Who runs the world....

A few years ago I was at one of my sons cricket game on a Saturday morning with my husband. We ran into an old friend who is a CEO in a financial services institution. We were talking about the state of the world; climate change, gender inequality, corporate toxicity all of it. Our friend turned to us and said “ I think Men have really stuffed it all up and should give up and let Women run it all', what do you think?” My husband agreed. An older friend of ours who was also standing watching, who at that time was in his late 70s said “oh no women get super angry when they go through menopause and they never stop after that!’. I ignored that comments. I of course loved it; I was feeling very vindicated after years of putting up with rubbish behaviour in the corporate environment. But also as a coach I see patriarchal conditioning playing out negatively for everyone I coach, regardless of their gender, every single day. Later my husband described the look on my face as like ‘the cat who ate the canary!’

But here is the big kicker and it is really why I do, the work I do. So many women have been ‘kicked down’ for so long there is a lot of work that needs to be done to build up their self-love, self-efficacy, ability to hold all of their emotions in a grounded way AND to make friends with their relationship to power. To learn to connect with their sexuality and to enjoy erotic pleasure all for themselves. In my humble opinion, until all that healing work is done, nothing much is going to change.

One of the biggest skills we need to learn as adults, particularly if we want to set ourselves up for thriving in our second part of life, is to be able to hold the energy of the feelings of our emotions. Feelings, particularly those associated with those feelings we’ve been taught to repress because they are unacceptable (you know the usuals Anger, Grief, Sadness, Frustration, Despair), can feel kind of yuck when we are not used to it. It takes a lot of practice when we’ve been repressing them to be able to hold the energy of them in our body and let it run through. It is not enough to be able to talk about it, you have to be able to stay in your body and feel it. Let me tell you it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep them repressed, so think of what you are missing out on it terms of access to your life force energy by keeping up these unhealthy patterns of repression. Imagine the toll it takes on your body!

When you cut yourself off from feeling one emotion, you cut yourself off from all of them - you don’t get to choose. There are so many ways you can learn to' ‘feel all your feels’ and most of them will centre around some form of embodiment practice. My best tip if you a starting this journey is Dancing. Yes find a song that lets you connect with the feelings you are having and go dance your little heart out.

The second really critical thing I think women need to connect with is their sexuality. I can tell you that when you do this, you will feel liberated and free. Your sexual energy is life force energy. When you cut yourself off from that, you lose vitality, a source of nourishment and energy. Our Sexuality is a deep part of who we are as humans. It is a foundational aspect of who we are. When you connect with your sexual energy you build confidence and self-esteem, self-love and self-acceptance. Many women have learned about their sexuality through a masculine lens and for this reasons many of them find it hard to connect with what their erotic energy and how their body functions sexually. Often thinking this doesn’t really work for me or feel like me. My body doesn’t work well, I am broken. Well firstly I want to tell you that there is nothing wrong with you. You are judging yourself based on a model of male sexuality. Secondly, you can start really slowly by practicing female embodiment practices - I have a free Mini Course on Female Embodiment if you would like to start up some practices.

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any medium and it will be lost”

— Martha Graham

Finally, connecting with your sensuality is another strong key to connecting with yourself. Your sensuality is how you take in the world through your five senses. It is grounding to your nervous system, it is a source of great pleasure and joy. Our senses help us connect with the deep parts of ourselves that we have locked way. They take us to the places inside of us that are often unconscious. Pleasure through our senses are a great source of joy and nourishment. It is also a source of grounding for your nervous system and a great tool to use for rest and finding simple pleasures in the moment.

Of all the women I coach most of the ‘problems’ they have, are related to feeling broken sexually and emotionally, frustrated, hopeless, lacking self-esteem and self confidence, are not because they have done anything wrong. It is because we have grown up in a culture that wants women to play small, be quiet and not complain. There is implicit messaging that if you own your emotions, if you have a healthy sexuality and connection to your sensuality, there is something wrong with you. You are too much, too big, too emotional.

So here is what I want to say to you.

Pleasure is your birthright. All human bodies have a innate orientation toward it.

So there is a bit to do if we want women to run the world, but it is not that hard, inaccessible or gruelling. It involves us unlearning all this cultural conditioning. It involves a bit of rebellion.

