessness, because “they” are doing something to me. I am not in charge of the situation. I make myself smaller than “they” are, whomever they happen to be… classic examples are the government, the medical system, even the weather. For me, a big one that comes back again is federal tax agencies… having lived in 5 countries, I get to face that one anew over and over again. Trying to figure out what to do every time is not fun, and “they” are the source of a lot of pain and angst. If they are doing this to me, I am in a disempowered state and my only options are helplessness and complaining.

And while it feels great to receive sympathy, it doesn’t do anything to solve my problem. We can even create a sort of black hole of not return… we feel helpless, we complain, we receive sympathy, we feel seen though noting changes, we’re still helpless and so it continues in this negative feedback loop.

I was sitting in a cafe the other morning, and my husband and I finished talking just in time to hear the barista finishing her log diatribe about what “they” had done to her. The two women listening, sipping their morning coffee, expressed emphatic agreement, “That’s terrible that they did that to you.” “It’s unthinkable!” said the other.

And that was it. No problem solving. No ideas offered. Three intelligent souls, and they stopped right there. They could have at least thought of one thing the barista could do to ameliorate her situation, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal was blame. And sympathy.

The true cost of blaming others is that we’re not actually solving our problems.
We’re staying stuck in it, in a rut, going around in circles of helpless and blame.
Add in a dose of sympathy and we’ve got all the ingredients for being stuck there for a long time.

With my taxes, when I can calm down enough, I do a practice that helps me face what ever I’m feeling. With my taxes it’s the fear of being wrong, a pretty deep fear that when I go deep enough with it feels like life or death… like if I get things wrong I’ll get thrown out of the tribe and I’ll die. That’s pretty hairy. I’d much rather blame “them” than feel that. So I do, until I get calm enough to face it. Then I can relax, own my part of the situation and start looking for solutions. I stop running around in circles and start facing the problem. Usually, I get help from a local who knows what needs to be done and that is that.

I’m not saying it’s easy.
I am saying it’s very worth it!

Here’s the meditation I use a lot for facing the pain, Sensational Awareness. This one focuses on physical sensations, and it can be used for emotions as well.

Enjoy,
Elena

Abundance Depends On What You’re Paying Attention To Vs What You’re Attracting

Hello beautiful souls.

What if we talk about the Law of Attention versus the Law of Attraction.
This is maybe a subtle shift. It feels really profound to me though. So first of all, what am I talking about?

The first time I heard about Law of Attention, it was explained to me like this: The Law of Attraction is “I’m an energetic being. I’m vibrating a certain way and so I’m going to attract things that are vibrating similarly to me.” That’s the law of attraction. That makes sense.

The Law of Attention is, if there are 360 degrees of things to pay attention to, and I can’t pay attention to all of them at once, I’m going to focus and filter for certain things. Those are the things I’m paying attention to. Those are the things that are going to be in my field of perception, the things that I (appear to be) manifesting. And this is the Law of Attention.

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Resistance As A Protective Layer Over Trauma

Hello Beautiful Souls.

Resistance.
Resistance is one of those things we all have, whether we like it or not.

It doesn’t feel great, and gets in the way of doing things in life, so we vilify it. The general idea is that we need to get rid of it, and if we don’t we’re doomed to have it forever, because ‘resistance persists.’

But why is resistance here in the first place?
Maybe I’m resisting walking up stairs, because I’m afraid of falling down. We might feel like it’s stupid thing to resist this, but here’s the thing: your resistance protecting you.

This may seem a little crazy, so let’s think about this for a second. Why would we resist walking upstairs? Why is this fear here at all?

Maybe when I was a little kid, I was walking upstairs and I fell down and I had a really big, very scary fall. Ever after I resist walking upstairs. Why? Because I’m protecting myself from that dangerous situation. I know from personal experience, from a banged up body, even broken bones, that walking upstairs is not safe, so, now I have this layer of resistance to walking upstairs.

