There’s a hidden creek in the Cascades west of Bend that we call “Fairy Moss Creek.” I spent an hour there a couple of days ago, in the company of an American Dipper. (Dippers, also called Water Ouzels, are North America’s only aquatic songbird.)
This dipper’s right leg appears to be useless. She drags it along behind her over moss-covered rocks and through the water as she goes about her dipper business.
The rills aggregating to form Fairy Moss Creek appear out of bare rock just a little way upstream from the downed log on which I’m sitting. An additional creeklet appears to erupt from the top of the ridge across from me, then bubbles down the ridge to join the main stem. It’s up this branch that our dipper moves, hopping from rock to rock, sticking her head into pools and under tiny waterfalls, evidently finding plenty to eat. She’s in no hurry, moving steadily up and up and up, dragging that useless leg behind her. No drama. No angst. Just whole-hearted dipper.
I hear her say that injured things can thrive. Hurt beings can be strong. Imperfect creatures have every right to nutrient-rich habitat. She tells me she’s whole, in spite of her injury. She tells me I’m whole, too.
Fairy Moss Creek is magical. This dipper is a shaman. And I am a mystic.
The world talks to me on the regular, as it does to all nature mystics.
September 17th is the feast of Hildegard of Bingen, hands down my favorite saint. Hildegard, who lived in the 12th century, was the Queen of Both/And. She was an abbess of a monastery in Bingen in the German Rhineland. She was a healer and theologian. She was an herbalist, a painter, and a writer. She instructed popes while writing music. And that’s just for starters. Hildegard was many things, some of them seemingly contradictory.
I think I admire Hildegard because I have seemingly contradictory parts, too. There’s the left-brained analytical biologist who geeks out on geology, botany, ornithology, and the intricacies of watersheds. And there’s the right-brained intuitive who loves art and poetry and healing, and who receives dipper messages.
For the longest time, I’ve believed I needed to choose between these two worlds. As a kid, I was told that the intuitive me who knew stuff about people, loved narrative and color, and talked to the trees wasn’t practical. That I needed to give her up in order to make my way in the world. That the part of me that would be useful to others and would make my living is the orderly, fact-based part. That we’d all be happier if I would just get over myself, accept the loss of my kaleidoscope life, and settle for black and white.
I’ve found a little “both/and” air to breathe occasionally, while mostly drowning in my inability to choose. My master’s degree is a Both/And: Conservation Biology and Communication. My coach training is Both/And: scientifically rigorous and firmly rooted in the mystical. (Martha Beck, who developed Wayfinder Life Coach Training, is sociologist with a doctorate from Harvard and one of the most mystical women you’ll ever meet.
Like Hildegard, I’m a biologist and a poet, a science nerd and an intuitive, a healer and a theologian. I contain multitudes. And I refuse to accept the culture’s message that I need to choose.
I know there’s more to this world than meets the eye. I believe in that deep womb-heart I felt on the Camino. I get messages all the damn time from rivers and rocks and birds. That I can also tell you the story of the basalt rock we’re sitting on at the time, identify the bird you’re hearing in the trees (and the trees), regale you with interesting facts about that bird, and tell you where the river’s headwaters are, only adds to my joy. I hope it adds to yours, too.
I’m claiming my both/and life. I’m choosing my integrity and wholeness, and to hell with the culture that says I can’t have both.
PS. Interested in more about Hildegard? The Abbey of the Arts is offering a retreat on Hildegard’s feast day. Here’s more information.
In every situation you encounter, you choose to behave as either a victim or a creator. Which orientation you’re operating out of makes all the difference in how your life feels and looks, and the impact you have on the world around you. Once you see this difference, you can consciously choose to act from a place of empowerment. This is the basic idea of David Emerald’s TED: The Empowerment Dynamic, a cheesy yet profound book. I’m finding this concept mind-blowing and incredibly helpful.
Like many of you, I’ve known about the Drama Triangle—composed of victim, persecutor, and rescuer—for decades. But the antidote to it, the “Empowerment Triangle,” is a new idea for me.
