Healing

Healing: Have I Healed It If It Keeps Coming Back?!

Hello Beautiful Souls,

If you’ve done a lot of work around something, like anger, have you healed it if you keep feeling angry?
Isn’t it supposed to go away if you’ve healed it?
Isn’t that the POINT of healing something? So that you don’t have to deal with it anymore?
Didn’t you heal it to make it go away?

For me, when it comes back, I think, “Oh my god, I thought I healed my anger, but I’m mad at my husband again! Where did this come from?! I still haven’t healed this!? Will it ever end?!”
Right?!

How many times have you had that happen: you heal something and it comes back?!
And then you doubt that you’ll ever heal it.

What if there is a better way to look at this?
Let’s look at what happens in healing, and then a way to look at it that allows us to heal in degrees, over time, vs getting disappointed that our magic wand is clearly broken!

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Healing: Ways To Measure Progress

Hello, Beautiful Souls.

You’re on your path, on a healing journey… and you’re getting better!
Or at least you think you’re getting better…
But how can you be sure?
How do you know if you’re actually improving, or just kidding yourself?
This is a great question.

If you’re on a big journey, tackling big hairy things, it’s good to know if you’re making progress…. if you’re just spinning your wheels, or if you’re getting traction. And it’s especially comforting to know if you’ve just turned a BIG corner.

I have 3 suggestions for tracking your progress that I find really useful. Most of us will prefer one or another, so feel into what fits you on your current path.

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Balancing Shadow Work with Light Work

Hello Beautiful Souls,

I hope you’ve enjoyed the sweet song of summer and are welcoming the fragrant winds of fall.

As we cross the threshold from one season to the next, I’ve relearned the utility of balance, that while digging down into the depths it is also important to nourish the seeds of what I want to harvest. Balancing the dark with the light, the pain with the pleasure, the challenge with the gift. One without the other is either too dark and depressing or too shallow and ungrounded.

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Assertiveness Tips for Building Beautiful Boundaries

Hello Beautiful Souls,

Ok, it’s happening.
Someone is doing or saying something you don’t like or asking for something you don’t want to give and alarm bells are going off in your head and heart.
You feel really uncomfortable, maybe even angry, and you want to address it.
A boundary needs to be set…

Here we go with Assertiveness 101.
I’ve just created this new crib sheet for us to play with.
You’re welcome to test it out with me. Below is a video for those who prefer to watch, and a more comprehensive text for those who prefer to read. They’re a bit different, so if you really resonate with this topic, consider both.

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Building Beautiful Boundaries by Developing Assertiveness

Hello Beautiful Souls,

It’s safe to say that assertiveness is challenging for most of us, largely because we’re asking ourselves to be respectful (or at least civil) when a boundary has been crossed. I’m feeling bad, and now I need to tell you about it. Challenging.

Before we start with how to be assertive, let’s look at some things to do to before we get there… some foundational preparation that makes healthy boundary setting possible.

I’ve listed things that I find critical to my process, including two key points that I haven’t seen any where else. Look for KEY POINT belowor jump down to the video that covers just those two.

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Leaning In: Using Difficult Emotions & Judgements for Healing & Growth

Hello Beautiful Souls,

I’m sharing some of my most hard won lessons with you today. They’re about facing vs avoiding painful emotions. Hard won because as biological beings wired to avoid pain, toxicity, etc. and if we’re admitting our pain it’s generally because we’re in so much of it that we can’t seem to do anything else – we’re drowning in it and taking everyone and everything down with us. It’s not pretty, and we generally avoid it like the plague. Quite literally.  

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Insomnia Melting into Sleep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKOexGhiEdc&t

Frustrated with your attempts to cure your insomnia with meditation? I realized that the frustration itself was keeping me awake! I also realized that if I could relax into being just 10% calmer (versus frustrated the I still wasn’t asleep!), that I’d sink 10% deeper, then 10% more… Eventually, I was 30% closer… Melting slowly. Melting slowly to sleep. If nothing else, melting, relaxing is a restful practice.