In fact, learning all these new skills can be a lot of fun. It can be liberating, give you a sense of freedom and you could even see it as an act of revolution. It’s an act of unlearning all the bullshit cultural messaging you’ve been told of how you are supposed to be and to learn how to just be yourself.

If you like this post, pass it onto a friend. If you have any questions or feedback, hit reply and come back to me.

The plight of the over-achiever

I coach many women who are high achievers. I consider myself a reformed over achiever, so it makes sense they connect with me. I have walked a similar path. Often what we find through coaching is that a lot of their excessive productivity, their overachieving, their excessive exercising, their busyness, is a response to trauma. A way of soothing their nervous system. I was reminded of this last week when a friend of mine ,who is a somatic experiencing therapist, put up a post about it. I thought hmm I have to write a blog post about this because I see it all the time. Hell I lived it for 30 years.

The thing that is most challenging about this disposition is that we live in a culture that values and promotes it. Productivity and On 24/7. Many organisational cultures are supported by capability models and values that reward behaviours such as team player, reliable, staying power - which is styled as resilience, focused and determined. Behaviours that simply reinforce this behaviour and often backed up by financial bonuses that reward it. Productivity is valued over rest and periods of quiet. We learn to push up against our window of tolerance in our nervous system and feel ok in a constant state of hyper-arousal. This often leads to burn out physically and in some cases some pretty ‘crazy’ behaviour. I put crazy in inverted commas because it is often perceived as crazy by others and may cause some distress, but is just a sign of a person not coping.

“So much that we do is not logical on the surface. Walking on beaches, growing flowers, lavishing attention on a dog. But it’s actually the very heart of what makes life work”

Steve Biddulph, Fully Human - a new way of using your mind

So where does this over-achieving drive come from? My husband and I met in one of the large global consulting firms and we always laughed and said the place was full of insecure over-achievers. It is true that that is the behavioural model of what they recruited. Often this comes from a strong need to please emanating from an individual’s inner child. From deeply unconscious feelings of unworthiness, or that they do not deserve what they are receiving in life and are constantly seeking to prove that they do. It often begins as a way to be noticed and rewarded by a parent, but over longer periods of time, becomes a way of coping, feeling loved and acquiring a sense of belonging. Stressed out over a conversation; sit at the desk and work. The part of ourselves that needs love, safety or belonging receives that by ‘doing’ stuff and ticking off boxes. The race against the clock to get stuff done.

So how do we stop this pattern? Well the first place is recognising that maybe you have it. I think for me in my twenties I used to work super hard for a couple of years and then take off for a few months and go travelling. Well you can only do this for so long. I got to the point where I realised that the way I worked was not sustainable and that I needed to take on less work, I found this challenging because I have “big shoulders’ and what I mean by that is I can carry a lot mentally and emotionally when it comes to load. I find this quality to be also there in my coaching clients. Also most over achievers are pretty smart, they can talk themselves in or out of most things in life. They talk themselves out of listening to their body, its calls for help whether it be pain for illness and learn to just push through.

For women, I think getting back to the natural rhythms of your menstrual cycle can be a huge help because for one week, give or take, every month, you have a period, it is a time of winter, a time to rest. It will not matter if you do not go to the gym much that week. Your body needs to rest and rejuvenate. I have found this form of relating to my body, beneficial on so many levels. In my experience taking this rest time every month is playing the longer game. It is looking after your energy levels long term. It gives your body recovery time. Acknowledging and accepting that the feminine body is a cyclical one and our energy levels go up and down and are meant to change is a huge step. Choosing to live this way in line with your natural rhythms is truly a blessing. If you no longer have periods you will probably find if you explore, that your energy levels line up with the cycles of the Moon. Check out when the full moon is around, you are often full of energy, when it is a new moon, it is time to rest.

Acknowledging that your energy is not there forever is very important. According to Taoist Tantric theory we are only born with a certain amount of energy - or Qi as the Taoists call it. We have to learn to nourish and replenish it. Mindfulness practices are great but they are not focused on the body. For women in particular, our body facilitates our growth through rites of passage, we are movement. Gentle body based practices that forge a mindful connection with the body are very beneficial. Such practices would include Qi Gong, a Jade Egg Practice, Sensual movement, restorative forms of Yoga, some aspects of Pilates.

Learning to listen to your body and really listen to what a YES and NO feels like inside of your is exceptionally important. It is important for boundaries and it is important for your health and wellbeing.