I feel like I’ve discovered the secret of life, the Rosetta Stone, the key to personal and organizational growth and health.
Most of us, most of the time, are living as victims. This is completely understandable. Our culture is a victim culture. We’re taught victimhood from our cradles. We’re steeped in it. We swim in it like water. We’re mostly unaware that we’re approaching our life and our choices as victims. This Drama Triangle feels completely natural.
An alternative triangle, what Emerald calls the “Empowerment Dynamic,” is composed of a creator, a challenger, and a coach. To grow up is to become aware of where we’re living as victims and to choose to take on the creator role. To grow up is to see that we’re always making a choice. This is scary as hell, sure, but it’s also why we’re here.
When we behave as victims, we approach our life as a series of problems to be solved. Viewing life as a problem creates anxiety, which causes us to act in ways that reduce the anxiety but almost certainly don’t solve the problem. And the cycle starts all over again. Not much changes.
Creators, on the other hand, develop clarity on what they want to see happen in a particular area of concern. Clarity leads to passion and motivation, which creators then harness to move toward their desired outcome or vision. Creators change themselves and thereby the world, if they choose to.
When you’re feeling frustrated, stuck, and powerless, you’re in victim mode. When you blame others for your feelings and criticize yourself and them, you’re in victim mode. When nothing changes and you really wish it would, you’re in victim mode. When other people aren’t doing what they should and you’re sick and tired of it, you’re in victim mode.
Conversely, when you’re energized, focused, and open to surprise, when you’re making choices that move you toward what you want to see happen, when your boundaries are firm and you’re in charge of your time, you’re acting as a creator.
How do you make the shift from victim to creator? Realize that you’re always, always, always making a choice. Even if you’re truly a prisoner and you can’t actually make decisions about your actions, you’re still in charge of your thoughts, and thereby your feelings.
If Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl can be responsible for his attitude while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, we can learn to be responsible for ours. Frankl famously said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
If you’re curious about how this shift feels, you could choose to try this exercise:
Bring to mind an area of your life where you feel stuck, frustrated, and powerless to change the situation. This might be your marriage, your job, your aging body, COVID, or political polarization in the US. (Many of my clients feel the most frustration with their marriage.)
What do you see as the problem? (For many of my clients, their perceived problem is that they crave growth and change, and their husbands or wives seem to want to stay the same. This disparity causes my clients to feel afraid that if they choose to change and grow, their marriage will end.)
In this scenario, who’s the victim? Who’s the persecutor? Who do you expect to rescue you? Do these roles seem to change?
Now, ask yourself what you want to happen. What’s your vision for this area of your life? What’s the outcome you desire? Take time to get as clear as you can. Your clarity will be your motivation.
What’s one tiny step you can take in the direction of your desired outcome or vision? If it’s doable right now, go do it. I’ll wait. If it’s truly not, make a plan to take that step.
Check in with your body. How do you feel now? Do you still feel stuck and frustrated? Or do you feel more energized, compassionate, and empowered?
If you’re feeling more open and enthusiastic, pat yourself on the back! You’re making the shift from victim to creator.
If not, please know that’s okay. This work may be simple, but it’s often not easy. Celebrate your new awareness and give yourself compassion. There are many reasons, some of them very good reasons, why we choose not to change.
Questions? Want to go deeper? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!
“When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it. All else is madness.” ~Eckhart Tolle
Does that quote piss you off just a little? It does me. There
are things I feel I ought to be able to complain about. Things that just aren’t
right, but that don’t seem to be within my power to correct. Things like White
nationalism, the persistence of misogynist patriarchy, and rampant capitalism,
for example. But what good does complaining about any of that do? Nothing.
Nada. Zilch. At least for me.
I believe Eckhart Tolle is correct. I make myself a victim when I complain. If a situation is truly intractable, the only sane course of action is to accept it. Because the above-mentioned forces are man-made (deliberate use of “man”), they are changeable. It’s just that changing them requires such hard work and an eye on the long game that they feel intractable.
