Hey everybody. It’s Amber Desmond, your emotional awareness coach with emotional medicine coaching. So it’s been, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here and I’ve been really wanting to give back into podcasting more regularly. So my apologies for lagging behind today. I wanted to talk about something that I like to call being in your story and what do I mean when I say you’re in a story right now. So could example being in a story is, um, I don’t have enough money or good men are too hard to find or um, there are no good jobs or I never, I never do anything right or nothing ever works out for me or you know, a endless, different, endless, endless, different examples of what being in a story could mean. And ultimately, when I say you’re in a story, I never ever mean that your story is untrue, that you’re making it up, that it’s not valid, that it’s not something you are definitely experiencing.

It just means that we create our realities. We are storytellers by nature and we don’t recognize most of us that the power of the story we tell ourselves and other people repeatedly. I mean think about what is the story you tell the most. What do you find yourself saying most often? I know for me my story is definitely breaking the pattern of saying I don’t have enough money. And um, I don’t know how for sure is, is a big story. And also even my, my story of chronic pain, just like, Oh, I’m in pain, I’m in pain, I’m in pain. And sort of repeating that mantra over and over again and not recognizing the power that I have over my own life, including my own body, my own health, my own wellbeing. Uh, the, you know, opportunities to attract more abundance and prosperity into my life.

More wisdom and faith in myself to trust that I do know how and so on. And, and I hear this from clients. We just, some people are incredibly, incredibly attached to their story and that’s okay. There’s no shame or harm, no foul, no anything and being attached to your story. But when one is ready, ready to begin to unravel that stories hold on them to start saying, you know, I’m really ready to start telling a different story. And that can mean, you know, really practicing. It’s, it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight is something you’re gonna sort of fall back into. Cause think about it if you’ve told one particular story for 20 years. So you think just by saying something else for a couple of days that like automatically that’s just going to shift your entire life. A no, no. Sorry, I wish you, I wish, I wish it worked that way.

That would be really amazing and it would make things so much easier. But it means that we start practicing not only saying different things, not just externally saying them out loud, but internally shifting our dialogue, paying attention to what our mind is doing, where our thoughts going, what are our sort of immediate reactions and responses in our minds to certain situations that could be keeping our story alive within ourselves. And then, you know, what are we posting about? What are we talking to our friends about? What are we saying over and over again to our partner, to our children, to the people in our lives. So then that, you know, words have power and creation and think about the intention. And so if you pass on your story to others, then they can hold that version of you in their mind. And so the power of creating that story is then generated from all different people in your life and now would be internet.

You’ve got people all over the world who could think these things have you. So it’s really amazingly powerful. I feel like can be terrifying. It can be overwhelming. It could really be upsetting to people. Like, you know, we don’t want to be responsible. We don’t want to be responsible for our own lives. And let me again say there is no blame. It’s not like, Oh well you know, if you had trauma in your life, if you were abused, if you were hurt by someone that you know, Oh, you’re just telling a story about that. No, that is something that did happen. The story is when we create an identity around the trauma, when we become the trauma, when we perpetuate more and more reasons to stay connected to that past experience, and this is not something you do consciously and that you want to do or that you’re like, why on earth would I want to stay connected to the trauma?

And it’s not as easy as just telling a different story and of course not, but it is a part, a part of the healing journey is beginning to tell a different story about yourself. Now you can recognize and know what happened in the past and you can work with that, but you don’t have to stay in that version of the past. That part of you that was traumatized is staying active and alive through the re-traumatization of repetition and staying connected. Sometimes I feel personally that talk therapy is amazing. Absolutely, absolutely amazing and I am big in talk therapy but also sometimes going and living, reliving the past over and over again and just reiterating over and over again. What’s happened to us is great and it’s great to tell our story, to give it a voice and to speak those words out loud and to be heard and to be held and to be supported, and that’s absolutely powerful.

I mean, that’s where telling that story is important, but then when do we stop telling that story? When do we then feel like, okay, I’ve now spoken this story to its fullest capacity and now I’m ready to start moving forward, to start changing, to start telling a different story about my life. I’m ready to move on with who I am. I’m ready to tell a more empowered story about who I’m going to be for the rest of my life. If I continue to believe the stories I tell myself or that I have told myself about who I am and what’s possible for me, nothing that I’ve accomplished would have ever happened and it really requires me believing in things I can’t quite see yet. And taking those leaps of faith and really kind of stepping out into the dark and believing that I do have creative power and that I am a powerful creator in my life and that I can be in charge.

I can take the power back from these limiting stories. And also the reverse is true. Like if there’s a story you tell that’s really powerful for you, tell more of that story, give it even more energy and power. And it’s not just about, Oh, so I’m saying words. I think I was getting to that earlier. I’m not just saying words, but also feeling a feeling associated with those words, the feelings that come up when we talk about something unfortunate, something uncomfortable, something that hurts. Like we can literally start to feel, I’ve watched people’s body posture shift and change and they sort of slump a little bit more, or their voices kind of get different, or their facial expression changes. So you’re literally watching their story transform their physical body. And so think about that power right there. It’s like you’re literally becoming that story in front of my own, in front of my eyes as someone telling me that story, their story.

And that’s just been to really think about, think about the power that repeating something over and over can have on our lives and practicing shifting day by day by day. Like what is the new story? You could write it down, you know, creating a new dialogue. Sometimes just keeping a journal or recording things that you say. Like having more of like stream of consciousness thoughts and record yourself and see what words you use the most. What are you gravitating more towards? Are you complaining a lot? What do you mostly complaining about? What keeps coming up? Like what is the number one thing that you feel sort of jumps out at you when you start tracking these he’s thought experiences and these uh, you know, conversations you’re having is start paying attention. Like what am I saying? What am I sharing the most? What am I telling people over and over again about myself?

And is that, how can I, I struggle with this? Like, how can I have a great balance between feeling like I’m sharing my truth that’s in the moment without sort of generating more of that same truth in the future? Like how do I say? Like, this is how I’m feeling right now and not get locked into making that my set point. And it’s something that I feel sometimes I personally feel like I’m sharing a little bit about what’s going on with me and maybe something that’s troubling me, but I’m also adding in a sort of, we’ll say the kind of negative thing. And then I also add like, but these are the things I’m doing to change, to grow, to get better, to heal, to evolve, and I want to give more energy to those things. That sort of the story, the thing that I’m wanting to overcome, I make it the smaller aspects where I’m still feeling like I’m able to share my truth and I’m just like walking around, spouting rainbows out my ass.

You know, like yo, life is sunshine and rainbows. Like, we can’t, you know, that would feel really oppressive and oppressive is just to only speak positive, happy, sunshiny things. And that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying we can’t share our authentic truth, but also recognize that it’s okay to share, but also pay attention to how attached you are to stay here in that story. You know, it’s like how are you just sharing a passing experience? Or is that something that you’re finding yourself saying over and over and over and over and over again in your life? And is it serving you? How is it serving you? Is that story serving you? Is it helping? How is it helping? And if so, that’s great. And if not, like how can I shift this? How can I create a story that is more uplifting or more in alignment with the version of myself that I want to become? Not the version of myself that I have been. And so these are all concepts based in, you know, law of attraction and spirituality and even psychology and recognizing the creative power of words, thoughts and feelings, and the power of storytelling and how we can indeed create our own reality. Thank you everyone. Have a great week.

The post How The Stories We Tell Affect Our Lives [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hey everybody, it’s Amber Desmond with Emotional Medicine Coaching. I’m your Emotional Awareness Coach. And today is July 24th I believe, summertime and I’ve had a very strange day. I had a very busy day scheduled and then my day just sort of fell apart as far as scheduling and everybody just sort of canceled or rescheduled. So it ended up being a very chill day and I was sitting around my house getting some things done. I did have work for a little bit today. My other job as a massage therapist, I went and did a massage this morning. And during the massage high was having a lot of different thoughts and feelings and ideas as tends to happen when I’m doing a massage and a, it’s a regular client. So we’ve a very good flow and rhythm and easy and I know her body really well and so it just kind of opens my mind up and allows it to think, feel, expand to some of my most creative and inspirational ideas come when I’m giving a massage.

So, ah, yeah.  So I came home after the massage after running some errands and I was sort of questioning what to do with myself, really unexpected free time. And it’s like, Oh, I’ve got all of this stuff I could be doing. Of course there’s like endless things that can always need to be done, you know? And so I’m doing some laundry and Yada, Yada, Yada. And I’m thinking about my relationship with myself. I’ve been a very weird place, a very, very, very weird place this past couple of years really. But in particular, I’d say this last year has been a very interesting time of growth and expansion and change and personal development and very compressed. I’ve been feeling very much like a lot of what has been deeply unfelt in my life. Things that are sort of as core deep wounds and beliefs have been really present and making themselves a very known in my life this past year.

So it’s been a very intense sort of healing crisis in many ways. As I faced these parts of, and while I was doing this massage, one of the things that came up for me was realizing, and this is something I’ve have processed and thought about over the years, but it just like anything I feel, I learn it in layers. Things come in layers of understanding layers of embodying layers of comprehension, layers of really letting those things in those  understanding sink in really deep. So it’s like each time I come across these beliefs or thoughts, they kind of hit me and a newer, deeper capacity. So I was really recognizing cause I struggle pretty consistently with depression, specifically around my menstrual cycle. It really gets super magnified a week or two before. And then also during, so like three weeks out of my month, I can have a lot of, a lot of feelings that are sometimes really euphoric and sometimes deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable. And I really have battled with the depression aspect of myself and feeling like I’m a resist and fight and, and really fight myself and feel like I’m fighting, labeling myself as like, there’s something wrong with me. What’s wrong with me or seeking to fix myself and that there’s something broken that needs

He fixed. And I don’t really believe I, yes, I believe that there is some stuff going on. But I don’t feel that I am a broken person because I have uncomfortable feelings. I have so many different ideas and thoughts about what depression is and where it comes from. And I feel on a personal level that there are several different manifestations of depression and then it can show up in different ways for different people and maybe because of different reasons. And so I feel like that’s also why depression can be really hard to nail down as far as like a quote on quote cure because I feel it’s multilayered. Depression is really multilayered. I feel ultimately depression is suppressed emotion from past, from probably something that happened in the past that we suppressed and that we are actively, even if subconsciously still working on suppressing that.

And I don’t particularly resonate nor believe that depression is caused from some sort of specific vitamin deficiency or any kind of food. Anything related. I do think that if you’re depressed and you’re eating a bunch of crap, like a really bunch of processed junk and sugar is not going to in any way help you, it’s not going to make you feel better. It will, I think exacerbate, but I don’t think it is necessarily the cause. And so when people are like strictly approach depression from a dietary aspect, it really pisses me off because I’m just like, you know, I absolutely believe food is medicine, but I also don’t think that the cure for depression because that’s again thinking that it’s strictly some sort of chemical or you know, biological, something to do with the, the physiology of the person, that it’s specifically something related to body chemistry, body balance and so on.

It’d be your brain chemistry or your gut or anything to do with just the physical physiology of the person, but that it’s also that you know, that it is saying that the physiology of you is affecting the emotional cause. But I particularly believe that it’s the inverse. I believe that it’s the emotion, the emotional element of depression that could be causing the physical disruption such as, I think the emotion comes before the chemical imbalance. I think the emotional trauma, stress, repression, so on can then cause an imbalance within the brain and also like problems with your gut and so on and so forth. It has my personal philosophy. It doesn’t resonate with you, then leave it. You know what I mean? That’s something I also feel like just a little tiny rant in this day and age. Whenever I say here, these are my conclusions is stuff that I’ve come to.

This is, these are my beliefs, my thoughts, my feelings, my understandings, and my personal philosophy and I’m sharing them. And if they resonate with you and that feels like truth for you and it helps you fucking right on, and if it doesn’t, then leave it, let it go. Put it aside. Say That doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t need that. That’s not a piece of information that I need to take into myself and make my truth. And then that’s that. We don’t have to have some giant argument about, you know, this is the right truth and you know, nobody has to be right here. This is all just, you know, everybody’s just on their own journey of belief, you know, and all the scientific studies and research. But you know what, there is no one specific scientific study or research, you know, it’s like if they could all agree than sure.

But it’s still a debate even if you bring science into it. So let’s just walk, forget that Shit and just say take it or leave it. The end. So as I digressed back to my original thought was just realizing that over the years, the conclusion I keep coming to is recognizing how much we fight against ourselves. I fight against myself, my battle with my emotions. And so today I was actively, consciously acknowledging to myself whatever the self is that is observing one’s own thoughts, the observer self, the consciousness self, whatever it is. Like when you say, I feel blank, who is the eye that is observing that you feel blank. So I feel depressed. So who is the eye that can be removed enough from the depressed self to say I feel. Anyway, so that’s a whole other thing as well. Just thinking about all the different aspects of the human mind and the observer and who is the eye that is experiencing these particular thoughts and feelings and recognizing that I am not my own enemy. I am my own enemy. When I make myself my own enemy, my body is not my enemy and nor is my mind. See over the years I have mantra that my body isn’t my enemy because of dealing with my own chronic pain issues, which I think also stem from depression stuff. And so today, thinking about my mind is not my enemy as well as my body is not my enemy. I don’t have to be my own enemy at all. Choosing to not create t

A villain out of any of my thoughts or feelings, be it physical or emotional and that I don’t have to become victim to any of them, that I don’t have to fight against any of them. And I sat with, and this is something I love about the mindfulness practice and something I did when I was experiencing severe anxiety in the past is diving into the fear, into the anxiety, into the pain, into the depression. And literally instead of trying to avoid it or feel better, even trying to find things to feel good about, but that I would actually sit with the discomfort and see where that would take me because, you know, sometimes it was too much and I would just try to do something to feel better. And sometimes that’s the route one goes. But other times avoiding the pain became in and of itself an exhaustive job.

So I chose to then just say, I’m going to feel depressed and let that be okay and just be depressed and not try to be anything but that particular feeling in that moment and just sit with that sensation and be in that. And usually I, the second I would do that, then the depression naturally starts shifting and turning into something else. And I tend to have some of my most profound discoveries when I, instead of trying to run away from my feelings, but I then choose to acknowledge them. So it’s like thinking about your feelings as if they’re small children begging for your attention. So sometimes say if I’m in a depressive episode, I can think of it as like, there’s some part of me that is kind of a throwing little tantrum. It’s like…oh, notice I need your attention right now.

And the more I am like shy, quiet, sit down, shut up. No, I don’t have time for you. And then it just, the more pissed off it gets. So like a child, sometimes you just need to turn face the child was having the tantrum and say, kindly lovingly get down, down on your knees, get down to its level. Look into his eyes, sweetie, what’s going on?

I hear you over here. I hear you freaking out. Tell me, tell me what I can do for you. Tell me about it. What’s, you know, I’m here. I want to listen. Let me know how you feel.

And it’s amazing. These, these emotions inside of us are all these different unmet needs and literally like all these little children that live inside of us expressing all of these needs that need to be met and all these feelings and all these emotions and all these things throughout our entire lifetime that we can have been ignoring and, and

Avoiding and suppressing and even shaming, judging, criticizing, berating. And so they desperately want our attention and they act out. It really, really act out and say why, you know, sometimes you know, even negative attention is better than no attention at all. Right? So it’s like part of my practice with emotional awareness coaching is to really help people get in touch with what parts of them they’ve been ignoring and avoiding and berating and belittling and criticizing and these parts that are screaming out for our attention that need our love and acknowledgement. They need us to see them and to sit with them and to listen to their stories and to be present so that they can heal so that those needs, those deep, deep, unmet needs can finally feel like somebody has acknowledged them. That’s what we all want the most is to feel in this world. Loved. Yeah.

And that can translate to you paid attention to seen, responded to with kindness and attention and presence. I mean, how good does it feel when someone is really with you and you just feel them, they’re with you. They’re listening intently, they’re hearing you there being really present and they’re honoring you with love and kindness and attention. That’s, that’s priceless. And it’s something we don’t often think about giving to ourselves. Like we so often seek that outside of ourselves and tend to feel a lot of disappointment and upset and get really triggered and have a lot of problems.

So in our relationships, because a lot of people are also carrying around these burdened, neglected children inside of them. And so we have a whole room full of neglected, angry you know, children who are all striving to be loved and paid attention to, but none of us know how to give it to the other. So just chew on that for a little while and think about that.

