Today I’ve had to work with a lot of pain. It appeared seemingly out of nowhere…

Seemingly…

Here’s the deal: when you work with your stuff, your stuff will rise to the surface.

When you stretch the limits of what is possible for you, as I’ve done this week, stuff will come up.

Strong emotions. Resistance. Pain. Tears. You name it.

One conversation with my yoga teacher, and I fall to pieces.

This is part and parcel of the process. And yeah, it throws me for a loop every time.

It’s the whole “things get worse before they get better” thing. It’s like tidying up your closet: you have to get all the stuff out, so now your room is really in a mess.

*sigh*

Acknowledging your wants is challenging and scary because, guess what! You look at your life, you look at what you want, and it HURTS like Hell that you’re not there. It hurts to think that you may never be there.

And yes, this is pain that comes from a perception of reality, but it is real and it still hurts.

 

I said I was going to do this, and I am going to do this. Challenging as it may be.

My Write up of Week Work: working with my wants.

On Tuesday

Adventure

I heard and HSP woman describing the way she connects to her husband (non-hsp) as this big adventure that he wouldn’t go on his own. I’m going “THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO A T!!!”.
Seriously, this is so much what I want that I literally cannot believe it. And I’ve heard this woman say this before! But this time, I’m bringing it back to my want, so I’m noticing it.

Cycling to the supermarket, I noticed how much I want “adventure” and how it wasn’t a part of my reality right at that moment. I panicked. Then I thought… how can I make this more “adventure like”?
I cycled for a while looking up, so that I saw the tops of trees going past. It’s always a rather magical experience.

Glitter

Then, at the supermarket, I bought “Queen olives”, which I’ve always associated with “luxury”. Turns out, they cost just as much as the normal kind! So I got them just for sheer fabulousness.
(Note: this is an example of using symbolic things to effect an internal change. My change if “to be comfortable around having abundance”, so bringing symbolic things into my life that remind me of “abundance” is going to help me… become comfortable around having abundance. If that makes sense)

On Wednesday

Adventure

I ended an unpleasant experience and I wished for much better ones. Like this:

“Closing the door on an ill fated adventure.

And that’s how this adventure ends… not with a bang, but with a whisper. Or a telephone call.

Here’s to bigger, brighter, beautiful adventures, full of joy and wonder. Adventures so beautiful that they break my ideas of what is possible on this planet and in this life. Adventures of my own choosing…

Where I grow and expand my perception of the Divine, whatever that may be. Adventures that leave me crying tears of awe.”

Oh, and I learned the meaning of the word “wanderlust“, which describes perfectly how I feel.

And I read many people’s dreams… And mused on how so many of us dream of the same thing, and I acknowledged all this “anxiety” about how it may not happen for most of us.

Glitter

I bought pot pourri for it’s “glittering” qualities. Then I placed it on my yoga mat while I did yoga. Guess what. It has patchouli, which is “is thought to be a bringer of prosperity and abundance“.
Awesome.

Thursday

Mostly noticed all the little ways in which neither adventure nor glitter are part of my life right now.

By then all this “processing” was beginning to take its toll on me.

Then on Friday, I crashed. Which is why I couldn’t write this.

And Saturday was spent working with the crash.

That brings us to today. Hi.

Usefulness you can take from all this:

• Working with your stuff is challenging. It will take everything you’ve got, and then it will ask for that bit more.
  This is exactly what is needed to grow, annoying as it may be.

• You don’t have to push yourself into “all the pain”, but know that it will be challenging. It has to be, for it to work. Little and often is the way to go.

• Don’t judge yourself for ending up “crashed”. Or for being depressed. Or for being unable to function. You never know what is going on under the surface. You may think “I haven’t done ANYTHING challenging” or “I have no reason to feel this way”, but something quite different could be taking place in your subconscious.

• Respect your pain. Make space for it. Allow it to be there. Treat it with kindness.

• The more you work with your stuff, the more resilient you get. In human words, that means “you bounce back faster from the misery hole of depression”. And that is amazing.

• Symbolic things help. Sometimes they are all you have, so you have to start there. And, as I always say…

• Start where you are. You can’t start anywhere else. And you have to start the process for it to work.

• Trust goes a long way. Practicing trusting that things will work out, or at the very least, that you will have the capacity to work with whatever comes your way.

I hope some of this made sense.
And remember:

“You are not a bad person for wanting good things for yourself”