I also see in myself a tendency to complain about situations I could leave or change, if I were willing to live with someone else’s anger or my own discomfort. I blame others for my choice to remain in situations that I don’t like. We complain when we don’t want to change, or when we feel powerless because the problem is so damn big. We choose not to change because we’re afraid of the hard work and the consequences.
I learned something in life coach training that blew my mind: Thoughts create feelings. I always thought it was the other way around. Nope. Here’s how it works:
Thoughts create feelings, which create actions, which create results, which lead to more thoughts, which create more feelings, which create more actions, which produce more results, which lead to more thoughts … on and on, around and around …
You can see how we can get ourselves pretty deep into a
gnarly clusterf*ck if we don’t understand how this works.
Your thoughts create your feelings which motivate your
actions which produce results. You then have thoughts about those results,
which create feelings, which motivate actions, which produce more results. All
of these results add up to your circumstances.
Of course, all of this is happening within the complex human ecosystem which is you. You exist within a matrix of material reality interwoven with Holy energy. And, as mentioned above, we live in a culture that privileges Whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and wealth, which certainly affects your life.
If you’re an adult and you’re reading this, your present circumstances are largely a product of your actions. You did this. Every step of the way. The circumstances in which you find yourself are the result of actions you took in response to feelings produced by your thoughts.
Although we like to blame others for our adult
circumstances, unless you’re being held captive, that blame is probably not
accurate. I’m NOT saying you caused your cancer or depression or whatever. I AM
saying that if your cancer or depression or whatever is creating unnecessary
suffering, you can allevate that suffering by taking responsibility for it. It
may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility.
If you’re looking around at a life you didn’t intentionally create and you’re not thrilled about, it’s because you didn’t know about this cycle — how it works and how to create meaningful change for yourself.
How do you take responsibility for this cycle and the results it’s produced in your life? By understanding it and learning to intervene in it skillfully. To grow up is to understand this cycle and to use it to create the life you want.
Circumstances we don’t like and feelings we don’t like are where we usually notice distress, so it’s natural to think they are what we need to fix first.
We would be wrong.
Thoughts and actions are the only places we can break the cycle and put ourselves back in charge of our lives.
When we try to fix feelings without attending to the
thoughts that drive them, we deny our feelings or numb them with addictions and
compulsions. To alleviate uncomfortable feelings, we take impulsive actions, or
no action at all because we feel paralyzed. These careless actions are useless
at best, destructive at worst.
When we try to fix results of our clumsy actions without addressing the feelings and thoughts that drove those actions, we simply recreate the same circumstances over and over again. We all know people who’ve moved, changed jobs, coupled up or broken up, gone back to school, had a baby, or something else to alleviate the discomfort of their circumstances and feelings. Heck, I’ve done this myself a time or two. Wherever you go, there you are.
Unskillful interventions create more suffering in the long run, and they don’t produce lasting change and healing.
Skillful interventions, on the other hand, reduce suffering and result in long-term change and healing.
How do we intervene in this cycle skillfully and effectively?
A good place to start is to notice what you’re complaining about. If you complain about a circumstance in your life, you’re making yourself a victim. Stop it. Stop and look at what’s really going on. Follow the cycle backwards. Ask yourself these questions:
What actions have I taken that resulted in this
present circumstance?
What feelings was I having that drove those
actions?
What thoughts created those feelings?
(A coach or other careful listener can be really helpful
here, because we’re often blind to how the cycle has worked in our lives. If we
could see it clearly, we’d make different choices!)
Actions: If you’re choosing destructive actions to alleviate feelings you don’t want to have, stop it. Are you overeating? Overdrinking? Overspending? Yelling at your kids or your spouse or the driver in front of you? And recognize that simply ceasing an action without attending to the feelings and thoughts that drive that action is unsustainable in the long run. Will power isn’t infinite.
Feelings: Uncomfortable feelings won’t kill you when you feel them. Feel your feelings all the way, and they lose their power. You’ll discover that you can feel your feelings and survive. Learning to feel feelings without needing to act on them in ways that are destructive to your life and your integrity – that’s freedom. That’s maturity.