But so sitting with, sitting with the depression and sitting with those uncomfortable feelings and we, I, you know, I question why do I avoid feeling my feelings? Why do any of us avoid feeling our feelings? Why do we numb out, tune out, pay attention to other things? Because I mean, the answer I’ve concluded from my own personal experience is fear. Some sort of deep fear that if

For me personally, if I let these feelings in, that I will be overly consumed, that I’ll be flooded and that I won’t be able to find my way back. Like the ultimate fears. Like I will be lost within this particular emotion. And that’s never the case. You know, it really isn’t. The more I fight against that feeling, actually the generally the more flooded I am by that feeling versus if I sit and allow the feeling to arise. And what do I even mean by that? Do you even know what I mean when I say I sit with the feelings? So that means when I’m feeling the feeling of depression say, which just feels kind of like for me, a restlessness and a sort of empty confusion and feeling futile and just like, what is the point of all of this shit we call life? Sometimes there’s just like, so it’s a very hard, it’s hard feeling to really describe, but I feel like, you know, so whatever depression is for you, sometimes it’s maybe doom and you know, hopelessness.

And so of course to like survival instinct is to avoid that because nobody wants to feel those kinds of feelings cause it’s painful, right? It’s painful, it’s uncomfortable. And so when I say sit with it, I then turn to that feeling towards turn towards that feeling within myself and I say, come on in and I let the feeling wash over me and I feel the feelings of depression feel those feelings of being futile and empty and restless and sort of I don’t know, like an empty confusion almost, and frustration in a depletion. And I let myself feel that until the feeling doesn’t need to be felt anymore and trust me, it will be like, okay, I’m good. Like I’ve felt that now, like I’m moving on. Feelings don’t actually last forever. It’s maybe sometimes about five minutes, maybe 15 if it’s something like really super intense. But if you’ve ever noticed, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, like your major crying episode, like I’ve had major crying episodes in my life and I’ve never cried for like five hours. You know, you have a really intense, maybe

Like maybe have cried really intensely for like 30 solid minutes. It’s not probably even that long. Honestly, it probably cried if I really timed it. Probably more like it feels like 30 minutes, but I’ve probably actually only cried really hard for like five minutes and then maybe I like wimpery cry for 30 minutes and then maybe I’m kind of numb or depressed or depleted. But that emotional overwhelming intensity has eased up and usually about an hour or two later I’m feeling considerably better after having like a big cry. So it’d be that’s the whole process is that recognizing if you just allow yourself that big cry, even if it’s not actually crying, if it’s just allowing yourself to be in that feeling, it will dissipate and it may come back 20 minutes later to do it again and then so on and so forth. It’s this is not like, and then you feel it and then you’ll never have to feel it again.

But the more I feel that we step into our feelings and allow them the space to exist, Debbie processed and witnessed and experienced, then the more we can actually move through them. What keeps us stuck in cycles and habits and things that we just keep repeating over and over again is because we’re, even though we’re thinking we’re trying to break these habits, usually we’re trying to avoid what we’re doing, avoid how we’re feeling when we’re doing it, and make some sort of changes, you know, physically some sort of behavioral changes without actually acknowledging the emotional feelings behind the habitual pattern. So emotional awareness is, as far as I’m concerned, on my journey. It is one of the end all be all ultimate tools to true lasting life changes. I feel if we’re not willing to become aware and to have a relationship with ourself in a really deep and thorough way, then we’re gonna probably wander through our lives pretty confused about why things are happening and why our life is the way it is if we’re not having a honest dialogue with ourselves. So that’s my thoughts, my thoughts for today. Hope you enjoy it and tune in next time. Thanks everybody. Bye

The post Depression & Presence [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hi everyone. It’s Amber Desmond, Emotional Awareness coach with Emotional Medicine Coaching. It’s been a little bit since I’ve done a podcast, but I wanted to come and uh, started up again as I just kinda got out of sync with it today. I was, I would like to have kind of a general podcast about a couple of different things that have been coming up for me and for clients and the world and just things that I’m noticing and paying attention to and kind of some patterns that I’m seeing over and over again. And I have to start with relationships. I have known many, many long term, partners ownerships that have ended this year, which is really interesting. I think there’s a very heightened state of stress and pressure and just the collective consciousness of the world right now is really pretty, pretty heavy and there’s a lot, a lot coming to the surface, a lot of things that have been ruining and churning and being able to kind of hide out in these little dark nooks and crannies.

These are just sort of flooding to the surface. I think with all of our media access now and just so many people having voices and so many people having platforms and there being so few places to hide at this point, I feel like just tons and tons of information that’s, it’s not like it’s new. These aren’t new problems that are coming up. It’s just seems kind of like they’re all happening at once because just every like it’s like the flood gates opened and now all of this information is coming up in all these different movements and all these different people fighting for their rights and all of these different energies coming up, like commanding and demanding and stating their presence and they, you know, really I belong here and I deserve this and this needs to be addressed and so on. And I feel like that’s not just happening on a mass scale.

It’s, you know, cause the masses, what are the masses made of individuals. So on an individual smaller scale, you know, it’s like the micro and the macro. I feel like that same thing is happening within more interpersonal, you know, private relationships and I feel that a lot of what’s going in our world collectively is just, you know, healing. And initially just like if anyone’s ever been to therapy, I’m having allergies, so I apologize for the sniffling. If anyone has ever done therapy for any kind of long period of time, they know that the initial phase, once you start to actually chip away and break down and open past those barriers and those guards and those blocks, even the way you know the ones you put up against your own self, not even just to keep others out, but the blocks we create within ourselves to keep parts of us hidden from us.

And I feel that the world is in a collective state of therapy and it’s kind of heightened everybody. I feel like everybody is just triggered. It’s like everybody stuff is out, out in the open. We’re all just like all these raw nerves walking around and it’s like all these mechanisms that we’ve had to kind of suppress this or keep it quiet or only talk about it with certain people. It’s kind of deteriorating. So a new paradigm is literally being born in our lifetime. And I don’t know if I’ll see, I mean, you know, will it ever end necessarily quotes in? No, I feel like it’s going to be, you know, life is ever evolving, but I feel just like the 60s and seventies you know, the sexual revolution and women’s empowerment and burning brides and integration with races and the war and everything was a major time of awakening and shifting and fighting against old paradigms and ways of being. And I feel like we are having a revolution right now, and it’s not just a world revolution. It’s a human collective, individual revolution. So many people that I know are waking up and an awakening, just like I was saying in therapy, we, once we get past those barriers and real therapy starts to happen, it tends to get a lot worse before it gets better.

And with a spiritual awakening regardless of what your spiritual beliefs are. I’m just going to use that term because it’s what I use personally. There’s a spiritual awakening, becoming awake, awakening within yourself, awakening to something bigger within yourself, within the universe, within other people within the collective, within the biggest of all. And seeing that there’s more that is profound and beautiful and it’s also scary as fuck and can be incredibly painful and very overwhelming and very confusing. And there’s not a lot of like, oh, are you having an awakening crisis call this hotline, you know, and it can be really hard to pin down and to explain and to verbalize and to even express with words when these kinds of feelings are coming to the surface. It could be something completely unfamiliar to you. It could be something you’ve been kind of just barely touching on.

It could be something you’ve been swimming around in for a really long time. It doesn’t really matter no matter what. It can feel pretty jarring and it can be a bit of a slap in the face. And I feel like a lot of that is coming up in personal relationships. People who are already in partnerships. I have found that you’re not only have your own stuff to contend with and all the unhealed parts of you and all of these things coming to the surface, flooding you, memories, feelings, questions, ideas, you know, just like holy crap, like maybe life is something completely different than I thought it was. And then here you have a partner and they’re going through some things similar. And even though it can be an incredible bonding experience for people, that can also be really hard for people to hold space for each other in that process because it’s so big and it can feel really challenging for you to process that within yourself as well as holding space for your partner to have that experience as well.

And on a personal level, I don’t really love giving specific. I will help people with their relationships and coaching. I absolutely 100% help people, but I don’t give advice in that like there’s some right way to have a relationship ship because I think that there are infinite ways for people to connect and relate and engage in what feels right and good for them. But I will say that there are some universal things that I have noticed, not just within my own relationships but and everyone else’s that I see. And that I think that there is also a collective awakening of what relationships really are right now. Like what does it actually mean to be in relationship? And I think that’s changing with the shift in sexual preference, our gender preferences, the fluidity, but all these new birth birthing things that are very unfamiliar to us.

And so it’s like literally learning a whole new approach to men, woman connection, even beyond just gay and lesbian and just, just all of this incredible new energy coming in that is just radically changing everything. And that’s amazing. And it can be really scary and really threatening to people who are not ready, who are not interested, who have decided that certain things have to be certain ways. And you know, I feel like we are beyond a sexual revolution. We are just, we’re literally evolving as a species. We are changing what we’re told. We can even be as far as like born a man born a woman and you have a right to change that. And that’s amazing. Like what an incredible just wow experience to be living through right now. To be witness to the birth of this is just incredible to me. But within that I’m circling back around and going off on tangents.

I have found universally, regardless of cross genders cross, you know, whoever’s connecting, doesn’t matter man, woman fluid, identify, you know, whatever, gay, lesbian, any kind of ethniticity what comes up in relationships is you meet yourself and I think that’s something that’s not widely discussed in relationship information. I feel what really needs to be recognized is that you will meet parts of yourself. It’s like having a mirror because it’s really hard to reflect on things about you if you don’t have something reflecting those things back to you, if that makes any sense. So it’s like it’s harder to see something if it’s inside your eye versus if you could take it outside your eye and look at it with your eye. So I feel like that might be a little more clear. So in my own personal relationship, I’ve been in a long term domestic partnership.

We’ll have been together seven years this coming November and currently it is June. And uh, we’ve been living together for about five years and I definitely feel it’s been the best relationship I’ve ever had in my life. But it’s also been one of the most intense and challenging in a different way than my other relationships were challenging. Some other relationships were really toxic and upsetting and more dramatic and nowhere near as long lasting. And with this, I feel like in real intimacy and long-term partnership, especially when you live together and you are just really enmeshed in each other’s existence and you’re sleeping in the same bed every night and that kind of thing in that sort of energy entanglement, it’s takes a lot to hold your own space, hold space for your own energy as well as staying open to letting that other person in without either you flooding them or them flooding you.

And I think that is a major part of, you know, you could call them, I think they’re normally called boundaries. I feel like yes, boundaries are great and that’s a whole other topic. I mean, but basically it’s the same thing. I’m just using a little bit more like fluid Wu type verbiage to explain it, but I, I feel that when someone is reflecting things about you that are hard to see, it’s really hard to stay present with that, to stay open to it Tuesday. Okay. I’m willing to see that. I’m willing to acknowledge that within myself. I’m willing to work on that to say like, is this something that I feel I need to have growth around? Is this something I want to change? Is this something that I feel pretty firm on? Like this is just kind of who I am and I’m not interested in changing this and so maybe they need to work on their reflection of that.

To me with long with longterm relationships and just sharing this planet with other people and I feel like, okay, what’s going on with everything coming up collectively as we are seeing a lot of mirrors of our own shadow selves and all the darkness and all the pain and all the things in this world that exists within each and every one of us, it’s just a matter of expression. It’s a matter of what we choose to do with those energies within ourselves because we cannot see something that we are not. If we can witness it, if it’s like a, there’s a saying, if you spot it, you got it and so if we can see it, it exists within us. That doesn’t mean mean we are that in that we are acting that out in the same manner, but it lives within us in some regard, in some aspect, in some way, way that thing that we don’t like and someone else is something that exists within us.

And that is where shit gets really hard in the world right now and an individual relationships because we want to point our finger out at the thing and say, you, you are the problem. You are the thing and I don’t want you to be this way anymore. And in order for the world to be better, you have to change. And I agree that there’s a lot of shit that’s going on right now that does need to change and we do need to grow. But also recognizing that pointing our fingers outward is not really going to be the answer. What the answer is in my humble, humble opinion is pointing the finger within, not in an accusatory sentence like it’s me, it’s my fault. No, turn the hat, gaze inward. I see the suffering. I see this pain. I see this distortion in the world. How was that in me and how can I shift that in me so I can better shifted in the world outside of me?

Because if you want to get really metaphysical, there is no inside and outside where all in this, this big meshy Jello, jelly, energetic puddle together. It’s ultimately the world is an ocean and we are all drops in the ocean. So we’re individual but we’re all whole at the same time. You can’t separate the drops. They, they are all connected. We are, you can’t take the wave out of the ocean. We are the wave and we are the ocean and we are the drops and everything that we see and accuse and blame in our world are things that the power that we have is individual. It is how can we shift ourselves enough in a way to where we can have an impact for greater good in the external world. I mean, Gandhi summed it up in the most simplest terms be the change you want to see in the world.

So an individual relationships when your partner shows up and is showing you something really painful, something really hard to see about yourself or about them and it’s, it’s making you want to run or question yourself or your relationship or all of the above. I mean, we don’t all have this luxury and not everybody has the emotional awareness or emotional intelligence or the tools to navigate when this level of intensity happens. And I think it’s why a lot of people that’s, you know, the seven year itch kind of thing and why a lot of people break up and buy a lot of things in when we start to see those shadow aspects of our partner and ourselves because they’re uncomfortable and we don’t want to see it. And we’re like, oh, well obviously this isn’t working with you because these things. So I should probably break up with you and find somebody else.

And then you get into the initial fun phase where all the fun, happy, amazing dopamine chemicals and oxytocin are being released in, you’re having sex all the time, which is releasing more of those feel good chemicals and you think, oh, see how much happier I am with this person and things eventually and inevitably will get real. And so it’s a matter of, and I’m not saying stay in toxic relationships. I mean you know, when something’s really, truly, truly, truly wrong. I mean you’ve got to, this is about intuiting what is workable, what is your stuff, what is their stuff, what is manageable? And then also what is a toxic, destructive, poisonous relationship. If there’s any kind of abuse, sexual, mental, emotional, physical, whatever it is, leave. Definitely. I’m not, I’m not talking about those extremes at this time. I’m talking about generally decent relationships that eventually your stuff starts to come up and get in the way.

So it’s really, right now I think we’re all being tested and learning how to confront ourselves, confront ourselves through all that we’re seeing in the world. This is us looking at ourselves. The world is basically just a big giant mirror reflecting back to all of us. This is the underbelly. There’s, it’s also reflecting a lot of really beautiful things to us and a lot of amazing change. We tend to focus on the negative and like what’s going wrong and what’s horrible because that’s a lot of what the news is as well. It doesn’t like to talk about all the fabulous things happening. It’s like, yeah, yeah, fabulous shit. Look at all this darkness. Wow. So to remember that there is both util amazing light and change that is powerful and profound and fantastic that’s going on right now collectively and individually as well as some really heavy, dark fucking shit that we’re having to face.

And I see this as a representation of our evolution as human beings, that the earth is literally showing us these are the things that need your attention and your healing. These are the things that are going really well and you’re doing a really great job. Keep that shit up. Let’s work on this stuff. Let’s heal. Let’s reconnect with ourselves. Let’s learn how to actually be a community, how to communicate. Again, back to the individual relationship. Relationships will not work in any kind of way. That satisfying if you don’t know how to communicate. Uh, I said to a client the other day, I was like, you know, it’s about communicating. They were like, I talked to my partner every day and I’m like, no. Talking to someone is not necessarily communicating. We can talk all day long. I communicate absolutely nothing of actual real value or importance.

Communication means people learning how to hold space for their partner to hear active listening, hearing, sitting in the discomfort, sitting with whatever they’re saying. We don’t let someone sit there and attack you obviously, but knowing how to let someone share their feelings and their stuff, even when it’s painful for you, even when it’s hard, even when it’s something you don’t want to hear about yourself or you don’t like it. Learning how to actively hold space for them to share that because that is so vital. We need in our world and in our individual relationships, the ability to speak our truth, even if it hurts other people, even if it’s something that other people don’t want to hear and they don’t want to know it. No. And they want to push against it. It’s, it’s, you know, we can’t not say things to make everybody else happy and to make everybody else comfortable.

And I feel like we’re really in an interesting place with that on a collective scales. There’s a lot of movements for new language and rights over being able to speak your truth. But then those same people I see just really fighting for their truth, shaming other people for not using the language that they have deemed acceptable. And I mean, and I’m not talking about people intentionally saying hurtful things and they’re being upset. I’m saying just people maybe using things in a way that this other group doesn’t think is the right way to use these terms. And that’s not freedom of speech. It’s not acceptance. It’s not. It’s like we have the right to say whatever we want it to speak and to be heard and to be seen, but you don’t have the right to say anything about it. And that’s not really how things work in relationship with other people in this world.

We all have a right, even if it pisses you off, even if it sucks, even if it’s against everything you personally believe in, we’re not going to all agree. It’s never in my personal opinion, going to be a Utopian society where we’re all like, we agree with everything each other’s Fez, like no. A part of life is contrast. That’s how we grow. We learned from the conflict, we learned from challenge. Sometimes the universe chickens you to awaken you and sometimes to wake up you have to have a wake up call and that means sometimes hearing something you don’t want to hear and that can be in our media and that could be in your home with your partner, with your family, with your friends, with that, whoever. I mean, and part of this process is I really feel like we’re in state of like learn how to communicate, learn how to listen, listening.