Ultimately it is also about exploring practices and choosing relationships that nourish and lift us up. Practices that allow the body to recover, so we shift out of that constant state of hyper-arousal, survival mode of fight and flight, and into a state of regulation. Relationships that foster this are vital. When you look at the circle of relationships in your life: immediate family, broader family, close friends, community friends, work friends, what are those that sustain and support you, that allow you to be in that place of nervous system regulation? Review your work culture; is it supportive of your longer term growth away from these survivalist patterns?

Choosing practices that stimulate your five sense and bring pleasure to your life, that bring you back to a place of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world, and to celebrate that you are alive, are incredibly nourishing and offer an incredible doorway to calibration of your system.

My personal tip, when I feel my ego kick in and I get in a frenzy to get something done, I just slow it down and take a rest or go for a walk. The drive for me now comes from creativity and I am a very creative person. So when it feels in flow I do it. When it feels tiring or like I am pushing through, I stop.

It is never to early to choose you. To say a big YES to you. Your pleasure belongs to you, never forget that.

Please pass this onto anyone you feel may benefit from reading this. Drop me a line if you you have any thoughts. I have 2 spots open for coaching . If you are interested, we can have a chat on a free clarity call to see if we are a fit to work together.

Perspective is everything

I recently read a book called ‘Cassandra Speaks’ by Elizabeth Lesser. My friend Jackie texted me and said ‘I’ve just read this book you will love it, a must read’. (thanks Jack by the way). It is a story about women. It is a story about understanding the stories of women and how they create meaning in our lives. How we act them out every day.

Words are powerful and so are lack of words. When we don’t talk about issues it creates a vacuum and a void, so people make up stories in the absence of that. I learned this pretty quickly about 25 years ago when I started doing change management work in the corporate sector. Human’s learn and communicate through stories, we have been doing it for thousands of years. Stories are powerful. You can drive change just on a narrative when you take a narrow view of an issue. Brexit anyone?

We talk about what we value in society. Think about that, especially those of you who are getting older. How do you feel about ageing and death? In a cultural context, where youth is prized. Where we don’t really want to deal with old people. Atul Gawande wrote about this a few years back in his book, Being Mortal. (another great read). You try and look for a stock photo picture of a women in her forties. I am telling you it is near impossible.

Think about the ancient stories that centre around women. There are not so many. When we are involved we are usually the supporting character or the evil person. If it is an older person in the story, she’s a woman usually evil or a witch. The evil ugly step mother, Cruella da Ville ring any bells.

Which brings me back to my main point. If we want to thrive and lead a more empowered life as a human race we really have to be able to listen, watch and read about other perspectives. I have a great coach friend Julia who is very opinionated. This is one of the things I really love about her. She is also fierce. I rarely agree with her on many issues. On the big stuff I often do though. I like her values too. I am always curious to hear what she has to say about any issue. She opens my eyes, ears and heart to other ways of looking at an issue. We can have different perspectives and still be friends.

How we frame up a dilemma in our life determines what we see and what we don’t see, which impacts on the decision we make. Being able to take up many perspectives and enquire into them broadens the capacity of what you can see. These are basic foundations of systems thinking.

“To make deeper connections with each other, we need to be willing to be disturbed”

Meg Wheatley

The world is in a really tough place at the moment and people are in a lot of pain. How can we take more empathy for the position of another? See where they are at and ask questions. It is easy to stay in your narrow lane when you are under stress. Do a little audit of the music you listen to, the style of books you read, the media you pay attention to. It is very easy to get stuck in your bubble and do the othering thing. Othering is when we attribute negative characteristics to people or groups that differentiate them from the social norm. It is a way of negating an individuals humanity and they are seen as less worthy of dignity and respect.

Women have been ‘othered’ for years. Othering is intersectional. This means there are other marginalised groups who may also intersect with this. For example a woman of colour or a woman who is disabled, a woman of colour who is elderly. Marginalised on a few accounts. Get the picture?

So here is my tip for you. If you want a better world, if you want to be more empowered, if you want to see more compassion and kindness; it starts with you. Challenge your own thinking, seek out alternative points of view on an issue, do not just cling to your co-conspirators all the time. Listen to some new music. Try some new practices. Challenge your own internalised belief systems. I was a big Hatha Yoga devotee for years and then three years ago I discovered Kundalini Yoga by virtue of the fact I shared a room on a retreat in Mexico with a wonderful lady who is a Kundalini Yoga teacher. Gave me a new tool for mindfulness and a great friend!