Thoughts: The most effective and sustainable place to intervene in this cycle is with our thoughts. This is the bulk of the coaching I do, because most of us need help hearing our thoughts and changing them to thoughts that serve us.
Here’s an example from my own life. I feel embarrassed to share it. I also believe many of you can relate, so here goes.
I often crave potato chips, even when I’m not hungry. The cycle goes like this: I see potato chips and I think, “I deserve those today, I won’t be able to stand not eating them now that I see them, and a few won’t hurt me.” So I want them, I eat too many of them, and I feel overfull and not proud of myself. I haven’t acted in my own best interests and according to my values. This is what I did just a couple of days ago.
I could have interrupted this cycle in two places. I
could have noticed the wanting, felt it all the way, and not eaten the potato
chips. This is what I usually manage to do. The most powerful place to
intervene, though, is with the thought, “I won’t be able to stand not eating
them.” Because I know if I can just let that craving be what it is, it will
eventually dissipate and I’ll be fine. The craving is just neurons firing in my
brain, after all. Although it feels lethal, it’s not. This is getting easier
and easier for me to do as I rewire my brain. I hardly ever eat when I’m not
hungry anymore.
Now, for most of us, potato chips aren’t the end of the world. But sometimes, because we don’t know how this process works, we make choices with destructive consequences that are life-altering.
Looking back on my life, I can see how I’ve gotten where I am, both the good and the bad. I can draw a line from the circumstances in which I’m living now, back to the actions I took to manage the feelings I was having, and then even further back to the thoughts that drove those feelings, and the circumstances that created the thoughts, and so on and on and on.
Here in my 60s, I can see how choices I made when I was in my teens and 20s have resulted in a life that doesn’t fit in important ways. I can stop doing the things that hurt me, but it’s working with my thoughts that has created and continues to create lasting change and healing.
Because of what went down in my childhood family, I believed I wasn’t worthy of living my own life on my terms. My choices flowed from that core belief. The only way I’ve been able to heal is to examine those tangled beliefs, and to begin to learn to think different thoughts. It’s not easy. Lasting change rarely is.
Now that I know better, I can do better. So can you. Start with where you’re complaining, and work backwards. Contact me if you want to talk.
This is the piece I was ready to post last week. And then “A letter from God to her daughters who resist joy” showed up and wanted to be shared instead. Here’s my more cerebral, left-brain answer to the question, “Why do we resist joy?”
Two weeks ago I wrote about how to feel sad, and I heard from a few of you who were grateful for the encouragement and instruction. Today I want to encourage us to feel our joy.
Joy. Why would we resist feeling joyful and happy? It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Pushing away sadness makes sense. Sadness, grief, sorrow – they hurt. Joy doesn’t hurt, right?
Well. Maybe, maybe not. We might not resist joy like we
resist sadness. We resist joy in different ways – we might rush past joy, not
stopping to take it in. We might hold on
to it with a death grip, grasping and needy, not trusting that there are
moments of joy yet to come.
We might believe that if we let joy in, it will only make our inevitable sorrow more acutely painful.
And we’d be right.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Kahlil Gibran
Feelings are unpredictable. Feelings ebb and flow. Feelings arrive, fresh-faced or tear-stained, without words, yanking on our skirts and distracting us from our to-do lists. They require our attention at inconvenient times.
Feeling our feelings, all of them, is a choice. We don’t
have to do it. We can numb and distract and talk ourselves out of our feelings
until we die. Many lovely people choose not to feel their feelings. You
probably know a few of them.
Our dominant culture excels at teaching us to ignore our
true feelings.
So, why bother? Why feel at all? Why rock our little human boats that we try so hard to keep afloat and on an even keel? Why make life harder than it already is? Why choose to feel deeply? Why not leave well enough alone?
Why choose to get back in touch with our emotions? Our
emotions live in our bodies. When we cut off our emotional lives, we cut off
our embodied existence. We live from the neck up, dragging our bodies around
like machines controlled by our brains.
You may have vacated your body and moved into your head
at some point, probably in self-defense. It was the best strategy at the time.
Vacating your body was how you got through the painful stuff.