I can’t fucking emphasize listening more to anyone listening to this. Listen, listen to people. Don’t just hear them listen, still breathe while they’re talking. Don’t sit there thinking about what they’re even saying and if you have feelings that are coming up, you’re like, oh, they don’t want to know. As they’re saying, it’s just breathe it. You don’t have to suppress. You don’t have to not say what you feel. Let them talk, let them talk. I partner and I had to have a very big conversation the other day and I think we have great communication, but apparently I was a little wrong about, I think we do have great communication in many ways, but it wasn’t quite as good as I thought it was and you never know what someone’s hearing or what stories someone’s telling about things that you’re doing and you don’t know what’s really going on with people if they don’t really tell you.

And we came up against some things that I really realized that there was a lot of cross wires and things that were not being communicated, communicated and misunderstood. And it was a really hard conversation and there was a lot of stuff that came up that was really hard to hear. But ultimately, as much as it sucked and I hated that conversation and it was very painful and I wanted to just storm out and scream and cry and throw a Tantr I did my best to really hold space and hear my partner and I asked that he did the same. And you know, it’s not easy. It’s not easy, you know, there can be crying and just you have to be patient with each other and breathe and the willingness, willingness to show up, show up, not just have your body there. Torturously being, you know, talked to but being present.

This takes practice. Got To practice this with the people in your life and with yourself. If you don’t show up for your own, if you don’t practice listening to yourself, honoring how you feel, your thoughts, your needs, it’s going to be really hard for you to let someone show up for you in those ways to maybe show up for other people in that way. Sometimes we don’t know how to do that for ourselves and we only do it for other people some to, and we won’t and can’t receive. But practicing showing up in your life, in all your relationships, show up for yourself in the same way you’d show up for your partner if you would give your partner everything in the world and you give yourself everything in the world because it’s all, it’s all balance and it’s all one relationship. Our relationship with ourselves is emanating out of us until all of our relationships with other people.

If we can’t have clear connected relationship with ourself, it’s going to be really hard for us to have clear and connected relationships with people in our lives. And this is on the micro and the macro and right now I feel like our work as human beings is to learn how to be present with ourselves so we can begin to even hear other people clearly really learning how to listen, how to feel, how to intuit, how to tune in to ourselves, how to hold space for our own feelings while letting somebody else have their feelings. This is an impossible and it doesn’t have to be a monk up on a mountain practicing bear entire life. It’s a day to day practice. It doesn’t have to be huge. It doesn’t have to be all consuming. It doesn’t have to be your entire every minute of every day, but it is a lifestyle.

It is a practice of tuning in and becoming aware and the more clearly we love ourselves and hold space for ourselves, the more that that impacts the world around us. It’s not trapped inside of us. When we love ourselves, that goes out into the world. It’s not just limited stuck inside of our bodies. Our hearts literally have an energy and I’m not just talking about like woo energy. I’m talking about measurable frequency of energy that can be measured like hundreds of feet outside of the body, so it’s literally heart, energy, heart connection, heart to heart. When you have a heart to heart with somebody, when you get within someone’s heart space, you feel into each other. This is, that sounds all fruity hippie stuff, but this is healing. When we let ourselves feel someone else’s heart and we let them feel our heart even when they might be really hard to love, at least holding some space for that person, knowing that there is a human being here, there is somebody who has their own staff, who is a person who has needs and feelings and love and wounds and if we can have love and compassion for those dark, twisted, broken, scared, hungry, angry, lost, betrayed, all the parts of us that hurt and that suck and that we just wish would just go away and leave us alone.

If we can’t embrace love, honor, respect, communicate, acknowledge, look at those parts of us and learn how to integrate, how to communicate, how to connect with those parts of ourselves. We’re not going to be able to do that for the world at large. We want the world to heal, but we don’t want to do the individual work and that’s where it starts. I’m going to say it boldly. I’m going to say it like it is the absolute fucking truth because that is what I know. That is what I feel. That is what I witnessed within myself, within my life, within this world is that healing starts when we, you can begin to have compassion, understand, sanding, slow down, listen to ourselves and really start to be able to listen to other people some more clearly. We know and understand, have awareness about who and what we really are.

That is when we are able to even begin to see other people more clearly. They are not seen through these distorted, confused, hazy, you know, circus tent, crazy mirror room distortions of everything because that’s what happens. We’re just seeing wounds and fears and prejudice and it’s all this increase z distorted glass and like Mad House Mirror House, freaky horror movie stuff and it seemed like that couldn’t be me. That could it be me. There’s gotta be something wrong with them. And that is not where healing begins is in blame and shame and accusation. No what power you do have and know that it is infinite and that that power, the power of loving and understanding, and that doesn’t mean tolerating and accepting abuse or saying, oh, we’ll just love them. And so they can go on and do sex slave trafficking with children. No, of course not. You know, but I’m saying begin to practice learning how to hold space for all the dark parts in you so you can more clearly create change and hold space in this world.

When you see that darkness in the world, if you’ve embraced it in yourself, venue have true power over lasting change in this world because you are not lost and sucked into drama and fear, then you’ll have the true clarity to step into that situation and know what needs to be done, where the healing work begins. You’ll have more clear understanding in your own mind. The answers will come to you. Take this step and move in this direction. You talk to this person, you show up in this way. This is awareness. This is emotional awareness. This is mindfulness. It’s not woo woo shit. It’s what people are made of. We are emotional beings. We spend so much time working on our physical bodies and what we eat and exercise, but we rarely barely acknowledge the emotional body, the emotional realm and what impact that has on every single thing in our life.

It’s like this giant blaring, blatant missing piece of our world, of our medical institutions, of our mental health institutions, of the education institutions. This giant gap, I mean political stuff. Oh my God, I don’t even get into the political lack of like understanding that emotions are guiding every one of these people. Every one of the Donald Trump’s emotions, his wounding, his beliefs, his traumas, his bullshit is, is creating his decisions, but we don’t see that and I’m not saying so then that’s an excuse and we just then excuse him like, oh, well then that’s just whatever. It’s about understanding, okay, if I understand this, if I can hold space for that in myself, then how can I approach this with clarity, with real power, not power through force and accusation and plain, but empower meant embodying my own power, not being afraid of my own darkness so I can face it in someone else. That’s it. People. I’m good. I’ve said what I needed to say and that’s all for today. Thank you everybody. Have a great week.

The post Healing Relationships [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hi everyone. It’s your host, Amber Desmond, Emotional Awareness Coach at Emotional Medicine Coaching. Today’s episode trigger warning. It is about addiction, so when I say addiction, I just want you to take a moment and see what comes to mind. When I say addict, that person’s addicted. This is an addict. What do you think of? What is the first thing that comes to mind? Drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, porn, all things that are things that people are addicted to, but today I want to talk about the myriad of different things that we’re addicted to. You give me a person, I’ll show you someone who is addicted to something. This is in no way, shape or form about judgment or shaming. On the contrary, this is about demystifying or trying to release some of the shame and sort of knee jerk reactions that we have towards the concept of addiction because we’ve criminalized so much of addiction at this point and stigmatized it that now being an addict is something that is said in 12 step groups where people can be supported by other people who are addicts or you’re in prison, in prison. Maybe you say it in your therapy or in a support group, but it’s not something you generally walk around expressing like, Hey, I’m an addict. It’s like maybe you say you’re in recovery. And so I’d also like to think about, have you think about like what does it mean to be in recovery? What are you recovering when you’re in recovery and you’ve recovered?

Most people say they’ve recovered themselves. So there is this true essence, this part of us that can never be hurt or destroyed by things that we do, but that remains intact. But we might lose sight of it. Disconnect, so to speak, even though you can’t ever really disconnect from the essence of who you truly are. But you can, you can damp in it, you can focus other places, you can lose sight of it. You can lose yourself in other things in your life. So I’ve written a list of all the things that I have personally come to understand and see as things that we can be addicted to. So I’m just going to read off the list to start. And while I’m reading, I might, uh, talk a little bit more about some of these things because you might be like, so first drugs, slash medication, that’s the obvious.

Lots and lots and lots of drug addiction and people addicted to pain medications, things that they’re being prescribed, the abusive Adderall and Ritalin and just all the ways that we are, you know, then the illegal drugs of heroin, crystal Meth, crack cocaine, all those things. And of course, the marijuana though, I mean, people can be addicted to pot in the sense that they’re using it to numb out and to escape themselves. So there is that element of addiction to pot-smoking. I don’t think there’s necessarily a physical addiction connected to pot. Like you don’t have withdrawals necessarily. Uh, I’m sure that there are some people who will say that they have, and certain adjustments that maybe their brain chemistry had to go through if they smoked the enormous amounts of pot regularly. That’s a whole nother topic. So then we’ve got alcohol. We all know about alcoholism.

Probably nine out of 10 people listening to this know an alcoholic or have one in their lives or our one themselves. So alcoholism is rampant, at least in the United States and that’s where I am. Then there’s cigarettes. Cigarettes are a massive addiction substance that sa legal and going on in our, our country, caffeine, the other legal stimulants that we are very openly able to have as well as even openly express our addiction towards caffeine. I mean most everybody I know who drinks caffeine openly and willingly talks about their dependency. Like I can’t do anything until I have my coffee. There are funny memes about coffee and their funny memes about moms and wine and moms and coffee and all of these ways that we’re, you know, openly kind of talking about addiction but not necessarily calling it addiction. And then of course there’s food and food is a very broad topic.

There’s a lot of ways that we’re addicted to food. But right now I’m just gonna use the general category food. Then there’s sex and love addiction. And my partner asked what love addiction was cause he was like, what? So love addiction is not like you’re actually addicted to what is it that the bigger picture of love, the concept of, of love and the concept of God being love or anything like that. This is love. Addiction is more like you can’t be alone. You can’t be not in a relationship that you’re constantly seeking love and connection or whatever your version of love and connection with other people. And it’s something that might be driving your life in a very compulsive manner. So sex, we know about sex addiction and people who have to have sex or feel very drawn to having sex in ways that is harmful or maybe dangerous and makes them feel out of control but they can’t seem to stop. Then there’s money, money, lots of people money. And there’s another one I have on here is power, money and power. You know, then there’s shopping, which I all have kind of globbed together.

Money addiction is more like the acquiring of money, the collecting, the gathering, the making of money and feeling like you’re compulsively driven to make money and to have money. And I’m not talking about survival needs cause we all at this point have to have money to survive, to be able to pay for our, our homes and food and so on. But I’m talking about when money is the driving force of your existence in a way that is harming your relationships with people shopping. We all know about shopping addiction. So what does that look like? Shopping addiction can be, you know, just the same as any addiction in the sense that it’s something you’re trying to do to make yourself feel better. It’s trying to fill a void. It is something you think by getting this thing, whatever that might be, you might temporarily feel soothed from whatever stress or anxiety or sense of lack of worth and maybe this thing will then make you feel more whole or valuable and it will fill a temporary need until it doesn’t.

And then you have to get something else. And so there’s the cycle perpetuates. And usually with shopping addiction you end up spending money and getting yourself in debt and spending money you don’t have. And then that is where the real problem really starts. Then we have working addiction, which is not quite the same as money addiction. Working addiction can be an addiction to feeling. I also have in here being busy. It’s also an addiction to feeling important. Feeling like you’ll have purpose. Work. Addiction can also be a way of avoiding other parts of your life. It can be a way that you don’t have to go home or you don’t have to face yourself or you don’t have to look inward and be still and have enough time to really evaluate maybe what’s making you feel like you have to keep working and the compulsion that can come with that.

Being busy is just, it’s an epic epidemic at this point. Uh, in our cultural history I find that kids are busier than ever. Achievement. Our drive for success and what you have to achieve by a certain time in your life and what is expected of you is enormous. So people are just busier than ever and it’s also yet another numbing. It’s another mechanism of avoidance. It’s another way to not necessarily have to stop and be still and be with yourself. It’s a way that your using to cope and to numb out. In a sense, if you’re so busy that you’re just so busy being busy, you don’t really have time to think about your life or yourself or who you are, what’s really going on or what that underlying gnawing ache is inside of you. One thing with addiction, like to have a little caveat here is every addiction has its purpose.

It has a genesis, it has a place of origin. People don’t. It’s a very missed misnomer that we as as people choose through poor choices to be drug addicts or alcoholics or you know, gamblers. Excessive gamblers are to become sac sex addicts. That somehow it’s a flaw in the human design or that it’s a disease of the brain. None of this is necessarily true. I mean, you can argue there’s all different kinds of information. I’m not here to argue the reason why addiction exists. I’m here to tell you what I have come to understand through my own research and through my own personal experience. So [inaudible] so being busy next religion people can be very addicted to religion and their personal beliefs about religion. I’m very attached, very afraid of, you know, being without it, that God in and of itself becomes the drug. God becomes the thing that you cling to.

When I say you, I mean just collectively, not you individually, whoever you are listening to this us, we all, I’ve definitely known a lot of people whose religion consumes their entire existence. And again, this isn’t a good, bad, wrong just what it is. So then we’ve got drama. We all know someone who’s addicted to drama. We all know that person or we’ve at least seen that person on TV or in a movie is somebody who was life feels really empty if things aren’t super dramatic. If there’s not just some sort of drama going on, they don’t know really what to do with themselves. And so then there’s tends to be sort of a perpetuation and a creation of more drama to continue to feed that cycle. So then we’ve got hating other people slash stemming from hating yourself. We have a lot of crazy stuff going on in our world right now, especially politically.

The social political environment right now is on fire. And there are a lot of people who are very, very, very attached to hating people, hating the other, whatever the other is, whatever, whatever side of that wall you’re on, you know, we, you know, either side can be full of hate and hate is understandable. Anger is understandable. This is what I’m talking about when it becomes pathological, not just a natural emotional response that is fleeting. I’m talking about people whom feed on hate, that that drives them, that it is a driving force in their life that maybe their hate or anger are causing problems at work. It’s causing problems at home. They don’t know how to have a, you know, connection with their children or their spouse or friends or coworkers and that this hatred and or anger flareups and kind of be one or the other or both.

Usually if you’re filled with hate, you’re pretty angry person. So, um, so you can have this addiction to anger as well. And this is not just some sort of metaphorical sense. This is a biological response that when you’re feeling angry consistently, when that is your set point, when that’s your sort of instantaneous reaction to so many things, then your body actually becomes addicted to the chemicals produced in your body when you have that response of anger. So literally becoming addicted to your own state of being when it comes to hating other people or blaming other people or thinking that these other people are what’s wrong with the world. And this is also connected to sense of con addiction to your own beliefs. So then we’ve got exercise. Exercise can be incredibly healthy. It’s I think something that everyone should do in some version or another.

We all need to move our bodies. Exercise is good for you, but mot exercise can also become obsessive. It can become pathological. There’s um, I’ve actually read several very interesting books about exercise. A Lexia I think is what it’s called to where it’s usually accompanied by a disordered eating by a, um, anorexia nervosa or bulimia, sometimes self harm. But where you’re using exercise as a form of control over your body to an extremely detrimental state where you’re really harming your body. So it’s, it’s a another, it’s another thing that on this list that might require more of an intervention and something that if not stopped or, um, acknowledged or worked on that it could eventually kill you. So then we have here beauty youth and our body’s appearances in general. Specifically I’m talking about women, but I also know that this can apply to men when it comes to like weight lifting and being cut and, um, you know, bulking up or whatever.

All the different things that guys like to do to look hot and, uh, which is all, it’s all totally okay to want to take pride in your appearance and to exercise and to be fit and healthy. But I’m talking about again, extremes I’m talking about when it becomes all consuming. When we are anxious, depressed, stressed out, and really consumed by our feelings about our appearance, about our body, about our weight, that we are spending all of our time in the gym or we’re getting excessive plastic surgery or we’re really hating ourselves because of our physical appearance. And recognizing that this in and of itself can become an addiction. It’s an addiction to can be over-exercising and or to buying beauty products, continuously trying to do things to improve your physical appearance in ways that might be harmful or excessive and that are all consuming to your life and maybe isolating and something you are hiding or not letting other people know you’re doing to a certain extent and what links you’re going to.