You will build some new neural pathways, you will meet some new people in your life. It may help you navigate the harder stuff in life with greater ease. You may very well discover a whole treasure trove of cool parts of yourself that you never knew existed. Challenge the stories you have been told.

If you want to experience life differently, look through different lenses. You never know what you may find.

The art of receiving

This time of year can be hard. It is busy with Christmas celebrations, buying presents and family get togethers. In the southern hemisphere we have double the pressure to finish up things at work because many people are breaking to go on summer holidays. The thought of family celebrations can be stressful. It is hard when you have done lot of work on your inner child to find yourself back in the family system that caused all those triggers in the first place. We often get caught in so much busy time, that we ignore the signs our body is giving us to slow down and just be. So I thought for my last blog for the year that I would write about receiving.

Receiving is a key to Women’s Empowerment. It is almost impossible to be nourished and practice self-care properly if we cannot receive and we cannot nourish and care for others if we have nothing to give. Being receptive is also a critical element of community; when we receive we participate in an exchange in community that sustains all aspects of community. There is little reflection or understanding of receiving in most people’s worlds; it is not valued as something we need to learn. Self Care is something that few people do well. We seem to value giving more than receiving and often do it in a way that makes being receptive seem to be a sign of inadequacy or neediness. In the book the Tao Te Ching, the feminine expression of receiving is the counter balance to the masculine expressiveness. We all have a masculine and feminine energy within us, regardless of gender.

The tools of listening, intuition and attentiveness without action, are all expressions of receiving. They will deepen our capacity to nourish ourselves. We can get stuck in old repetitive habits and patterns if we cannot receive. How do women today who are filled up with conditioned thoughts and values of how they should show up in the world learn to receive? How do women whose voices has rarely been heard learn to listen? Well it takes a lot of practice for your nervous system to feel safe to receive.

One thing I learned from my practice of Qi Gong is that a womans receptivity is a strong part of her energetic makeup. Men’s Energy fields are strongly focused around their heads, often the front of their head. Interestingly they often are focused on tasks. Womens energy fields are often dispersed. They radiate out in many directions. They take and receive energy from many different perspectives, their field more open, less restricted. Is all this openness the reason for the strong sense of knowing and intuition that women have? Women seem to connect more easily . We connect with our children through our bodies, we connect to the earth easily, we foster connections with people. Does our natural affinity for connection and receptivity mean we are good at it. Not necessarily.

Many physical things on the planet, take in and receive. Plants, Trees, Animals all take in some form of food or oxygen. We humans just produce and do. Do, Do, Do. Women are conditioned in our society to give, give, give. We habitually nourish others and we leak a lot of our own energy. We attune to our children to support them. When you stay in this pattern of nurturing others, you can easily forget that you have a self that is separate to them. A self that needs to be cared for and maintained. I recall many years ago a client asked me to design a workshop that would teach his team to be human beings not human doings. It was a challenge but we got there.

When you start a practice of self-care and take time every day to do something for yourself, you open up to a new paradigm of receiving. You can start to discern what feels good and what does not, what and who supports you and what and who does not. You experience an increase in life force energy in all of your energy centres. Your body fills with pleasure. Give yourself permission to practice receiving every day. Give yourself permission to hold this energy within every day, it will sustain you. The more you practice this, the more comfortable your nervous system (you) will feel with practicing receiving.

What are some practices of self care that you can give to yourself? When someone compliments you, receive it, thank them. Think about the food that you put in your body is it nourishing? Take walks in nature, nature is a huge source of energetic nourishment. Dancing is a huge source of energy for women. Or you could try some form of meditation. It doesn’t have to be a meditation that is still, there are many forms of dynamic meditation that are nourishing. Ten minutes of Breathwork will do wonders for your body. This holiday season practice breaking some old patterns. If you are tired, choose yourself first over going to parties or meetings that will not serve you well. Cut down on screen time. Focus on spending time with people who support you and love you. Spend some time being quiet and resting.

Women have so much capacity to be receptive if they draw in and listen to themselves. Listen to your body, this will translate to listening to your emotions, your truth, your creativity, your desires and your knowledge. The listening happens through your entire system, all your energy centres but the primary centre is your heart. Listening to yourself is an act of radical self care. It takes courage, commitment and time. Women thrive when we listen inwardly and align to our own wisdom through our listening.