If so, it’s time to come back home.
Why? Because, when you cut off your embodied feelings, you also cut off your connection to Soul. Our souls and bodies are intertwined. Your soul does not live in your brain or your mind.
Feeling your joy and sorrow is how you reconnect with
your body. Reconnecting with your body is how you connect with your soul and
your soul’s Source.
Cutting off your body because it hurts too much and you feel uncomfortable is to cut off your connection to God. Refusing to be in our bodies severs our connection to Holiness. Your holiness. My holiness. Earth’s holiness. Holiness Itself.
Besides, it takes so much energy to keep stuffing and
resisting our feelings! Just think what you could get done if you just let your
feelings move through you and got on with your day?!
If you want a less woo-woo, more sciency reason to feel your feelings, consider the neurobiology adage “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In the words of Rick Hanson, “Passing mental states become lasting neural traits.” He’s got some good instructions in this 13-minute TED talk.
When we pay conscious attention to joyful moments, experiences, and memories, we heal our brains. A healed brain is more resilient and flexible. A healed brain is more resistant to stress and the cascade of destruction and disease caused by stress.
We inhabit our joy only when we also attend to our sorrow. They walk together.
Mary Oliver:
When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,
like the tambourine sound of the snow cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.
Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.
Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.
A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Does this resonate? Want to explore further? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!
Repeat after me: “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.”
The behaviors you carry into your adult life are not your fault. They are simply how you learned to cope with the stresses and strains of being a child in your family and in your culture.
They are not your fault.
They are, however, your responsibility. Once you are aware that your automatic behaviors in stressful situations aren’t serving you, it’s your responsibility to learn new ones.
Here’s what happened. You came into this world with an incredibly malleable, adaptive brain. Events happened in your family that began to shape your brain even before you were born. Every event in your childhood was an opportunity for neurons to connect. Every repetition of an event and your response to that event strengthened that neural connection. Over time, these connections learned to function like superhighways in your brain. Stimulus leads to response without your conscious awareness, producing the same result.
It’s neurobiology, and it’s not your fault.
For example, let’s say one of the adults in your life got mad often, and you frequently got hurt when they got mad. You probably learned that angry adults are scary and your job was to either hide or placate. That was an adaptive, rational response when you were seven. If you’re still responding to angry adults by hiding or placating when you’re 57, that’s a problem. You’re not a child anymore, and you have power now.
Building new habits to replace the old habits that no longer serve us – that’s what coaching is.
We start by learning the cycle: an event produces thoughts, thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions produce results. You can interrupt that cycle in only two places. You can change your thoughts, and you can change your actions. Feelings are a result of your thoughts, and the only way to shift them is to shift your thinking.
To heal and to make different choices, you must cultivate awareness of exactly how this cycle is operating in your life. One powerful tool for developing awareness of the cycle is the Awareness Wheel. Grab one here, and read these two previous posts for more information.
Sometimes just shining a light on what’s going on with us will ease our suffering. To really heal ourselves, though, we need to heal our brains. One powerful way to heal our brains is through an inquiry method, such as Byron Katie’s model which she calls “The Work.” (There are other forms of Inquiry. I’ve included links to two of them at the end.)
After you’ve identified a thought that’s not serving you, The Work asks four questions:
Is it true? Yes or no.
Can you absolutely know it’s true? Yes or no.
What happens when you believe this thought?
Who would you be without this thought?
The deeper you go into Questions 3 and 4, the more healing occurs. Take your time here. Katie’s website is full of resources, and I’m always happy to talk you through this process.
The final step is to turn the original thought around, and to find evidence for why it might be as true or truer than the original thought.
The purpose of this process is to find the truth. Inquiry is not about denial. It’s about truth. The truth will set you free.
Here’s how The Work could look for a child growing up with a violent parent. One painful thought learned in this situation might be, “It’s my job to keep people happy.”
Is it true? It sure feels true, so YES.
Can I absolutely know it’s true? Not really, so NO.
What happens when I believe the thought “It’s my job to keep people happy”?