And this is when it’s an addiction. So then also one of the bigger ones. Now that’s, it’s such a, a new times addiction, but it’s the internet, our phones, social media and TV, entertainment information being constantly bombarded with stimulus. Um, it’s also an incredible way to numb out. I, I know that all of us most likely listening to this, I mean the fine, it’s a fine line between what’s healthy relationship with your internet, with online, with social media, with your phones, with TV, with being entertained and what’s addiction and I feel that I just want to add video games in there as well. I don’t, I don’t play video games but I know that that’s a, a pretty major thing that’s going on right now is gaming and video games and people spending hours upon hours and hours video gaming and it’s causing problems in their lives and their relationships and with family and with work and with their own health and we are literally spending so much time on screens that we’re neglecting ourselves and our relationships with other human beings in real life, real lifetime, face to face, human connection.

I feel with our phones in particular, there’s others a problem going on. I know that there’s a sort of thing you can look at or program onto your phone that tells you how much time you’ve spent on your phone or like how much I think you could like give you the graph of like how much time you’re checking or looking at or spending on social media and uh, it can be jarring and I suggest doing it just to get some insight into like, what is my usage? Like what is, what do I wanted to be? Also like with any addiction, looking at why am I reaching out for this substance, the substance being your phone, it’s a hit. You’re getting a hit, some hit. It’s just like picking up a pipe. You’re just taking a head off of your phone and what are you getting?

What are you getting? What is it helping you with? What is it feeding? Cause all of this, all addictions are coping mechanisms. They are things that we’re doing in looking for comfort and to feel better. It’s not some malicious dark entity of thing that we’re, I’m looking to judge or criticize. Not at all. I have plenty of my own addictions, which I will talk about also in this podcast. This might be a little long, so just be prepared. Um, but yeah, I will sometimes want to reach for my phone and I will sit and go. Okay. And wanting to reach for my phone right now to get on Instagram cause that’s my, my place that I enjoy. That’s my social media outlet. And so I think, what am I looking to get out of this exchange? And a lot of times it’s because maybe I’m feeling lonely or I’m feeling like I want to avoid something else in my life.

Like maybe there’s something I’m really needing to do but I don’t want to think about having to do it or the fact that I’m not doing it. And so what’s a good moment for me to take and numb out and just be absorbed in something else and not think about my life. It’s my foun and then we can just dive in and getting sucked into the ins like endless portals of stuff and people and information and other people’s lives and comparison. And we could just spiral off into like 8 million different thought vortexes. And then there we are like 30 minutes has passed. What have we done? We’ve just properly avoided whatever it is or we are looking for approval for connection. Maybe you want to know how many people have liked what I post. Is that enough? Is it enough? Is it ever enough? How many people like your posts I have on here also approval as something that we can be addicted to and attention.

Having people pay attention to you, having people approve of you. Um, through social media that is a major outlet for which we can feel acknowledged, which we can see it feel seen. We can feel important. Like people care what we have to say. And that is super addictive because we as human beings need love and approval. We need to feel seen and heard and connected. And so it’s natural that here’s this outlet that we think somehow we’ll feed that need. And sometimes it might a little bit, but then it’s like, oh, a hundred people like this today, but maybe tomorrow a hundred isn’t enough. Now I need 105 then I need whatever. And then it just keeps going up and up and up to where you’re never ever going to just be okay with the amount of likes or comments or engagement that that’s the carrot dangling in front of you kind of thing.

And it’s like you’ll never actually really get the full hit that you’re looking for. And then so you have to keep going back. For me, I know one of my personal addictions is approval and it’s also TV. So TV for me is yet again, same sort of same concept as the Internet. I like to, I have an avoidance. It’s part of my, my trauma recovery and recovering myself and my true authentic self is working through my avoidance of certain things in my life of certain parts of myself of certain aspects of my life and what is required of me and TV is how I escape. A lot of times, you know now with the age of Netflix streaming, dear God, it’s, I mean the fact that bingeing is a thing. I mean it’s literally called Bingeing, which is something we generally associate with addiction. We binge eat weed, binge drink, you know, we’d go on benders.

And so now we literally have that terminology use jokingly or in a way that’s just totally casual and normal. Like, oh, I totally binged or cracked out on that. And I mean this is an addictive behavior and I mean that’s okay. Sometimes we need to numb out. It’s part of how we’re gonna Cope. It’s, this is what I’m saying, I’m not saying so then we need to eradicate all of these behaviors from our lives. All of these patterns. I’m talking about becoming conscious. Why am I bingeing on this show? What needs am I looking to get fulfilled? What am I avoiding? What is going on with me and do I sometimes maybe I think those thoughts and I know exactly that and I go, I choose to go ahead and binge on this show and I’m going to be at peace with that for today.

And then I’m not going to beat myself up about it. And then later, if I have that same impulse, I’m going to check in again and say, you know what, you binged yesterday. So maybe today you face some of those things that you didn’t want to face yesterday when you watch that show. And so it’s about recognizing choice. I do not believe, and I am sorry for all 12 steppers it works for some people it works if you work it right. So, but my personal feelings in addiction recovery is deciding that you are powerless over something and then having to offer it up to God or whatever it is a higher power. I mean, I love the idea and I get the concept, but for me becoming powerless isn’t the route of recovery for me. I feel for me it’s recognizing I am super powerful. You know, maybe you feel powerless over this substance.

Shit, I don’t know if this is still going.

Okay. Still going. Sorry, somebody texted me and I didn’t know if it has sad anyway. So recognizing that you might be powerless over feel powerless over the substance or behavior, but really in truth, you’re not powerless.

Hmm.

You have the power, this is your way of looking to sooth. And I’d also like to add that most all, or I would say all really addictive behaviors are based on, you know, can be little t trauma to big t trauma. You know, cognitive behavioral development from, you know, infant hood on that. I think it’s a mis misinformation that happy, satisfied well-founded people are just going to accidentally fall into being addicts or that it’s just some uhhh, you know, luck of the draw or not luck of the draw. I guess it’s just like some Shitty, oh well you pulled the short straw kind of famous like so at any minute. Like you’re just doomed to have the addiction disease from all the studies that I have studied about addiction and what I’ve seen is this is absolutely inaccurate that any person, almost all people I know are addicted to something to certain extremes versus the other, but everybody is addicted to something.

As we’re seeing, there’s just so many different levels and versions of addiction that just aren’t addressed. We don’t think about being addicted to anger or hating people. You know, we might think about like obviously the obvious things like, you know, alcohol and drugs and cigarettes and food and caffeine and even our Internet and the phone. We don’t think about people being addicted to righteousness, being addicted to their intellect and to being right. That there are countless ways that we can be addicted to certain ways of being, behavior mindsets that are painful, that can cause problems in our everyday lives that are stemming from trauma and emotional wounding. We also have addiction to struggle. This is another one of mine. Um, growing up experienced, I experienced a lot of struggle with my family. There was a lot of financial struggle and a lot of emotional struggle that went on and the family dynamics between half brother and sister and our family and my mom and dad and their stuff.

And being um, poor and having two parents that worked and being in a really crappy public school system and just all the crime and things that were happening in the city I grew up in. And so I grew up in a state of stress and struggle and that became my normal. So it has been a process of unlearning, unlearning this, the thoughts and the thought patterns and the behavioral patterns connected to my concept of what my life can be and that it doesn’t have to be a constant struggle, but I’m very attached. Like I don’t know what my life is without struggle. Who am I when I’m not struggling? This is an addiction.

Then there’s of course the addiction to power. I think we all can recognize the addiction to power in our political climate right now. And those who when handed a position of power can abuse it immensely and who don’t know how to surrender, who don’t know how, be vulnerable, how to soften. And so the addiction is to control and to being powerful and to be seen as powerful and the identification and the striving and the bulldozing of perhaps the people around you or in the world and your life in order for you to get that power. That is an addiction. And I talked about already attention and approval. So then we have also, well, I’ll just have one. I’ll touch on that a little bit more with attention. There are people who I know who you just, you know, they just need constant attention and recognition and uh, acknowledgement and look at me.

You look at me, look at me. And if they are not performing or having people applaud or recognize them or, or pay attention to them, they feel an incredible sense of, of emptiness. It may not even be conscious like, oh, I feel empty, but that strive for more attention is what’s driving them. That’s the addiction because without that comes this emptiness or this feeling of void and this thing that needs to be filled, a space in them that’s not comfortable, that doesn’t feel safe. It says, I have to have people seeing me. I have to have people applauding me, liking me, paying attention to me, listening to me, whatever it is I need that. I don’t know how to not need that. That is an addiction approval. We all need approval. As I’ve said, I definitely have some people pleasing stuff going on in my life that I’m working on.

Definitely working on authenticity and finding truth and being okay with not getting people’s approval is really painful and hard for me. And that’s an addiction. Um, let’s see. We have knowledge people who I have a bit of an addiction to knowledge as well to knowing things, to continuously consuming knowledge. I um, in this particular era that we’re living in, there is so much information right now that we are being bombarded with that it’s definitely the consumption of information is, is overwhelming. But it’s like if I’m not consuming information, I feel like I’m, I should be that I should always be learning something new and doing something and, and figuring something out and reading and investigating and I’m just driven by knowledge. And also knowledge can be power. Knowledge can feel safe. There’s a safety in knowing to not know is to be vulnerable, to feel like you have to step into unfamiliar.

If I know everything I can feel safe in that. Think about that. That to openly not know, like I don’t know and feel really safe in that not knowing is pretty rare. So it’s just another thing to think about. We’ve got competition, people can be competitive and then there can be an obsession and a competition that is destructive, that is harmful, that isn’t, doesn’t make the person happy, they’re just, they can’t not be competing with people all the time. So think about that is trying to fill some void like they need to win. And then I have again written here your addiction to winning being number one to being Victoria’s to always winning. Like I have to win, I have to be also there’s like sort of segway into the addiction to being right or um, yeah, I’m just coming out on top being a winner being number one and that drive and that obsession and that compulsion again, filling an empty nest inside people, addicted to relationships.

Just kind of similar to the love addiction. And this is when your continuously getting in relationships despite actual compatibility. Actual, you know, really being like this person isn’t somebody I actually really want to be with, but I’m so in need of being in a relationship so I can get my love approval, my physical needs met so I can have companionship. So I can feel not alone. These are not deep lasting reasons to be in a relationships with someone can fill, avoided place inside of you and when you’re unable to not be in relationship. When you meet someone and they like you and you only like them because they’re there or they’re cute, but and you can’t resist that urge to be together even when you’re not really that interested because maybe you don’t really know even what you want because you don’t let yourself really know what you want because then you’d have to pick and choose and choose to be alone or to be single for a little while and that can feel really, really scary.

So again, searching for connection, for feeling safe, for soothing some part of you that feels unsafe, scared and insecure, not being in a connected partnership with somebody. Then we have a recognition which can be a little bit like power, but it’s also can be status being seen as somebody a of wealth or somebody of prestige or maybe you’re really attached to your title and your job and that feels like that gives you value and to be recognized as someone of value and importance and how much that might drive your life. Cause that can drive some people’s lives. Like the thought of having no recognition or status makes them feel like nothing. Like if they see people who don’t get recognition and status, they think they’re not there, they’re nothing. So the fear of inadequacy, a feeling like nothing, a feeling like you don’t matter would be the drive to feel intensely this need for recognition again, which segues into feeling important, which kind of the same coin, maybe a little bit of a different side.

Same kind of idea, feeling important, feeling like you matter. We all want to matter. Everybody wants to feel important in some way. If it’s just important to somebody, to their kids, to their animals, to a neighbor, to their grandmother, whomever. We all want to feel. We have value and importance. But this is again a pathological need for feeling important for maybe seeking approval and recognition in ways that can be harmful to yourself. It can be detrimental to your relationships with people maybe leading you to be inauthentic to doing things that you don’t like about yourself. Just to get the recognition and the importance that you crave in order to fill that void of of lack. Then there is dieting. We as a culture are obsessed with what we’re eating these days and dieting can be an addiction there. People can, some people I’ve met are always on a diet and that can segue also into like being obsessed with how you look being obsessed with your weight and how much is that controlling your life.

What does that, what does that look like? How much is that a controlling your social engagements when you go out? Do you stress about what you can or can’t eat? I want to diet so I can’t go eat there or I can’t do this. And you know the fear of temptation of eating something not on your diet, which segues into addiction to eating clean or eating healthy. The most uh, pathological end of this is the sort of new new eating disorder. Disordered eating pattern is orthorexia and it can start off initially as seeming really healthy because it’s eating clean and eating healthy and that in and of itself is fine but it’s again, how much is this beginning to control your life? How consumed are you with food, with how clean it is with how pure it is, with how healthy it is, what ingredients are in it and is this your entire existence?

I have seen people lose themselves into their diets and what they eat, it becomes who they are. They don’t know how to talk about anything else but what they eat. And I tell Ya, I’m saying that is an addiction period. Obsessive Diet Foods, obsessive fad diets of contorting and controlling your body of taking harmful diet pills and weird not FDA approved medications and all kinds of stuff that is, you know, it’s for the desire to control and change your body and that if this is something you perpetually do and you don’t just try a couple and then stop and say, forget, I didn’t know I was going to try a different route and you find some balance. But if this is your continued journey, I’m going to call it an addiction. So we already talked about video games. I’m just going down a list here. So porn, p, O, r, n pornography.

I have personally known people who had porn addictions and it’s definitely been a real challenge in the relationships of the people that I’ve known whose spouse has had a porn addiction and porn, if you think about it, why you would compulsively or continuously seek out porn is not because you’re a deviant, not because you’re a bad person, not because you don’t love your partner, none of that. It’s got nothing to do with any of that. It’s got to do with, again, some sort of place inside, some sort of trauma. Something that happens, some wounding and porn is your outlet. It’s your, it’s what you have to take a hit of. You have, you can lose yourself in it. You can be consumed by it. You will find pleasure. It, it releases certain hormones and chemicals in your body. You have orgasm, you ejaculate or you, or for women.

I don’t really know many women with porn addiction, but I guess that exists. Um, [inaudible] so it’s not just because these people are sexual deviants or horrible disturbed people, which, you know, some of that is the case. But really it’s an addiction. Like any other addiction. It’s that addiction. Just like being an alcoholic. It is something that they are seeking out that makes them feel good. It fills some sort of need. It fills some sort of void that helps them escape. It helps them lose themself. It helps numb them. It tunes them into a different place that temporarily gives them a fix. But because it’s only temporary and it’s not addressing the underlying information, it’s why it becomes a addiction. Why it becomes compulsive behavior, why we have to keep doing it over and over and over again. Because you know, in larger and larger and larger doses as well is because it’s not actually healing the thing that we’re trying to, to sue through this mechanism.

Then we’ve got adrenaline junkies, we’ve all heard that term, right? So people who need to feel like they’re living on the absolute edge, like they’re jumping out of planes, you’re racing cars, maybe you’re like doing really dangerous, crazy, wild things in your life because if you’re not pumped, if you’re not literally pumped full of Adrenaline, you don’t feel alive. So you have then become addicted to the adrenaline that your body is producing in certain scenarios. And maybe that has to get more and more and more extreme for you to get the same hit, which can get more and more dangerous and more and more life consuming and all consuming and could inevitably eventually cause some sort of real physical damage. Gossip. I know people who have a really hard time not talking about other people and Gossiping and I don’t think it’s because they’re inherently bad people.

I think it’s, again, it’s a way of not looking at yourself. It’s a way of not confronting your own stuff, but you get to focus on other people and you get to connect with other people and feel important and have people listen to you and you have, and usually gossip is something juicy or you know, something people are like, Ooh, what? Oh, tell me. Yeah. And so we can become addicted to feeling like people want to listen to us and talking about other people as a way for us to feel valued and to avoid ourselves. And maybe we don’t feel that our life is that interesting or we have anything to say of value or that we’re valuable. So we just choose to talk about other people’s lives. Let’s see here. I’ve got so many here. Alright, so sports, the sports side of sports fanatic.

I feel like that’s enough said, right? Sports can be all consuming as a saving people and have a little sip of water saving people. Not like the uh, you know, surgeons or the ambulance drivers, not in the actual saving people’s lives. I’m talking about rescuing, rescuing, trying to the savior sense, I’m going to save you. Not just even the religious connotations of saving, but um, codependency of, uh, feeling the constant need to help other people. Uh, adds another one that I have worked with throughout my life. Definitely was really strong in my teenage years. Well, my childhood, my teenage years in my twenties. And I feel like I’ve been actively working on this particular addiction for the longest. And, and I mean, think about the manifestation of this in my life is also I want to be, I’m a, I’m a coach. I’m a massage therapist. Like my life is like, my careers are literally built on helping people.