Womens Empowerment

Womens empowerment, this is such a broad topic I don’t think I can write about it in one post. So maybe I should call this blog womens empowerment part 1. There are many sources of power, we are surrounded by it. Many of us believe that to be empowered we have to find that power outside of ourselves. We search constantly for it over the course of a lifetime, outside of ourselves and we never really find it.

The story that we have been told by popular culture and the media is that power is defined by; how you look, how much money you make, who you are dating or married to and your trajectory in your career as defined by an external hierarchical structure.

This is an old model of power. It is a model driven by fear and comparison.

We worry about whether we are enough or too much. Am I pretty enough? Sexy enough? Am I too outspoken? Too loud? Too intense? If you have used your sexuality to get what you want then you would worry about getting older and no longer being attractive. In a youth obsessed culture like ours, that worships teenage maidens, we disguise our natural radiance with make-up, botox, facelifts, clothes. The list goes on.

We try to be who we believe we are supposed to be. We constantly pursue personal development to give ourselves permission to make change. Ever had that thought, 'Once I do this course then I’ll be able to make changes I want in my life’, or ‘When I hit this goal then I can do what I want to do’. We contort ourselves to fit an image because we have a belief system that we are not right just the way we are. Focusing on how we should be on the outside or what we should achieve makes us unhappy, crazy, disconnected from ourself and often just downright confused.

What if I told you that you have all the resources you need to empower yourself inside of you. That the new model of power is to connect with yourself, to discover all the different parts of you, to love and accept them even the ones you don’t like so much. That connecting with your pleasure, your sexuality, your authentic self and your capacity to love will empower you like nothing you have experienced before. That it is all there right inside of you, everything you have ever needed.

Photo Jeremy Bishop

This is challenging to read and challenging to put into action. We live in a culture of always on, busy all the time, that leads to burnout. Organisations financially reward us for it. Who has time to lean into themselves? You will have to be brave and give yourself permission to not be productive. You will have to give yourself permission to bask in your own pleasure and doing this has not been encouraged in our culture. The cultural warnings we received about pleasure and your desires include ‘be careful what you want because you might get addicted’ or ‘you will just keep wanting more and more’. This carries into spirituality, beware of your desires, they are a bottomless pitt, never-ending downward spiral. Let’s be clear I am not talking about desires that are not healthy for you. I am talking about knowing what you really want in your life.

Women have been treated as second class citizens for thousands of years. We have been maltreated, persecuted and just not considered equal. This gets passed down through generations. Most women do not have a natural sense of safety in their bodies. The impact of sexual trauma, disconnection from our body and unfulfilling sex, because we have not been taught how to ask for what we want, has leaked out of the bedroom and into our daily life. It has shut down our voice. It has shut down a massive source of creativity and energy. It disempowers us in life. We shrink, hide, play small just to stay safe. We lose our voice and our capacity to ask for what it is we really desire in our life. We have become afraid to ask.

What if you could ask for what you want in life.

What if you could learn what a full body YES and NO felt like in your body.

What if you could ask to slow down or stop what you were doing altogether.

What if you could get really clear about what you do want and what you don’t want in your life.

What if you recognised that your sexual energy is a massive source of radiance, vibrancy, energy and creativity in your life.

What if you could pursue one pleasurable activity every day in your life and you used that energy generated from that to fuel you to create the life you desire.

What if you could learn the art of satiation. What it feels like inside of your body to feel satisfied and content and let yourself reside there for a few minutes and then for stretches at a time and it felt safe.

I don’t know about you but all of that sounds like a pretty empowered woman to me.

If you feel like this blog could help someone pass it on to them. If you read this and it resonates with you but you are not sure where to start hit reply and ask me I’ll answer your email.

PS - If you are super interested in this topic keep your eyes posted over summer. I’ve been recording podcasts that I am going to release over summer. There is a podcast on the topic ‘Orgasm as source of Power’, that I recorded with my friend and fellow coach Julia Lally, coming your way.

The healing power of Breathwork

I recently returned from 8 days of Breathwork facilitator training. It was a fantastic week where I got to learn and hang out with 19 other very engaged students learning to teach and facilitate Breathwork. By the end of our time together we had all developed extremely close bonds with each other, which is not surprising given we had spent all of that time breathing together and taking care of each other whilst processing lots of latent trauma.