I’m always being nice and going out of my way to accommodate others. I don’t say what I think and I never disagree with anyone. I’m always paying attention to how others feel to the point that I don’t know how I feel anymore. I feel tense in my stomach and my breathing is shallow. My shoulders are a little hunched and my arms are tight.
Who would I be without the thought “It’s my job to keep people happy”?
I’d say what I think. I’d let their anger be their problem. I’d pay attention to what I’m feeling and give myself love. I’d feel so much more free.
Two possible turnarounds:
It’s not my job to keep people happy.
Of course this is true, because I’m not actually in charge of other people’s feelings.
It’s my job to keep me happy.
Who else’s job could it be?
Repeating this process over and over builds new neural pathways. This is how you heal your brain.
Unf*ck Your Brain (This podcast and blog is the work of Kara Loewentheil, a Harvard-trained lawyer turned life coach. I think it’s f*cking brilliant, if you don’t mind swearing. Kara’s method is more streamlined than The Work.)
As always, I offer a free consultation. Please email me or use the contact form to set up a convenient time.
My mom was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer when she was 62. By the time it was found, the cancer had metastasized to her lungs, although we didn’t know that right away. The lung cancer would kill her a year later. My mom had been very healthy her whole life. Her plan to live to be 100 was one I heard often as a child. Her cancer was completely unexpected, which was why it was found too late to save her life. I was devastated. Everyone who knew her was devastated.
And she didn’t want to talk about dying.
We were living in Illinois, so I took both my kids, six and ten at the time, to Arizona with me for the summer. In June, the kids and I took a road trip with her to visit her favorite aunt in New Mexico. She went swimming with her grandkids. She took walks with her dog and her husband. She still didn’t want to talk about dying.
In July, my mom was slowing down. By August, I was doing all the cooking and cleaning for her and my stepfather. She had to sleep sitting up because she couldn’t breathe lying down. And she still didn’t want to talk about dying.
We went home to Illinois at the end of August. My mom’s last words to me were her promise that she’d call me when it was time for me to return and say good-bye.
She died September 1st, alone in her bed, never having asked me to come back.
I was heartbroken. I didn’t know I could hurt like that. I was also deeply angry. I was angry that she’d never let me tell her how much I loved her, and that she didn’t let any of us say goodbye. This was no accidental death, like my dad’s. My mom had plenty of advance warning. Hers could have been a much better death. It didn’t have to hurt so much. She could have died surrounded by people who loved her. She was a nurse. She knew how to do this right.
Grieving her death while I was so angry was harder and took a lot longer than it would have if she’d done it better.
I held onto this anger for years. I tried to let it go, but it stuck around. It persisted, despite therapy and many attempts to forgive.
I didn’t know at the time that I was carrying a lot of what the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy model calls “dirty pain.” Mixed in with the clean pain of my heart-rending grief was a ton of unnecessary suffering. (The Buddha and many healers since have put it this way: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” In other words, pain comes and goes, as a result of injury or loss. Suffering hangs around, tied like a yoke to the thoughts we’re having about our pain.)
And then one day, almost twenty years after her death, I did something that helped my anger loosen its grasp. I filled out an Awareness Wheel about how much I still missed my mom, as a teaching example for a small group I was facilitating. (Download one here. The rest of this will make much more sense. And here’s a previous post about the Awareness Wheel.) I was encouraging this group of wise women to go deep in their choice of issue to work with. They encouraged me to be brave, too. What follows is verbatim from my Awareness Wheel that day.
In the middle, in the Issue circle, I wrote “I miss my mom.”
I Notice/Observed: “Tears, heaviness in chest, avoidance of talking about her, distracting myself, tightness in arms/neck/shoulders.”
I Think: “She shouldn’t have died so young. I wonder how she is. I hope she’s happy. I wish she’d had a better death. I wish I’d been able to say goodbye. She was selfish in her dying. I wish she was still alive. People should have talked about the family history of cancer.”
I Feel: “Sad, furious, love.”
I Want (for myself): “To feel at peace. To have you back. I Want (for you): That you’re happy. I Want (for us): That you know I love and forgive you.”