So yeah, like, uh, the, the drive and the need to feel like I’m helping people has been huge in my life. And with these kinds of addictions, it’s a slippery slope in the sense that I’m not going to stop wanting to help people and I’m not going to change my career vocations and interests, but I can find balance in separating my career from my friendships and acknowledging boundaries and not trying to help people who don’t want to be helped by me and for me it’s about acknowledging what I’m looking to get out of my exchange when I am just trying save somebody else for the sake of feeling valued and important and like I somehow have the answers for them. It’s a big one talking. I know lots of people who have an addiction to talking. It’s again, it’s something where there’s an avoidance of self.

There’s an avoidance of feeling. There’s an avoidance of silence or stillness that the incessant need to talk is a way of creating noise in yourself that you don’t have to stop and listen. You don’t have to listen to other people. You don’t have to learn, you don’t have to grow. You don’t have to self reflect if you’re constantly talking. So this is an addiction that’s built a lot around fear. It can be a vulnerability, it can be a fear of silence, it could be a fear of self. It be a fear of if you’re quiet, what you might discover, what you might feel complaining. Definitely. I’ve met many people who are very addicted to their story, uh, complaining of there constantly being something wrong and the very strong attachment to complaining and the complete unwillingness to surrender that. And it can be very hard. I think that it can be very stressful on people’s relationships when one person’s set point is continuously pointing out what’s going wrong or what they don’t like.

And it can create feeling of stress and resentment and feeling unappreciated. And it can be really hard to be around somebody who complains all the time. And so this is something that can be really detrimental to interpersonal connection. Then there’s perfectionism, the addiction to this perceived idea of perfection that there is some sort of perfect that you can achieve. So this is the striving, and this particular one to me had lots of little subgroups of things that I’ve already talked about. And with striving and work and beauty and all of these different aspects, our intellect, all these different parts of us that we can strive for perfection, which is elusive. It’s again, another one of the dangling carrot scenarios where you’re not going to achieve perfection. It can be as good as it’s gonna get good, be perfectly imperfectly perfect, but perfection truly doesn’t even exist. I mean, it exists in the fact that we’re perfect because we are, we are as we are, and that is perfect. But that some concept of a flawless being or human or even flawless things that exist in this world, there’s always some imperfection. And sometimes that’s what makes something the most beautiful. But we can, as a culture be very hypnotized and believe even we can consciously think. Of course, I know perfection doesn’t exist, and yet the addiction to achieving it is still driving our lives.

We’ve got hoarding, stealing, criminal behavior, Pallette, political views, and activism. Aye. We can be very, very, very attached to an addicted to this kind of stems into like being right. Um, the addiction to hating activism can and is extremely important and powerful and something we need in our culture. But it’s, again, this is about balance. This is about how much is something controlling your life? Is it making you happy? What is the drive? What are you striving for? Is it causing your life to be more challenging in way that is causing harm in your relationships or in your work and with your children or just with yourself. This is about extremes. What, what is the extreme version of this that can be harmful? So I’ve said so many things here and I’ve literally almost finished the entire list, but I feel like I’ve run out of steam a little bit with everything cause it’s so much, so much.

But again, there’s so many routes that I can’t even begin to explain every single reason why anyone at any given time would have any of these addictions and why they would manifest and what causes it. There are so many reasons and I’m not here to argue or to try to be right. I’m here to express what I have personally dealt with and seen and have helped people, you know, and coached people with these particular addictions and saying that there is recovery, recovery is possible and that we are not inherently flawed or broken or unlovable because we have any of these addictions, no matter how extreme, horrible or dark or painful they might seem, you’re still worthy of love and acceptance and kindness and community and healing and forgiveness. We are all addicted and I want to educate people and breaking the stigma of addiction and why I listed so many different kinds of addictions.

Because I think the more we understand how we ourselves are addicts, it can help us face other addicts maybe with little bit more of a life challenging immediate, you know, maybe they’re holding people by gunpoint or they’re shooting up in alleys or they’re using infected needles and so on to where if we are able to have compassion and to not see people with these addictions as some inherently wrong or bad people or that it’s their fault or that they’re not like us. And so then they become other which creates only separation. Anytime there is otherness and separation, it is the birthplace of trauma and wounding. When we don’t see ourselves in each other, when we separate and say I’m not that in any way that we can see ourselves in the other is a step towards healing not only ourselves but other people as well and finding ways that we can start to begin to heal our own addictions and becoming aware of our own addictions and seeing what damage they might be having on our lives and asking for help, reaching out, seeing a therapist, getting coached, writing in your journal. You know, getting help to start shifting different mindsets and behaviors and patterns, talking to your spouse, going to a support group, whatever it is I plead. I just really encourage you to really think about what I’ve talked about here, to think about how you might be addicted and what you’re addicted to and what that looks like in your life. Who you know, and how you can begin to help not only yourself, but others. Always with love and kindness, compassion and connection. Thank you everyone.

The post Addiction [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hey everyone. It’s Amber Desmond with emotional medicine coaching. I’m your host and emotional awareness coach. Today I’d like to pontificate on some things I’ve been thinking about this past week. I’ve been laid up at home with a severe case of food poisoning and then on top of that I got my period and I’ve been experiencing some pretty horrific cramps and a lot of stuff has come to the surface both metaphorically and literally. I feel like there’s been a a great purging in my body for sure and as I was recovering and as I have been just being home and being in bed and resting, I’ve come up against a lot of resistance and fear and stories that I feel really grateful that I’ve become aware of them. I’ve kind of had this same wake up call over and over again. I feel like sometimes for me, I have to have a certain experience over and over again until it finally really hits me and hits home and can sort of penetrate my incredibly stubborn mind.

And I started spiraling into this whole story about my life and what am I doing and really getting down on myself and I’m feeling really horrible and kind of not seeing my progress and really focusing only on things that haven’t done yet or things that I want to do and really, really lasering in and this like really negative, harsh way of like, you know, why am I not doing these things and what’s wrong with me and dah, dah, dah, dah. And this tends to be kind of a, a pattern for me when I am sick or not feeling well. And I ended up having to be home for any kind of long period of time that I start to just really berate myself and beat myself up. And I spiral into this, you know, really intense feeling of like I’m always having to be accomplishing something and moving forward and doing things for my career and recognizing that I, I do not feel comfortable with rest and, um, really allowing myself just to kind of be, and that was a really interesting realization cause I kind of think of myself as this person who spends a lot of time chilling and being, and taking care of herself.

But I also realize that sometimes even in those experiences, they’re there with a purpose and sort of a, I’m doing this because, and you know, I, I pulled dance, um, for a hobby and that’s a lot of my, my downtime and fun is I pull the aunts, but it’s still an accomplishment. It’s still something I’m working on. It’s still something I can get better at. It’s, uh, you know, sort of social engagement when I go to classes and it’s exercise. And then I also, you know, will go spend time in nature, but that’s also like hiking and exercise and this activity. And so when I’m just having to literally do nothing, I find that it’s hard because then I know that I’m going to be confronted with that part of myself that really struggles with lying around. And, and it starts to really tell me stories about myself that aren’t true.

Like this is how your life always is. This is how it’s always going to be. Like really having a hard time grasping the impermanence of this particular experience. Seeing as I have a history of chronic pain and I do have hormonal imbalance problems and that my menstrual cycles can be really brutal. And that’s once a month that I’m confronted with pain and fatigue and IX can be extreme mood swings and depression and all kinds of things that come with my cycle. And then so when I get sick and there’s just this other interruption in my life, I, I realize how hard I am on myself. And of course I always think about, cause I’m kind of like see the biggest picture kind of person. And I find that really comforting when I kind of really pan out and stretch myself outside of my, my own version of myself.

And I see kind of the infinite universe in the world at large. And I think about that. I’ve never been afraid to die. I mean, of course I’m not like yay wanted to high. But I realized that what I fear more than anything is life and why I fear life is because life feels just that much harder. It because in life I’m confronted with having to be a person in death. I mean, of course it’s the great unknown and there’s definite fear in, you know, actual like if someone told me I was going to die tomorrow, I would be very scared and sad because I’m not ready to leave my human existence. But I just was really struck in bed that I’m probably more afraid of myself and the own suffering that I can cause myself than I am of of no longer existing in the human form.

And I found that that was really incredible and I’ve realized that repeatedly throughout my life. Like I said, sometimes I have to have the same realization in wake up call over and over again. And realizing why life seems hard and scary to me is because of how hard I am on myself about life and being a person and what that means and what I feel like I need to be doing and my drive and, and also feeling incredibly blocked by myself. And in my podcast where a previous podcast where I talked about your greatest block in your life is you, I cannot express how much I really mean that and how much I see it over and over again in myself and in everyone I’ve ever met. It’s not something I feel like I’m just making up. It’s something that I literally see over and over and over again in every single person.

Some people can get out of their way in a much easier way than others. Um, but it’s generally, I find that we’re always our own biggest challenge into, so the fact that like, it’s harder just to be here, to be a person then thought of not existing anymore. And this is not in a suicidal sense. This is no way like I’m ready to die or take my own life. But just realizing that to me, I feel like this is actually not, not just me. I feel like we’re all afraid of death because it is the unknown. It is the great unknown. Will we exist? Will we not exist? What, what is it? Where are we? Who are we? What happens? You know, for those who have, you know, have Christianity or other more like organized religious backgrounds, there’s the whole concept of heaven. Hell, you know, when are you going to be damned?

And you know, all those things to contend with, which I don’t have that background. I’m not really afraid of that. So that’s not a part of my, my process. But I really, I really feel that that’s a really, it’s a really powerful waking up moment is to realize that sometimes it would feel easier to be dead than to be alive and, but then also clinging, clinging to life, no matter how miserable we might be, that we still cling to being here. Because I think you know because we’re afraid of the unknown, but also because we know that it is such a gift to be here and that this is, if we, if we let it, if we let ourselves experience it, if we let ourselves open to life, that it can truly be heaven on earth and just seeing that thinking about what would be my greatest fear on my death bed and it would definitely be not the fear of death, but the fear that I didn’t live, that would be my biggest fear and regret.

It’s what wakes me up at night at times is this, am I living, am I really being here and am I enjoying it? Am I letting myself really, really live? I’m getting teary because I think I know that so many other people have this exact same feeling even if they might not have it in a really conscious capacity at all. We really want to do. Everything that we strive for in life is in that we are going to be happy and that we’re going to experience love and connection and purpose and find some sort of satisfaction because what is the point of life? It’s not to make money successes, great, but success in and of itself is just success is just another word for you. Feeling like you’ve had something to feel proud of, that you’ve accomplished something in your life, that you’ve had purpose and meaning and there’s a reason for it all.

When we have success, when we make money, when we strive for these careers, when we want to be healthy, when we look for romantic partnerships, it’s because we’re looking to be alive. We’re looking to embrace our experience on this planet because ultimately we have no idea, no idea why we’re here. Why are we here? Where were we before we were here? If we go somewhere, if you have the belief that you go somewhere when you die, if there’s some afterlife, some existence beyond this physical than you must’ve existed prior to your physical life. If your soul goes to heaven, if that’s what you believe, then were you in heaven before you came into this body?

And just recognizing that like there’s so many mysteries and so much magic and profound beauty in existence because really the irony is we think that with life we understand and that we have some sort of knowing and it’s not the unknown like death, but really life is the unknown. As you know. He gret says in game of Thrones, you know nothing, Jon snow, we know nothing. We’re always learning. We’re learning so much. We’ve learned so much just in this past decade. We, with our technology and science and understanding, we are discovering so much, but still we know nothing. And that can seem unsettling for some people. For sure. That feels really unsettling. We cling to wanting to know because if we know something, it feels safe. It feels secure. It feels like we have a grasp on something. Knowing we can control it, we can know what to expect and the outcome and who we are in that experience.

But really every day is a risk. And I don’t mean to scare anybody and that’s not my intention, but it’s a reality is that every day is the unknown. Every day you cannot know what’s going to come. Just as you cannot know what death is while you’re here in the physical. I think we’ve all in my personal belief system, I believe that we have infinite lifetimes and that I have been dead and reborn infinite times and that there are so many dimensions of existence and I, that’s a whole other podcast I’d get into. But [inaudible] so we all have experienced death I think many times over. And uh, but we keep coming back because life, no matter how hard and horrible and scary and traumatic it seems, it’s obviously where we want to be cause we’re here. You know, we feel like, Oh, I didn’t have a choice.

I didn’t choose to be here, but we don’t know that. I feel like we did in my deep intuitive soul knowing. And I speak only for myself. I can’t speak for anyone else. And this is what I believe, but I believe we’ve chosen this. We’ve chosen to be here and I believe that we are all creating, co-creating together our experience of life. We’re collective and realizing all of this. The point is for me, when I get into these really low dark places, when I’m trapped at home in my sick bed, feeling sorry for myself and being in pain and uncomfortable, it can feel like, why? Why is this happening to me? Why does my life sock and I feel like I can rush. I can try to rush through the recovery so I can get to my life again. I want to be, you know, myself again.

I want to get to my life again and I just had this moment again where I was struck my, this is my life. Being sick and being in this moment is not me, not in my life. This is a part of my life. It is sucky. It is uncomfortable. It’s not something I want to repeat or do for a long periods of time, but it’s also where I am. It’s what’s happening right now. I have the word surrender tattooed on my arm and I got it. I don’t even know how many years ago. I don’t know. Um, five years ago maybe. And the ironic thing is I didn’t even realize how much I needed that message over and over and over again. I mean, obviously some part of me knew like, Amber, you need to get this to remind yourself continuously to surrender and surrendering, as I’ve talked about before, is not about giving up.

It’s not about lying down die. It’s not about saying fuck it. I surrender. I don’t, you know, but it is. It’s surrendering is fuck it. Fuck it. I can’t be anywhere else right now. I can’t force myself to no longer be recovering from food poisoning. I can’t force myself to feel better by hating this situation cause it just causes more suffering. It’s just more shit piled on top of an already challenging situation. So I have to surrender to that experience right now. I’m not able to do the things I normally like to do right now. I don’t feel good right now. I’m having to face dark aspects of myself that I don’t like and I don’t want to believe exist and I want to numb out and escape them or be so busy that I’m not having to see them. And that’s not what’s happening.

What’s happening right now is that I’m here and I’m in it, and if I fight it, it just makes it worse. So surrendering to what you can’t control. Surrendering to what’s happening right now. I’m going to just be here. I’m going to be in this and it’s going to pass. You know this too shall pass. You know I will get better. I’m not going to be someone forever food poisoned. You know, I will continue to have my period until I have menopause and then I’ll go through that. But when I hate the situation, when I think it should be different, when I think I should be different, this shouldn’t be happening. Why is this happening? It does not add anything to the experience. It does not take away the discomfort. It only makes it worse.

And that’s why I feel like recognizing the, the giant unknowable, incredible, bizarre nature of human existence and life and death and being here, being on this planet in infinite space, in a universe, we do not even remotely understand barely. We have barely scratched the surface of the just our solar system. Forget like how many other universes and solar systems and you know, they’re discovering like dimensional layers and just all the different levels of existence that are going on and that we’re here, we are here and the having a sick day, having six, six days, six sick days, that’s hard to say is just an experience. It’s just a moment. It’s a little tiny splash in my life and things can feel so doom and gloom for me. You know, let’s, you know, maybe my head space and WIC where I go, I go towards, I definitely have like, I’m definitely wired towards negativity.

Um, based on my particular life journey and my own traumas and stories. I’m always ready for the shoe to drop and I’m learning to embrace when things are good. Also like surrendering to the joy, not just surrendering to the suffering, surrendering to the joy to saying I’m happy. Like this is a great moment when I’m in those moments and not just bypass them, but really take a moment and appreciate that I’m alive and in this moment I’m happy. Tomorrow is tomorrow, 10 minutes from now. It’s 10 minutes from now. But in this fucking moment and happy and the value and beauty of a moment of happiness is worth recognizing because life is made of little moments. It’s all just a series of moments collected. There’s nowhere we’re getting. There’s nowhere to go. You know, we’re, I feel like we’re all rushing towards something. So feverously running towards the future, our future selves, some future times and future things.

Some person, we’re going to be some person, we’re going to find some job, we’re going to have some accomplishment. We’re going to achieve some goals, some thing that’s going to happen that is when it’s there, it’s just going to be another moment. And we can embrace, enjoy and celebrate that right that moment. But then surrender to the fact that that moment will pass. And then there’ll be another moment and another and ultimately every moment of our life is as valuable and important as the next because that’s all you have because we’re here, we live and then we die and then we go onto that great unknown experience and adventure and story and journey and whatever that may hold, but now when I lie in bed sick and I think about all the things I should be doing and the person I’m not in, like all these blocks and issues that I have and I berate myself and I punish myself and I am missing my own life because I’m so focused on all of these things that are aren’t happening, that I’m not experiencing my life as it is, so I am missing it.