Breathwork has been around for some time. You may have heard of it or know it as rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, alchemy of breath, BBTRS Breathwork, Breath of Bliss. These are all different teaching methods. Similar but different. There is no branding or copyright around Breathwork because it’s Breath.

So why is Breathwork so effective at moving old stuck energy, tension or trauma out of our body? Well the idea is that you charge up your body with oxygen through a connected breath, in and out, no pause in between. This brings you 100% into presence in your body, bypassing cortical control into an altered state of consciousness. In BBTRS breathwork, which is the modality I am learning, the idea is to bring the body into presence with this old energy and release it by triggering the flight or fight response to give the trauma the opportunity to complete its cycle.

What is the trauma I am speaking about? Well the best way to explain it is to use an example from Peter Levine’s book, “Waking the Tiger”. Imagine you see a Lion chasing a Zebra. The Zebra in an attempt to save itself falls to the ground and plays dead. It is frozen. The Lion, realising the chase is over, gets bored and runs away. Some moments later, knowing that danger has gone, the Zebra jumps up. It immediately starts running around, tremoring and shaking its body. It is discharging the frozen energy from its body. In his book Levine says the Freeze offers two benefits. Firstly, it saves the Zebra because the freeze allows it to run for its life, when danger has dissipated. Second, If the Zebra was eaten by the Lion, when frozen and numb it would not feel anything. Nature has built in compassion into a natural cycle. Humans and animals can both access the freeze response. However, for humans, our body doesn’t naturally do the discharge. We have to give it some help to do that. (for the sake of the article I’m just talking about latent general trauma, there are many different types of trauma the principle is the same).

Every day we experience the fight, flight or freeze response in our body in our autonomic nervous system. The danger coming our way may not be a lion chasing us but maybe it is an angry boss or spouse, or a lack of emotional or psychological safety in our work environment, angry drivers on the road yelling at us or a train stuck on the tracks doing nothing whilst we are stuck inside, worrying about getting to work on time. We have these scenarios happening all the time and because they have become normalised instances in our life, we don’t realise that constantly moving into these states of flight, fight or freeze is putting a lot of stress on our bodies. This is because we don’t have any opportunity to release that energy.

Trauma is the result of the freeze energy getting stuck in our body and not having the chance to complete its cycle. Trauma is not the result of what happened to us. Trauma is the result of how effective our nervous system was able to deal with that energy that was triggered in the traumatic situation. Two people can go through the exact same event, one feeling traumatised, the other being completely fine post the adverse event. It depends on whether the person went into freeze and stayed there or whether they went into flight or flight and were able to ‘save’ themselves. The good news is there are many different ways of releasing trauma frozen in our body. Breathwork is just one.

So how can Breathwork help?

As mentioned above, breathwork allows our body to release this stuck energy. Through charging the body with oxygen, the flight or fight kicks in and the body completes the cycle through discharge. This may be shaking, tremoring, crying, laughing, shouting, myofascial unwinding which is the body moving itself. Emotions that were never acknowledged at the time come back up, muscular tension releases. It creates a lot of space in the body.

People report feeling softer in their body, postural changes, feeling more ‘in’ their body, better at reinforcing their boundaries, feeling their emotions and actually enjoying that. A stronger sense of their own presence and feeling others’ presence.

For me personally, I have released really old tension, lots of trauma, I feel softer in my body, my skeleton actually feels quite different, aches and pains have disappeared. I am present with the sensations and emotions within my body and able to witness and observe them and I have noticed my capacity to be emotionally triggered has significantly decreased.

Breathwork is something you would do with a trained facilitator who can safely hold space for you. However it is your own body doing all the work, releasing all on its own, unwinding, your own breath healing you. You being your own healer. All the answers deep inside of you, all there waiting for you. Your body and its own innate ability to heal working its magic.

There are certain health conditions where Breathwork is contraindicated. These include pregnancy, severe asthma, heart disease, severe mental illness, epilepsy, diabetes, acute physical injuries. If you are unsure if you should try Breathwork, please consult your medical professional for advice.

Healing our Inner Child

One of the biggest challenges we face in our growth and development as adults is healing our childhood wounding.  That is, the traumatic impact of both emotional and psychological wounds we incur in childhood.  