I Do (Past): “Stuff feelings. Be mad. Grieve.” I Do (Present): “Feel my grief. Acknowledge loss and your impact on my life.”
It’s useful simply to fill in a wheel when uncomfortable feelings arrive. It’s even more useful, after you do your wheel, to identify which thought is causing the most suffering. You do this by reading the thoughts you wrote and feeling how they feel in your body. Many of my thoughts were painful, but “She was selfish in her dying” felt like a knife to my gut.
I questioned that thought using Byron Katie’s method called The Work. (More on questioning our painful thoughts next time.) Simply put, through a series of questions, we get very clear on the results our thoughts are producing in our lives. Then, we turn the thought around and kindly investigate how the opposite might be true. This process wiggles the thought loose just a little and begins to grow new brain connections. Healing begins at the cellular level. We feel a little relief, at last.
When I gently investigated my thought “My mom was selfish in her dying,” I began to see how my mom had been generous in her dying. She let me take care of her. She spent time with her grandkids. She was trying to protect us.
When I let go of the thought that she’d been selfish, I can just love her and miss her. I can see that she was doing the best she could with an incredibly scary sad thing. I can see the ways I’d been selfish in her dying, by wanting her to do it my way.
This is how healing has happened, for me. I still miss my mom, of course, and letting go of my anger is ongoing. Now, though, my grief is mostly good, clean, healing grief. I can tell when it’s mixed up with dirty pain, because they feel different in my body.
Martha Beck has said, “If a thought causes suffering, it isn’t true.” That’s an audacious statement. It’s a core belief of my coaching work, because I’ve found it to be true.
When you pay attention to uncomfortable feelings using an Awareness Wheel, you find the thoughts causing suffering. When you question the thoughts that cause you to suffer, you begin to change your brain. When you begin to change your brain, you heal. And that’s how your feelings aren’t your problem, but your solution.
Interested in talking further about this? Contact me here to schedule a conversation. I’d love to explore with you!
What do you do when an uncomfortable feeling rears its ugly head? You know the ones I mean: the biggies like anger, sadness, or fear, and also their annoying little cousins frustration, anxiety, and the blues.
There are only two things you must know about feelings to handle them more skillfully:
Feelings are ephemeral. They come, they stay awhile, and then they go away, as long as we don’t make them too important.
Feelings are the result of thinking.
You probably weren’t taught how to deal with your “bad” feelings, so you try to manage the feeling so it will just go away already. (“Oh, shit. I’m anxious. Again. How do I make it stop??”)
Do any of these coping strategies sound familiar?
You numb or distract yourself (usually with an addictive behavior).
You decide not to do the thing that’s causing the feeling.
You try to talk yourself out of the feeling.
(For me, this third strategy usually sounds like a bully in my head saying things like “Oh, grow up,” “It’s not such a big deal, silly,” “I’m such a loser,” or some other very unkind statement.)
You might use all of these strategies, because you’re an overachiever in this department.
This sucks, right? And it doesn’t change diddly-squat. You don’t feel better, and you don’t learn what the feeling has to teach you.
Let’s change that. Here’s a way to handle the inevitable unwelcome feelings that brings peace, growth, and greater resilience. Here’s a way to greet those feelings open-heartedly, treating them and ourselves with compassion.
Does that sound better?
The next time you have an uncomfortable feeling, do this:
Stop and feel the feeling. Let it be what it is.
Identify the situation about which the feeling is arising. Write it down.
Notice the sensations in your body and your behaviors. Write them down.
Listen in on what your mind is thinking. Write the thoughts down.
THEN write down your feelings. There are probably more than you originally noticed.
You might recognize this process as an “Awareness Wheel.” Awareness Wheels are brilliant, because they help us see what’s going on below our conscious awareness. You can download one here.
Awareness in any form helps you see that your feelings are not your problem. Your feelings are your solution.
If you downloaded, you’ve noticed that the Awareness Wheel goes on to ask you what you want to happen, and concludes by asking about actions we’ve taken in the past and present or will take going forward.