I’m missing out on this experience even when it’s a hard experience. I don’t want to miss it. I want to be in my life because what is the point? Like I said, like what is the point of life other than to just fucking experience it? We don’t know the meaning of life. We really don’t know. You know, what is the grand purpose? What is our purpose? What is my purpose? Is my purpose really a job? Is it a career? Is that really my purpose? You know, is it really accomplishing some thing or is it just my purpose is to be here and to fucking experience it and to do my best to be as fully present with all things that unfold in my life.

What about you? What’s your purpose? Why are you here? What lights you up? What shuts you down? Where are you? Where do you go when things are hard for you? Where do you go when things are great for you? How do you process and practice being fully alive? What is your understanding and belief in feelings about death? What do you believe the meaning of life is? Why are you here? Things to think about today. Everybody, thank you for joining me. I’ll talk to you soon. This is Amber Desmond. Emotional awareness coach.

The post Life & Death Ponderings [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hello everyone. It’s Amber Desmond, your Emotional Awareness Coach. This is episode six. Today I wanted to talk about chronic health issues. Namely chronic pain and fibromyalgia, different “invisible” illnesses that are still not fully understood culturally or by Western medicine. And primarily what I wanted to talk about when it comes to those particular issues is our particular feelings about ourselves when it comes to having any kind of chronic illness and to add sort of salt to the wound of already having a chronic illness or health problem or pain that we tend to keep a bunch of shame, shame, shame, shame on ourselves for having these issues. For my personal experience, I have struggled with chronic physical pain for many years. I don’t even know how long it’s been for as long as I can remember at this point. I know, uh, in my teens it manifested maybe in slightly different ways than it does now.

But, I have flare-ups. Uh, it’s, it moves around so it’s moving pain. And uh, I truly, for my personal belief system, and this is just speaking for me, that I feel that a lot of my pain issues stems from internalized emotional trauma and a lot of emotional pain that I didn’t process or allow myself to feel. And it really became, you know, cause the body will, no matter what express unexpressed or unprocessed or under dealt with emotions and it sneaks out and all different kinds of manifestations. And for me it shows up as physical pain. I’m wanting to do this particular podcast today because I’m having a flare up and it’s been on my mind and I’ve just been working through some of the, not only just physical pain and discomfort, but the emotional pain that I feel when I have a flare up because it impacts your life.

It really, it affects everything. And it’s really hard when you’re experiencing a lot of physical pain to be really excited about much and to feel inspired and eager to participate in your life. Because pain, not only does does it hurt, but it’s really draining. It is emotionally, physically draining. I feel a lot more fatigue when I’m experiencing a flare up because I my, it’s like your body’s actively trying to heal or re or you know, correct itself. And I don’t know, it just sort of zaps your energy. And on top of being a coach, I’m also a massage therapist and I dance for my hobbies. And so when I’m having a pain flare up is really hard for me to actually even do, you know, one of my jobs and also to participate in something that brings me immense joy.

So then it’s, you know, then a spiral. Generally a lot of times with chronic pain and invisible illnesses that are sort of continued and when you have flare ups, chronic fatigue and those sorts of things is that there’s a lot of depression because our culture, sadly, it just is not set up to where it’s really not created for us to be able to take the kind of respite that we need truly to be able to fully heal, to really be able to take the time that we need to get better before we can, you know, before we were forced to return to work or you know, and if you have children then it’s like very little time. Do you have to be able to really take enough time for yourself to recover? And you know, unless you’re just an incredibly wealthy person and you have nannies and you know, you don’t have to work as much, then if you’re a working Joe like myself, it’s then you, you know, he bought on top of pain, shame, depression, and then you’ve got stress and anxiety about making money and missing work.

And so then the it, which then perpetuates the cycle of pain because stress, anxiety, feeling crunched is going to exaggerate and irritate the nervous system. And if the nervous system isn’t in a state of calm and balance, it is much harder for the body to recover and to get into a state of homeostasis where it’s not thrown out of its own natural balance. And where you’re, you’re in the, what is it the parasympathetic or is it the sympathetic nervous system? I can never remember whatever the stress one is hatch. So when you’re in that stressed out state, then you’re creating more cortisol and more adrenaline and different, you know, not feel good chemicals in your body that are then causing more irritation within your system. So what do we do? What do we do to manage this situation? It feels, it can feel so powerless and that’s a really hard place to be too, is to feel victimized by your own body, to feel like you don’t have the same capabilities as other people or that you, you see other people just being able to live their lives and go to work.

And do things and they don’t have to have these bouts of intense pain or fatigue or whatever it is that comes up for you. You could have migraines or horrible menstrual cramps, different hormonal imbalances, chronic back pain, you know, horrible allergies. I mean so many different things. And so it’s like how, how do we get to a place where we can at least start to nurture our own healing and be patient and loving. And it’s so easy to say that like, Oh just be kind to yourself and love yourself. Great. But what really has to be considered as I really feel is really delving into what story you tell about yourself when that pain comes up for you. So you’ve already got all the stress, all the stuff you’re missing work or you know, not feeling like you’re able to take care of your children the way you want to.

You’re in pain, you’re tired. Maybe your partner’s having, you know, struggling because you’re distant or in pain and then they feel like stuff is falling on them. I mean, so it’s already this really challenging situation. Really challenging. And so then keep on top of that. You feeling really bad about all of that and really guilty. So what can we control? What can we manage? What can we take care of? What is our job? How can we begin to nurture this incredibly challenging experience and make it maybe just a little bit less challenging? Like I said, you know, take care of yourself, love yourself. So how does that, how does that start? Does that look like loving yourself and taking care of yourself? No, it looks like checking in with, okay, I have this pain right now. I’ll just speak for me. I have a terrible pain in my shoulder right now.

That pain is burning, aching and pulling. It hurts even just to have my arm hanging down at the side of my body. And so I think about what is, what are those words? Think about those words, aching, burning, pulling. And then I think about the symbolism and like how I could use those as emotional expressions. I’m aching, I’m burning. Something is pulling on me. I am such a huge believer in the mind, body connection now. It could be really triggering for people. And I am sorry if that triggers anyone, but this is my belief and this is where I teach from these beliefs that a great deal of our pain is connected to emotional trauma, to sort of subconscious beliefs that we took in on processed emotions. Chronic consistent negative thinking patterns that are alive, just kind of continual pain that we’re experiencing. And so that pain doesn’t just have to manifest, you know, emotional pain isn’t just emotional. It can also be physical and you know, being sexually assaulted, being raped, being violated, and that, you know, you can later in life experience a lot of unexplained physical issues in your body and you don’t put together necessarily that that rape or that molestation or that physical assault on your body has now manifested. It’s like an internalized shame and an internalized pain around that trauma. And now it is, you know, your, it can be manifesting in your muscles, in your tissue, in your neck, in your abdomen. It can be in your,your organ. Emotional trauma doesn’t just stay in your mind. It’s not like there’s a mind compartment and like chops, you know, cause there’s like a little door that stops mine from connecting to body in that thoughts and feelings and experiences. Sometimes our experiences of trauma are pre-verbal so we don’t even have words associated with our trauma. It is all visceral, somatic feeling related, suffering, trauma, hurt, fear, feeling unsafe and how the body can lock into just this rigid tight patterns of resistance and protection for a lot more detail on this. I really highly recommend checking out the body, keeps the score.  Oh gosh, his name is some very Swedish Vander something and I’m sorry but the body keeps a score. All you have to do is look that up and if the book will come up and also Peter Leviathan, a waking the tiger, he’s an incredible pioneer on somatic emotional trauma associated pain and issues held in the body.

Really beautiful, powerful, transformative information in both of those books about PTSD and different levels of trauma. And it can be little T, big T and a little T traumas or the things that we, we all have trauma, no matter who you are. Everybody has some form of trauma in their life. But little T is, you know, maybe not something super catastrophic. And big T is things like, you know, being raped or molested by family members or people being sexually accosted, car accidents, natural disasters and so on. You know, physical injury and severe emotional, physical, psychological abuse. And sadly, everyone, this planet has gone through something and I really feel that it’s a matter of keeping your, our culture. It can be just our family of origin and our immediate family upbringing and our relationship to emotions and talking about things and processing and what feels safe and what things we didn’t talk about, what things we didn’t share, what things we took in deep into ourselves and we hid those things away.

And then those things can manifest as physical pain. And so I feel like a big step is to check in with the story of your pain. When did it start? How is it, can you give it words? Can you check in with those words and see if they have another meaning, another story that your body is literally telling you. Your body is telling you a story. Something is expressing something to you maybe that your afraid to hear or acknowledge or look at. It’s too painful literally. So your body is just processing it by experiencing pain. But it’s to, it’s easier for you to feel pain than to actually go into the F the emotional pain and experience that because you would rather, I mean solid, very subconscious. It’s not conscious things that you’re deciding. Like I would rather just feel this, Oh LA, these are just deep ingrained patterns of processing and reaction and ways of surviving.

They are literally coping mechanisms that we’ve created for survival. Maybe it just wasn’t even safe or there wasn’t a space for you to express process, recognize or acknowledge what was happening to you. And so the only thing you could do is just keep going, is just to keep surviving, keep living. But all of that unprocessed stuff just got locked into your physical body. And so now in a way of trying to release it and express like something needs to be seen, something needs to be heard is your body is, is shouting at you. Pain is always a messenger. It’s always a messenger and we fucking hate that messenger sometimes and it sucks and it’s painful and we wished the message would come some other way. But that’s just what’s happening right now. Pain is the messenger. So I ask my pain, what do you need? What do you need? How can I be more present for you? How can I show up? What can I do to assist you in being heard, feeling seen, heard, felt, acknowledged.

And I sit with that. Sometimes I get really clear answers, sometimes like it really fuzzy answers. Sometimes I just cry and sometimes just crying is a release and it just feels better. But also again, back to the self love and self acceptance is not shaming myself or my body for having the experience that it’s having. Not creating a painful story to put on top of my already uncomfortable situation, but to, you know, I, I definitely get into like feeling weak, feeling inadequate, feeling like, Oh, well if I was really this, you know, spiritual self help teacher, I wouldn’t have this. That’s my thing. Like I should be healed or never have these issues and that can get me into a big head trip and like, you know, get this big story going and just adds a lot of guilt and a lot of feeling really bad about myself.

And that surely 100% doesn’t help me at all. And I’ve personally never seen anyone heap on a bunch of guilt and shame and blame and then feel better for it. Like, you know what, I’m so glad I’ve just shoveled all of this really painful shit on top of my already uncomfortable situation and then beat myself up about it. Like that’s never gotten anybody into a good space. Like, yay. Self-flagellation for the win. No. So, so I am a big believer also in mirror work, in sitting down and looking into your own eyes in the mirror, talking to yourself, asking yourself questions, looking into your own eyes. You mean speaking to that body part? Speaking to that organ or speaking to the headache or the hormones or whatever it is, and starting a dialogue. I mean we think it’s kind of weird and it doesn’t really occur to us like we can talk to these parts of ourselves, you know, they fit, they can communicate.

If we let them, it might seem like, Oh, I’m just saying stuff, I’m asking a question, then I’m just answering and so it couldn’t possibly be that thing. But whatever you answer, it’s obviously what maybe you need to hear or it’s maybe what’s really needing to be said. You know, it’s not an exact science. It’s just processing and practicing and feeling your way through it and seeing what comes up. And it’s not, I’m not saying like you’re going to do this and instantaneously be cured of like a life long chronic illness, but that I don’t think that we have to forever be doomed to suffer, that we don’t have to forever be tuned to be sick. You know, I really hesitate a lot of the times. It’s not that I don’t want to own my own chronic health issues, but I densifying as someone with that because it can become a part of my identity and I’m really looking to shed that belief and that experience and not take ownership over it.

You know, sometimes with a diagnosis or something, there is a great deal of relief. It can answer a lot of questions. It can be, once you know the diagnosis, you can then navigate your way through healing and, uh, you know, investigate and research and see what you can do to heal and nurture and recover. But for me, I really hesitate with owning a certain label. I’ve recently been diagnosed with ADHD, which was an incredible gift. Uh, it really, it’s like a shed, this enormous, incredible amount of light onto my childhood and my education and ways that I am that just didn’t make any sense to me and certain struggles that were really perplexing and it was an incredible and liberating diagnosis. I don’t really, even though I have quote ADHD, I don’t really think of myself as like, Oh I have urge do like it’s a part of my journey but I’m not going to necessarily walk around with that as a label on myself.

Just this is my personal process and also like I’ve been, you know, I’ve suffered terribly with depression and anxiety and I had a severe mental breakdown many years ago and I was a girl phobic and things were really dark and rough and I definitely have a good bit of diagnoses as far as mental health stuff goes and I’m grateful and that’s helped me navigate my way through healing. But I also don’t walk around saying I have mental health problems because you know, number one, there’s just a huge amount of stigma around mental health issues and I feel like if it gives somebody power and liberates them and they feel good and I get like wanting to educate people and to be a teacher and a way shower, that’s fine, but I don’t identify as having a mental illness. Um, I think that I’ve had disordered ways of thinking and experiencing my life.

I think I had some dark experiences, but I also don’t feel like I am now forever stuck in that place and I don’t need to own that description of myself as something that I am now forever doomed to experience because I feel like a lot of times with diagnoses we can become overly attached to that story and it becomes such a big part of our identity that then what about healing? Then what happens when we’re so identified with it, we don’t know who we are without it. If I make that who I am, who am I? If I don’t have that, and I think that’s just a whole other story and whole other layer of healing. And sometimes, I mean this can come in layers too. Maybe at first you need to own that label and you need to own the diagnosis and you need to be in that wholeheartedly and that’s a part of your journey.

But I highly encourage to be grateful for what you find out and just think of it as information of being informed about something that is existing in your physical, emotional reality right now. But that is not necessarily your then forever doomed to be that because you’ve been diagnosed by a doctor. Because medical science is always expanding, always learning, recognizing we don’t know that much about the human mind, about the human body. I mean, we know a lot more than we used to, but we still don’t know everything and new discoveries are coming every day. There’s still not really even totally understand why depression happens. You know, there’s all these theories about why people are depressed and you know, new ones come up all the time and all these different processes and methods and approaches. And I love the variety because that means so many different people who might resonate with different things, have access to help. And I’m just one Avenue. I’m one voice, I’m one opinion, an you know, a realm of billions of people with ideas and thoughts. And these are my particular understandings. What I’ve come to know in my life and what works for me, and this is how I coach and teach people is through this lens of discovery that I’ve personally walked and experienced. So practicing being present and working on decriminalizing your, your pain, your suffering, your experience, taking some of the blame and the shame away and to the best of your ability. I mean do it in little increments and do your best really to have some serious, massive compassion for yourself. Think of yourself as though you were a small child and you are meeting a small child who told you that they are in a lot of pain. And that they were struggling and what you would impulsively reflexively do if a small child told you that they were in pain, that you would just want to nurture and love and support them and hold them in a space of love and compassion and that you also deserve that loving compassion from yourself, that it’s okay. That’s the start is just, it’s okay for me to be in pain right now. It sucks and I don’t want to be in pain. It’s inconvenient. It’s hard, it’s frustrating, but ultimately it’s okay that I don’t have to dig my heels in and push against this and resist it and hate it and fight it and cause a war to go on inside my body. Me fighting myself, thinking of the pain as some sort of separate demonic entity feeding on us. The pain is a part of you. It feels separate. It feels mean,but it’s a part of you is just your body telling you something, your body expressing a need, feeling a situation, a trauma pattern, habit, something it sharing with you. Your pain is sharing something. And I know it seems so counterintuitive, but it, I’m not saying you need to learn how to love your experience, but recognizing that there is another way to start to have a relationship with your own illness in your body and that it’s going to be a journey and that it is just as much a mindset as it is a physical journey. Shifting bit by bit, little by little moment by moment and getting help. You know, finding a coach, finding a therapist, a support group, friends, family, people who will encourage you to see your strength and not just see your illness or your physical quote. Weaknesses, to recognize how strong you really are and to disempower that story of shame and not enough ness.

And that there’s something wrong with us for being where we are having this experience in the first place and that it’s not okay for us to have this experience and we need to fight. I’m not saying so it’s like, Oh to lay down and die. No. Cause a lot of people think you have to resist and fight. And if that terminology works for you and empowers you, then do it. But for me it is a surrendering. And surrender doesn’t mean giving up. Surrender means to me, leaning into letting go of the fight and diving into the story that I’m not hearing and opening myself up to what the deeper messages and how I can begin to really nurture and heal the parts of me that are, are screaming at me through my face, my physical pain, looking into the mirror and saying, I deserve my own love. I deserve my own compassion. I deserve my own tenderness. I can be present with myself through this pain. No matter how horrible I can be with myself and love myself despite this pain I choose to deeply and completely love and accept myself. Thank you everyone. I hope this is helpful and I’ll be back soon with another episode.