Here’s the key take-away: your resistance isn’t some stupid or random thing you do. It’s actually part of a trauma, and it’s here to protect you. Your resistance is keeping you safe from what you know has been a dangerous situation.

Resistance isn’t random. It’s part of the package. We can think of resistance like the outer layer of an onion, the outer layer of trauma.

If you want to get rid of your resistance, you need to treat it like healing trauma. First of all, you need to feel really safe. You need to feel safer than you felt when you created it, when you fell.

What do I mean by that? I mean, you’re going to continue to protect yourself from danger, you’re going to keep resisting danger, until you feel safe from that danger.

After all, you weren’t feeling safe when it happened originally, so do you feel safe enough now?

How to achieve the level of safety needed to heal resistance?

Your feeling of safety needs to feel bigger, stronger than your feeling of resistance.
I like to think of safety like a container… my safety container needs to be bigger than the resistance. I want my safety to feel big enough that the resistance can rest inside of it, like my safety can hold the resistance in it’s arms. The safety becomes a nest for the resistance to rest in.

Being in a safe space physically, mentally and emotionally is key.
Being by yourself out in nature or in your bedroom may feel safe enough if the original trauma was fairly small. If not, being with a trusted friend or healer who can hold space can be really helpful. You can create a safer container together, a more secure nest to rest in. This is why really scary traumas benefit from working with someone else – of course, whom you trust.

How to heal the resistance?

Healing the resistance is just like healing the layers underneath…

First create a physical and mentally-emotionally safe space. Your safety nest.
Then, invite the resistance to be here. When I’m working alone, I like to simply imagine whatever I’m resistant to, like walking up stairs. Start feeling the resistance, feeling the fear of walking up stairs.
As you start feeling the fear of walking up stairs your system will check, “Am I safe enough to feel into this now?”
If not, you won’t get very far, and it’s best to stop here. Trust your self. If you’re not ready, this won’t help.
If yes, the feeling of fear will break out of it’s shell and intensify. It will spread it’s wings and let you feel just how big it is.
Keep containing it, staying bigger than the fear, and eventually, the fear will dissipate.
If you stay even longer, other layers of the onion, the underlying layers of trauma will surface, and you can lean into those as well using the same steps.

It’s worth repeating that I do this a lot for myself, and if at any point I don’t feel safe enough, if the fear feels bigger than me and my safety nest, I stop immediately. I resource myself, calm down if necessary, and go find a friend or healer to help.


The key takeaway here is that resistance actually here to help you.
It’s protecting you from something.

If you treat it like it’s not important, like it’s silly and it should just go away, you’re going to have a really hard time healing it. Resistance needs your love and care just as much as your trauma, and if you want it to go away then create safety. Get bigger than your resistance. Create a beautiful container so that your resistance can break out of it’s shell, spread it’s wings, share it’s wisdom and fly away away from the nest.

Your resistance is not your enemy.
It’s your wisdom cloaked in feathers of protective fear.
Honor it, and it will honor you.

I hope that helps,
Eléna

Your Inner Critic Needs Healing, Too

Hello Beautiful Souls.

Ah, those inner voices that bully us into submission… like the inner critic that says, “You’re stupid for being worried! There’s nothing to worry about!” Those voices are really challenging to deal with and I feel like sometimes we don’t realize that they are actually part of the package that needs healing…
Yes, the parts of us that are worried unnecessarily need healing, but so does the critic! And that can be tricky to realize when the critic sounds so reasonable…

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Evolving: Feeling Safe When Your Future Feels Unknown

Hello Beautiful Souls,

Have you ever experienced an internal transformation so big, so dramatic that you didn’t know what you were changing into? You’re doing your self-development work and suddenly the future just looked blank? You had no idea what was going to happen?

That’s really scary because of course.
We want to know what’s on the other side of change.
We want to know if there are lions and tigers over there!
We want to know what we’re going to need in order to feel safe and comfortable on the other side!

If we can’t see what’s going to happen, if the future looks blank, it’s really hard to quiet down those frightened voices in our head.

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