This wounding is most often the result of our needs not being met by our parents.  Everyone that I work with has experienced this, as I have too. It is not because our parents were terrible parents, although some people’s parents were horrible.  It is that many of our parents are not perfect, they are people who were trying to work, raise children and have a life. They cannot focus all their attention on us 100% of the time.  They also had their own inner child wounds and at times they were parenting from that part of themselves, not their adult parts. The trauma I am talking about that we experienced as a result of this ranges from being criticised for not getting a great test score on a test at school, to being ignored, to in some cases, emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Trauma expert, Dr Bessel van der Kolk, whom I have had the pleasure of being taught by, says in his book “The Body Keeps the Score”, ‘Trauma causes people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past’.

We develop strategies, habits and patterns of behaviour, that are often very reactive and they become our dominant approaches to cope and live our life.  Thus often repeated patterns of feedback are given, repeated incidences of relationships dynamics occurring are often a sign that you are operating from your inner child self.  Anything that gets you a bit fired up or ‘triggered’ is often a good sign that old programs maybe of shame, inadequacy, abandonment, betrayal or feeling unsafe are operating. These programs always have stories attached to them that allow us to feel in control of what is actually going on.  So much so, that we attract the same situations and act them out on a daily basis.

When we are unaware of these child parts of ourselves running our life we are actually walking around projecting a shadow part of ourselves onto others. Our inner narrative might be ‘the bad person who did that to me’, ‘the bad luck responsible for our suffering’.  In some cases we get feedback in the workplace, giving us a sign of how others are experiencing this shadow part of ourselves - that we don’t see - and how it impacts on them. However, it can, when left unattended for a long period of time turn into symptoms, illness or disease; often in the case of repressed emotions that were not accepted as part of us as children.  For example, many people have an unhealthy relationship with their own anger and struggle to express it in a grounded way as it was deemed unacceptable when they were a small child. How many toddlers having a tantrum at two years old are sent to the ‘naughty corner’? What they are actually doing when they shake their body on the floor is trying to discharge the energetic charge of anger running through them.

Why do we need to do this inner child work?  I hear you ask. Well, often we don’t get a choice because we hit rock bottom.  Either in terms of poor health or relationship rupture. Often in midlife, our psyche gives us a chance to heal this wounding and face our pain to prepare ourselves for a vibrant ‘third act’ after we turn 50.  In her famous essay on Midlife, Brene Brown says it like this. ‘Midlife is when the Universe puts its hands on your shoulders and says “I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armour is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armour could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and loveable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short....”

“Facing childhood wounding and working with relationships that will help you heal your relationship with your inner child might be some of the most challenging personal development work that you do but it will also be the most freeing and empowering.  ”

To heal your inner child, you need to bring that part of yourself to consciousness.  You do this by witnessing your inner world. That is, be able to observe when you are acting out one of your habits or patterns of behaviour.  Once you can do that, you work out what that behaviour is trying to gain for you; often love, safety and belonging. The next step is being able to parent yourself. This enables individuation and clear separation from the sensitive child part of you within you.  The third step is learning to put some strategies in place for self care so you can regulate your nervous system and then develop new strategies to cope and thrive in the world.

This work is freeing both to you and your family system.  It breaks cycles of family patterning that you have been carrying.  It creates the capacity for you to witness and observe your emotions and understand in an embodied way that you are not your emotions - you are just the experiencer of them.  It makes baring your emotions so much easier and gives you the ability to listen to them when they arise.

Doing the inner child work is tough.  You want to do it supported by a coach or therapist and with the support of those you love around you.  It will improve the quality of your relationships. It will open you up to different types of relationships and experiences in your life as you stop reacting and start creating the outcomes you want.  It will allow you to have a close relationship with your body and really learn to listen to it and the innate wisdom it has within it, by listening to your emotions and learning to be with them. You will learn to appreciate your shadow and move towards self-love and self- acceptance as you learn to love all the different parts of you, good and not so good.  Hopefully you learn to listen to your nervous system and really learn the meaning of ‘take care of yourself’; how to give yourself permission to rest, how to regulate yourself at a pace that is supportive of your need to recover. But most importantly, you will learn to love all the different child and adult parts of you that you discover and that you are a glorious, multi-dimensional being who is capable of living their best life and thriving in the world. 

I do inner child work in my coaching - if this is something would like to explore, come have a chat with me.