The post Chronic Pain & Illness [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hi everyone. It’s Amber Desmond, Emotional Awareness Coach at Emotional Medicine Coaching. Today I wanted to talk about the mirror of life, uh, the mirror of our own relationship with ourselves and the mirror that life holds up to us. And I wanted to ask you what you believe is your biggest obstacle in life. I just want you to think about that. Really think about it for just a moment here. There was probably some instantaneous thought, something that popped up. What is your biggest obstacle? I would say my first thought for me would be, Oh, I don’t have enough money. And then that is an obstacle that holds me back from being able to do things that I want to do and travel and invest in my own business. And you know, that money and not being able to make enough money would be my biggest obstacle. And then the next might be, Oh, well having been a massage therapist for the last 16 years, segwaying now into being full time coach.

You know, my biggest obstacle is the uncertainty of becoming a full time coach, leaving my career as a massage therapist. And then also with massage therapy, feeling like, Oh, well I can’t, you know, there’s like really this platform and this ceiling of how much money I can make because there’s only so much I can do. If I’m not working with people and not doing massages, then I’m not making money and there’s only so many massages I can do and I’ve got all this pain in my body. And so then the next obstacle would be my body is holding me back. So whatever that might be for you, maybe you’re sick, maybe you have chronic pain, maybe you’re handicapped. Maybe you suffer from severe anxiety or depression, some sort of mental illness or diagnosis. Maybe it’s poverty, it’s money. Maybe it’s her partner, your children, your job at the town you live in, whatever, whatever it is. And I’m going to brazenly say,okay,that your biggest obstacle is you. My biggest obstacle call is myself.

And that is really, really hard to swallow because it, it seems like it’s other things. Oh no, it’s this, it’s that. Like it’s not just me, it’s something else outside of me, outside of my control. Something I have no power over. You know? Of course my biggest obstacles, cancer of course, and that could be very well true, is that your, you could be currently dying. But I ask if that is the case, that the most extreme case is how can you get out of your own way even while dying?

How can you step out of his story of dying and embody life right now? Even though you may be in immense amount of pain and suffering? How can you not find a way to make that happy or you know, make you love that, that this is happening. I’m not talking about being like, yay yippie Skippy, I’m dying of cancer to continue use that example because it’s so extreme. So because people die of cancer all the time. So [inaudible] what I’m saying is how can you be dying of cancer but not make that meaning that while you’re alive, you can’t still enjoy the bits of life you have left. And if you really think about it, we’re all dying. That brings me to this amazing quote. I wrote this down in one of my many journals that have kept over the years and I didn’t write down who said it, so I can’t get from credit, it’s not mine, but it says, make a counselor out of death and ask death, what should I do next? And that is a really amazing question for anyone, even people who aren’t necessarily on the brink of death due to any kind of illness, because ultimately we’re all on the brink of death at any given day. We have no idea when our time will come. None. And I know that sounds morbid and depressing and maybe it’s something you don’t want to think about, but for me, acknowledging my own death and that I literally have no idea when that time will come.

Not to live like you’re dying is really the only thing that actually makes sense because we all are dying and every day is a gift and that the biggest obstacle in our lives is us. It’s not our relationships, it’s not money, it’s not even cancer, it’s us. It’s our relationship with ourselves and everything that’s going on in our lives. First and foremost, the thing you are contending with every single day is your mind, your beliefs, your story, what is the story? What do I mean when I say your story? My story, my name is Amber, I’m 39 and I’m a Libra and I live in North Carolina and I have a partner named Zach and we have two cats and I’ve been a massage therapist for 16 years and I’m now an emotional awareness coach and I created a podcast. I do pole dancing for my extracurricular, fun activities.

I write, I do yoga, I hike, I’ve got parents who I’m close to, I have siblings I don’t talk to, you know, and then I’ve got the entire story of my childhood and my circumstances and my education and ex boyfriends and ex friends and lovers in the past and all the things that have added up to who I am to who I believe myself to be. These are my stories, the story of my life. He has, Oh, I was born in Orleans and I was raised by Tom and Hannah. I had half brother and sister who came to live with us. It was very, very challenging. I experienced a lot of um, trauma due to circumstances at our household. I experienced emotional neglect, you know, and out of love and not meaning to. But when you have chaotic situation going on, then you can get lost in it.

And that’s a story. And I’m not saying that that doesn’t end in any way diminish ish. My experience of what happened, it doesn’t make it in valid. It doesn’t make it not true. It doesn’t make it not important. But my relationship with that story can make me or break me. I, we’ve got stories that we create inside of our own stories. So that story of my life then adds up to beliefs I develop about myself due to my story, my education, where I was raised, how I was raised. They all created stories. The story of that, I was not smart that I really struggled in school. Um, I had high anxiety and did not do well under that pressure. And I let my feelings about that time to find me, how these moments in my life came to define me and to shape me and to tell me who I am.

And even though I came to know myself as a very intelligent and capable and remarkable woman, but even though come to know that inter realized that there was still this part of me clinging to this doubt, to this old feelings of secret and adequacy. I don’t matter, nobody cares. I’m not good enough. I don’t want them to find out how stupid I really am. I used to not, this is before computers and spellcheck and when you know, as you’re typing the right spelling is coming up on your phone these days. But back in the day I wouldn’t write things down and let people read them out of fear at them. Seeing my spelling and my lack of punctuation and how education, uneducated, that made me seem and the story that I created about being an educated or about not being smart and that it wasn’t ever the content of my writing that I was ashamed of.

Cause I generally thought my content was pretty good. It was the spelling and the punctuation and I had shame. So I embodied it. This deep shame that said like, you’re so stupid, you can’t let anybody read anything you write. You can’t let them see, see it. You could read it to them, but don’t let them read it cause they’re gonna laugh at you. And then they’re going to not actually take you as seriously because they’re going to see that you’re stupid. And if you’re stupid, obviously the content in what you’re saying has less value. And that my friends is the story of her culture as well. And our are very strong leanings towards what is intelligence and education and what we value. And so it’s just examining how we fit into these stories and what stories we take in and we make our own. And I take that story, you know, about how society can decide for me if I’m smarter. Not that school teachers have any say over how I feel about my own intelligence and what I believe to be possible for me.

You see just every moment we are creating beliefs, ideas, and stories about ourselves, about our lives, about what’s possible, about who we are, about what life will be for us, and we rarely truly take the time to say, what is this story that I’m perpetuating? What story am I making true? What am I making true about myself? What am I really trying to convince people that I’m not? What am I trying to convince people that I am? What am I afraid I am? What am I convinced that I might actually be? In what ways am I trying to contort and control myself and my life in order to be that thing? This is about being aware. This is about questioning your own beliefs about yourself, about saying, how am I standing in my own way?

I took in a lot of this belief about not being smart and it controlled my life. It controlled not just my writing, but a controlled jobs that I would take and things that I thought I could do, things that I thought were possible for me. I thought I was stupid and so from stupid, I don’t have many opportunities. I’m stupid. Doors aren’t going to open and I don’t have a big life ahead of me. I’m probably going to have a pretty small life if I think that I don’t have the intelligence and the skills to really be successful. And even I questioned that belief. We doubt that on some level it was true was what was killing me.

This, I had taken it in so deep that it had wrapped around my organs, that it had embedded itself into me, that it had become me.

So what I teach my emotional awareness coaching it’s about [inaudible] heavily. It’s like taking, you know, a jewelry box and say you’ve got a bunch of necklaces and earrings and, and bracelets and they’ve all just been thrown into this jewelry box and there’s no separation between all the different jewelries and it’s all just big giant in meshed, tangled mass. You pick it up and maybe one or two things falls out, but the rest you’ve got to spend maybe hours unraveling it and pulling little strings that pull onto other strings that go in through these other loops that are entangled through other earrings and and all wrapped up and nodded. Somethings are more easily let go of than others and some things are so tightly wrapped in there that it feels like it’s going to be impossible to undo it. This is going to take forever. We frustrated and we just want to quit. I don’t care if I’ll get it. I’ll just, I’ll wear something else. I don’t care.

That happens inside of us too. We’re weaving webs. It’s like giant story webs inside of us. All these beliefs and ideas, fears and insecurities and doubts, strengths and weaknesses, they get tangled into us to where we can’t distinguish what’s real, what, what do we really believe? Where did this start? Where does it end? Is there a beginning? Can I untangle this? Do I want to, who am I without this? What does my life look like if I’m not believing that about myself? If I am really, really intelligent and I’m really, really capable, then that means that I’ve got to live a bigger life. That means a bigger life has is possible for me. And that could be scary. That can be really, really scary even though it seems like something I might really want, I really want a bigger life, but a bigger life means facing more things, be more visible, being more vulnerable, putting myself out there and bigger ways. So then that little voice or saying, you know, you don’t really, you don’t need that. It’s okay, you, you’re, you’re okay the way you are. You don’t really, you know, need to grow or expand or challenge yourself. Not really. I mean, just enough, just enough, you know, your life isn’t amazing but it doesn’t suck. And then we start to slowly convince ourselves that it’s okay where we are.

And I’m not saying we should not say it’s okay where we are because where we are is where we are. But you start from wherever you are and if you want something more, if you know in your gut that there is more to you and to your life, look in the mirror, in the mirror of life, the mirror of yourself.

How can you get out of your way? How can you become less of your own obstacle? How can you be your biggest champion? It’s another thing we spend so much time with our inner critic with that voice of doubt, fear and disbelief. The voice that tells you to stay comfortable. Stay small, stay where you are. It’s too scary. It’s too much. It’s unfamiliar. You don’t know how you’re not smart enough. You’re not thin enough, you’re not feminine enough. You’re not masculine enough. You’re not aggressive enough. You’re not assertive enough. You don’t know enough about the subject, whatever it is. I mean, we have eight bajillion different excuses. Trust me, I have used them all. I love my excuses. Oh, I love them and I believe them at times or like I believe my own excuses. Oh yeah, that’s so true. But challenges, learning how to hear that voice question it you’re like, is that really my authentic best self, best life, best me voice or is that a voice of and doubt and disbelief, a voice that belongs to a story that maybe I don’t really need anymore that I don’t want to invest all my energy into. I don’t want to give power over to that version of myself anymore. I had trauma, I had struggle, I’ve had pain, I’ve had loss, I’ve had natural catastrophes. I’ve been in accidents, have been homeless. I’ve been heartbroken. I have been shattered as a person. I have abused drugs and alcohol. I smoked cigarettes, hurt people. I let people hurt me and those are all parts of life, but I can stay stuck in all of those things that were painful, like up, look at all that horrible shit that happened. Now I need to avoid anything that could potentially lead me into having any of those experiences.

Again, I experienced that pain and now I will do everything I can to avoid it. And that can mean maybe I don’t take the risk of being a bigger version of myself because that risk means I could be hurt in a way that I don’t ever want to be hurt again. And that’s understandable. We are wired to protect ourselves, to avoid pain. That’s how our brains are made. It’s pretty annoying at times. Everybody keeps us alive at the same time, our survival mechanism, our brain literally cannot distinguish between what’s happening and what’s being imagined. And that’s a really, really powerful thing to realize. Our brains can’t distinguish the difference between what’s happening and what’s being imagined. So your brain has no clue that your daydreams or you know anything that you are thinking and feeling and imagining are not actually happening. So it’s like, you know, if you got a panic attack, it’s a great example or an erection, you know, a, a wet dream, a fantasy, getting aroused.

Like your body is literally responding to something being imagined. If you’re a guy or if you don’t even know about how penis is work, then if you know a guy is thinking about something desirable, something that turns him on his body will literally send blood to his penis. So he gets an erection. That’s his body responding to something imagined to something of we don’t think about how, because we might not have all these obvious reactions like an erection to notice, but it’s literally the same thing is when we’re thinking over and over again and we reaffirm over and over again through our continued inner dialog and to then our behavior and response to that dialogue that perpetuates. The truth of that is that we’re not good enough. We’re too fat. We can’t, you know, be in a healthy relationship. We can’t take that job offer because we’re going to fail.

And so we believe it. We give it power and we don’t question the fact that we ourselves are the ones standing in our own way and say, do I really want to believe that I’m not good enough? Do I want that belief? You know I’m thinking it, but is that what I really want to believe about myself? Like Oh well it must be true because I’m thinking it thoughts aren’t necessarily true just because I can think, Hey, pink elephants are in this room. Does that mean it’s real? No, it’s just a thought. Thoughts are wind. Ultimately they’re just passing things and we get so into loops because thinking certain thoughts literally is wiring your brain. This is science wiring your brain to think thoughts, more thoughts like that kind of thought. So it’s like the more negative thinking you practice, the more you’re literally wiring your own brain to think negative thoughts about yourself or about whoever.

And so it is going to seem very unfamiliar when [inaudible] we start to try to shift our thinking and it might even seem hard, you know, and I’m not just talking my positive thinking like just be happy kind of stuff, but I’m talking about questioning, long held and practiced stories and beliefs about you that you work are really hoping and wanting to let go of to change. You know, I, I, I’ve had lots of fears in my life and lots of stories that I’ve been actively untangling for many years now. And I’m not saying I’m, all the jewelry is on tangled, but I definitely have it more sorted at this point. And there are still some areas that are pretty nodded up, but I’m working on it. It’s a work in progress. Sometimes I slip, sometimes I’m, you know, sometimes I think I’ve got that one not undone and then I realized that there’s this whole other tighter little not inside of that.

And there’s moments where I feel like I’m just going to give up. This is too complicated. It’s, I can’t get this on done. And then I might slide around for awhile and feeling sorry for myself until I’m finally ready to start again. So it’s like how do we begin to recognize what we’re believing about ourselves? For me, it’s really been about writing, like just writing down when you know, you know, you’d call it journaling. You could even just write lists of words that come to mind. You know, some of your main beliefs. Some of the big ones that maybe jump out at you every day. Something you might actually even say out loud like, I don’t have enough money. You know, to use one of buy. I don’t know how. There’s another one of my favorite mantras. [inaudible] I’m too fat. I’m not strong enough. I’m scared. What if I fail? What if they think I’m stupid? What if they reject me? What if they say no? What if they don’t love me? Just start to notice things that you’re
affirming, that you’re telling other people. You’re giving power to these beliefs by sharing them with people, telling people who you are and how you are sharing your limitations. Saying, join me. Join me, me, my limiting beliefs about myself. Show me, show me how this is true. Because if it’s true, then I can continue to stay here in this horribly heinous belief that I feel comfort in because it’s familiar because it’s practiced cause I know how to do this belief. I don’t know how to believe. I’m amazing. How do I believe I’m smart? Incredible, beautiful, powerful, sexy, interesting, lovable, kind, great with money. Rich, how do I believe that? You start practicing telling a different story. What story are your, what story you’re telling yourself about yourself? Write it down. Just keep writing every day. Check another word, thought idea, pops in your head, put it in your notes, in your phone, put a voice memo. And then as you start to unravel, recognize maybe it’s a bigger theme story in your life. Then you start writing the new story. Practicing the new story of now, because you know, we don’t, we, we want to create a new thing to fill the space. Cause if we’re not filling it with something new, we’re just gonna refill it with what we already know. It’s just the nature of our minds and how we think and how we operate. So creating then the counter story of what you want to believe instead. For me, I practice saying to myself in the mirror, I look at myself and one of my core wounds that I discovered was I don’t matter and nobody cares. And that’s a deep, deep one from my childhood. And I practice saying out loud while looking at myself in the eyes, I’m at her and people do care. I matter and people do care. Practicing saying, I’m willing to believe that I matter and that people do care and willing to believe I can be good with money.

Cause maybe saying I’m good with money doesn’t really feel real yet it feels really untrue. Or looking in the mirror and seeing a larger body and wanting to be thinner and being like I am Finn might feel ridiculous to you, right? So I am willing to love myself where I am. I am willing to allow my body to do what it needs to do. I am willing to see myself getting thinner and thinner and take steps towards being that if that’s what you desire but ultimately it’s practicing, seeing yourself, telling yourself, and most importantly feeling it. Because at first you’re going to say things and you pee. It’ll probably feel weird or unreal or stupid or silly and authentic, but it takes practice because the other thing you have practiced for so long that that seems really true because it’s really practiced. Something you’re really good at believing you’ve given it tons of energy and you’ve had lots of confirmation. Your life has proven it to you over and over again. So learning a whole new belief system about yourself can feel really hard. But it is like everything. It’s practice, it’s commitment, it’s a commitment to yourself. I mean, the very fact of the matter is, my friends that none of this will work if you don’t actually do it. That’s the rub. I wish we could just hear this and be like, Oh, that’s great.

Oh, and then that like just instantaneously changes your mindset. But sadly, having just an intellectual understanding of something doesn’t generally create any real lasting change. It might start to shift some things, but it’s definitely not enough to really be a catalyst for transformation. Transformation is a journey. It is a practice. When you first go into yoga class, you’ve never done yoga before. Maybe you’re really stiff, maybe you don’t have a lot of mobility and flexibility. Maybe you feel really weak. So the class seems really hard. It feels daunting. You’re like, I don’t, I can’t do any of this. Oh my God, this is just, Oh, okay. But then you go back and then you continue and you go and you go and you go and you keep practicing and practice to sing. And slowly you begin to just be able to do things you couldn’t do before. And you’re like, Oh wow. That thing that used to be so hard and seemed so out of reach is now just so easy. And then you have the next thing that seems unattainable, the next challenge, the next belief. And then you started working on that. That’s what it’s all about. So how can you get out of your own way and start allowing yourself to tell a new story and to recognize what’s really, really possible for you. Thank you everyone. Have an amazing week.

The post Discovering What’s Standing In Your Way [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hello everyone. This is Emotional Medicine Coaching with your host Amber Desmond, Emotional Awareness Coach. Today I would really like to talk about our bodies, our relationships with our bodies and how on large I have noticed that most people view their body as an enemy. It’s something to be controlled, something to be quieted, something we can shut down or shut off that we spend a large portion of our lives trying to control our bodies. Even in like there is something outside of us like we, whoever we are, soul being, whatever it is, that somehow our body is something separate and not recognizing that the body is an extension of the mind of the soul, of the being. It is the mechanism that allows us to be here on this planet, spinning at breakneck speeds in an infinite universe that we don’t even fully comprehend. These bodies allow us the ability to be in this atmosphere, to eat, to feel, to experience and that is remarkable.

So no matter what your body type is or how old you are or what color you are or what gender you are, your body is not your enemy. It is truly a gift. I suffer from chronic pain issues. I spent many years really abusing my body and not recognizing my body as a part of me to love. It was only a part of me to control and to criticize and to try to intoxicate into the point of where we would be silent, where I could exist somewhat peacefully within my body, feeling like my body was a prison. And I feel like a lot of people feel that way. I’ve been a massage therapist for nearly 16 years now, and so I’ve definitely had a lot of hands on experience with people’s body insecurities, people’s relationships with their bodies beyond just the physical appearance also, but into the realm of pain and the realm of feeling and emotion and vulnerability, you know, really laying your hands on people and tapping into people’s emotional body through the physical body is really powerful.

A lot of people don’t really acknowledge that massage therapy isn’t just physically manipulating the tissues, but it’s also releasing a lot of emotions that get stored energetically within the tissue, as they call it. The issues in the tissues, meaning that, um, you know, a lot of [inaudible] the somatic based therapies, um, psychotherapy, the somatic release and the body keeps the score and recognizing the trauma and the impact on our physical bodies from experiencing even sexual abuse or PTSD, and how that plays a huge role in our physical well-being at more than even just like recognizing how our mental trauma, how mental beliefs, feelings can have major impacts on the physical body. Now, I, I was in seven car accidents throughout many years. Um, only one of which I was driving. So I’m not the world’s worst driver. Uh, it’s pretty amazing that I’ve had seven car accidents and I never ended up in the hospital or majorly injured or anything broken or bleeding.

I did, however, have a lot of muscular skeletal problems. Um, neck, back, shoulders, low back, hips. So many things. I um, in a lot of car accidents, several of them I was in the passenger seat in the front and was directly hit by the car. So the fact that I have lived through I think what like four car accidents where they hit me directly that I came out unscathed in the sense of alive, not bleeding, not broken, is pretty freaking remarkable and I’d like to acknowledge that and recognize and own like how incredible, but I believe that even though I experienced those seven car accidents and I’ve been a massage therapist for 16 years on top of that, which has caused a lot of strain on my physical body as well. I truly believe that a lot of my chronic pain issues maybe exacerbated from these particular physical in real life events, but in my personal belief system, I feel that the source of my pain is truly emotional.

It is a heavily finally crafted in her critic that I have been working with for many, many, many, many years. Getting to know what I’m telling myself about myself and my own relationship with me and recognizing the impact that these beliefs and feelings have had on not only my mental health but my physical health within my body and being someone who struggles with chronic pain issues. It has created a whole new dimension of forming a relationship with my body beyond just, you know, the typical stuff that women tend to go through. Let’s just wait. Aging, changing, all the different things that we are told continuously that we need to be an order to be desirable, acceptable, important, noticeable, valuable in our culture that we should be thin and fit and strong and empowered and never age and be perfect mothers and perfect career women and perfect wives and perfect partners and perfect daughters and perfect sisters and perfect friends and just the amazing amount of pressure that women have in our culture to really embody all of these different roles.

And on top of that stay perfectly fit and perfectly beautiful and perfectly youthful and never have too many emotions and always be agreeable. I mean, there’s an incredible feminist movement right now and I’m really grateful to be here to watch this, this next wave of feminism and exploration and growth as, as women on a whole. And I just think that it’s so powerful and I think that that’s going to have a major impact on our relationships with our bodies. On a whole mat. We may not see it. Whoever, I don’t know what generation you are listening. As far as my generation, I don’t know if we’ll see the full impact of what’s happening now in our lifetimes. By the time we, we transitioned to the uh, non-physical, but I’m excited to be here on this journey and to witness what’s transpiring right now. But I would like to just take a moment and have a little, a little meditation with you so you can journey within yourself and explore what you’re feeling about your body. What beliefs are you holding? What subconscious beliefs are you holding about your physical body, about your weight, about aging, about your physical wellbeing, your level of fitness, health? Are you feeling pain? Do you have mental illness? How does that impact you to suffer from depression and anxiety? Are you menopausal? How are your hormones playing into your relationship with your body? There’s so many things. Oh, and also PMSA and currently being menstrual and how much we can go through ups and downs and then being on birth control and, or being pregnant. And all of these, all of these links to our physicality, to our being-ness within ourselves. So just taking a moment, closing your eyes, taking some really nice slow, deep breaths. You can sit down, you can lay down whatever feels comfortable for you. I just want you to really be present. Really take them [inaudible] moment to dip in, tip into deep self. Feel the inner body, the resonating vibe. [inaudible] the operational energy that is your body. Just really breathing, connecting with the power breath has that breath is life. Breathing has a huge impact on our nervous system.

Letting the tension stress just melt. Melt into the chair, bed wherever you are. Just let it melt away. I’d like you to check in, check in and see, see where you might be struggling right now. Where are you having a hard time letting go?

Mind busy or is it still, what are you telling yourself right now? Do you have time for this? There dishes that need to be washed, kids need to be picked up.

Are you just antsy? Is it hard for you to rest, to be still set and just be with yourself?

Recognizing that we so rarely spend time just being with ourselves, just being just like, Oh, here, you’re with this body here with this body and I’m gonna. I’m going to consciously spend time with my physical body. It’s like visiting a friend. How are you? How have I been treating you? What have I been saying to you lately? What is the message I’ve been most adamantly giving you over and over again? Is it one of kindness, respect, understanding, or is it critical and harsh? Can lie working with you or against you? Am I valuing the gifts, having a body or am I taking for granted, but I am able to do by having this physical body you want to make love to my partner, to pet my animals. Take a warm bath to dive into a cool river on a hot summer’s day to lie down on a warm rock in the middle of a river raging around you. To be able to take in the warmth, the sturdiness of raw, to feel new river rushing all around you, to be able to hear it, to be able to smell all the smells and hear the birds. I feel the cool breeze on your skin. This is the gift
and that same potty that we continuously mag and scold and try to control still loves us. That our body is an obedient servant, that it does everything you tell it too. You might think that’s ridiculous because I tell it to be thinner, younger, more beautiful, more strong, less pain and it doesn’t do that [inaudible] but we tend to tell ourselves those things from a place of criticism and harshness, we don’t realize that the body is giving us what we’re asking for, but it’s actually giving us, staying fat, looking Haggard, feeling in, in pain. Because when you push against anything [inaudible] you get more of that. The universe doesn’t hear. Your body doesn’t hear. Be thin. Here’s, I don’t want to be thought. I don’t want to be old. I don’t want to feel this way. I want to be different. I should be different. Why is this this way? Why can’t I change? What is wrong with it?

Your body is not your enemy. Your body is your friend. You kind of go as far as saying you are your body in the sense that it is an extension of you. When we leave this body body and it stays behind as it is built to do, we are travelers here in these bodies, these amazing earth space suits that allow us to participate in this thing. We call it life.

We should take a moment and I want you to recognize whatever’s come up for you. Has there been a message that’s become clear or something you’ve been telling your body over and over again? Whenever that is, I want you to apologize to you [inaudible] body. I want you to take a moment, put your hands on your heart and really tell your body how else are you? Are you so sorry, body for being so harsh and cruel and demanding, taking you granted every day thinking that I have to torture you in order for you to change to be what I think you should be. I spend so little time truly recognizing how bad nymphos scent and beautiful you really are.

I give my body the love and support it needs to thrive. I’m so grateful for my body. [inaudible] no matter what the state your body is in right now, it deserves your love. It deserves your loving, passionate, Tinder patient presence. Your body wants to serve you. Your body is not here to torture you.

Your body is here to be a vessel creation and life. Could you take a couple nice, slow, deep reps as you let that sink in.

When you’re ready, slowly open your eyes, taking your surroundings and take me through you through the rest of the day or the evening into your dreams, whatever. Whenever you’re listening to this just let this sink in. Really, really feel it. Go to the mirror. Look at your body with new eyes.

Well, look at it as this beautiful, amazing gift, this incredible miracle that we don’t even yet fully understand scientific studies still don’t fully understand the miracle that is us. That is our mind, our nervous system, our intuition, our gut, how that has power, how our heart has a frequency and can radiate energy. It’s heart intelligence. It’s heart coherence. How our hearts can actually sync up with other hearts in, you know, some long distance. I don’t remember the actual distance, but it’s pretty freaking phenomenal and that your body is that body. Your body is that capable. Your body has all of those powers
regardless of your size, your weight, gender, how tall or short you are, the color of your skin, texture of your hair, whatever age you might be, however your teeth might look, whatever your skin looks like, it’s okay. It’s okay to be you. Whatever face you were born with, your face to hate one’s own face, to take a look at ourselves and hate it.

What a horrible punishment. How painful is it to see ourselves and see only inferiority or inadequacy and to completely miss the profound, miraculous and incredible beauty that stands before us.

I want you to take this with you, pondering, feel it, question it, meditate on it, doubt it, do whatever you need to do.

But I just really encourage you to continuously circle back to the fact that we are on a planet, in a universe of infinite expansion and possibility that we can’t even really comprehend and how truly strange it is to be anything at all. Thank you.

The post Body Positivity Meditation [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hi everyone. It’s Amber Desmond with Emotional Medicine Coaching at EmotionalMedicine,Coaching.com. I’m your host and self-awareness coach. So let’s get down to it today. I’d like to talk about self love. Self love is a major topic right now, which is incredible. It’s a buzz word. It’s on everybody’s mind. People are creating memes about it and that’s, I mean just what an amazing trend is. The trend of self love. I mean I remember just years ago, a couple of years ago that you said self love and people just kind of looked at you cross-eyed. Like what on earth are you talking about? Crazy person like do mean masturbation. It’s like no, I personally came across self love in a really powerful way through the teachings of Louise Hay. She was a real key figure in my own self love journey. She really brought it in a way that was incredibly understandable and digestible and I think that is really important because I think that it can be kind of a strange gray area.

So what I’d like to bring to this subject here is that self love. I think something really important to recognize and acknowledge is that self love is a practice that is a mindset and it is a lifestyle. It’s not something that you accomplish. It’s not like, you know, running a marathon is that you train for it and then you run the marathon and your win and then you’ve won the marathon and that’s it. Uh, you know, goal accomplished, done. I did that. Check that off the list. If it’s, it’s something that evolves, it grows, it changes, it shifts, it comes in layers. It definitely is something that I feel like once you build a foundation, it’s easier to stay in touch with it. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t fall off a self love wagon per se. I mean I feel like I’m somebody who genuinely practices self love and who loves themselves and that does not mean that I don’t still struggle and have really hard days and self doubt days is not some magical bubble of rainbows and sunshine that now I forever am just in a great mood and full of love all the time.

It’s, it’s a process and it’s, it really does require some deep digging to really get in touch with all of you because it’s really easy to love the parts of ourselves that are [inaudible] easy to love. You know, if you’ve got a lot of money in the bank or you’re really successful in your career and you’re really powerful or you’ve got a lot of status or you’re incredible athletes aware, you are incredibly fit and really proud of your fitness lifestyle or you know, whatever the many different things that we can approve of. Maybe you’re really creative or you’re super intellectual, you win awards for your intellect. These are parts that you probably really appreciate and enjoy and you openly share with other people about your skills and abilities. You know, if you probably do it humbly, I’m sure, but you still, you still know that like, Hey, you know, I’ve got that going on.

That’s my strength. That’s my area, that’s my jam. I’m really good at that and it’s something I’m proud of it. It’s something I’m willing to show others so that area doesn’t necessarily need a lot of work. That’s not the area that you’ve got to dig into and find the juicy could self love stuff because it’s just sort of a natural, easy place of power for you. Where it gets complicated is learning how to dive into yourself and explore all the ways that you don’t love yourself. Those are the places, and that is the beginning of where the self love journey begins, is recognizing shame, pain, past trauma, fear, guilt, anxiety, beliefs about your worth and value the voice in your head that tells you you’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re a loser, you’re never going to be successful. You’re never going to be good enough. You’re a terrible mother.

Nobody likes you. I mean, all the horrible inner critic stuff that can come up for us. I mean, each individual person can have their own very unique, special inner critic that is catered directly and specifically to their personal emotional struggles. And we might have similarities across the board, but everybody’s inner critic is their own special, special to them. Specialized voice that communicates to them exactly what they’re most afraid of and what they are most ashamed of about themselves and what they’re most fearful. Other people may think about them. A lot of like a great practice is to think what is the one thing or many things about me that I would never want anybody to know. Like if people knew this about me, then they wouldn’t love me or they wouldn’t like me or they wouldn’t want to date me or be close to me or hire me or whatever it is.

And that’s usually an incredible insight into the place that needs your love and attention the most. For me. I’ll offer up some of my own vulnerable journeys with my self love process and uh, there’s so many layers, so many layers that have just, I’ve been peeling over the years. I’m now 39 and I really feel like I started this journey at 29. Like really officially, I mean I’d always been a seeker and Explorer, but 29 was a real, a real catalyst of change and growth and transformation for me is what’s 10 years. And a lot, a lot, a lot has changed and shifted and grown and really transformed over those years. But I’m still, I’m still on the journey. I don’t know if I’ll ever be done. And that’s okay. You know, it’s like you’re never done loving your partner or your children. There’s always more.

Your, your relationships are always growing and evolving and shifting and changing and becoming and morphing and you know, from your child re you know, when your child’s little to when she’s or he is, you know, uh, you know, like eight or nine years old to when they’re a teenager to when they’re young adults to when they’re mature adults, you’re going to have very different relationships with your children in these very different times of their lives and vice versa. So of course as you grow and evolve, you’re going to be changing your relationship with yourself as well and recognizing and acknowledging your own growth and journey and the different people that you’re becoming. So part of my journey is my relationship with money has been, it’s been a, an area of shame and area of struggle. It’s been probably one of the harder area, harder areas of my life where I just feel like I keep hitting walls and feeling incredibly frustrated and angry with myself and it’s like, why?

Why can’t I get my shit together when it comes to money? Why am I struggling so hard? And I was so hard on myself even like no matter how hard I tried to be nice, like my programs and my deep shame around money was so strong that it was, it was really just destroying me for a long time. I’m not saying I’m completely out of the woods now, but I do feel that I am shifting drastically and dramatically as I really uncover the deep subconscious programming that has led me to the relationship that I have with money through the relationship I had with my parents and their relationship with money as I was growing up and how that had an impact on me. And recognizing that if I become aware of the beliefs that I’ve been carrying in the subconscious realm, which the subconscious controls so much of our lives, you know, cause the conscious Amber, the person you’re listening to now, you know, she’s this incredible empowered, intelligent, capable woman.

And so what’s like, why? Why has it been so hard for me to really come into my power when it comes to money? And it’s been a really, it’s been a really hard journey and I’m really discovering just more and more clearly and more and more deeply how much our beliefs about ourselves have such a tremendous impact on how we feel about ourselves and if how we feel about us is everything. Mastery of yourself is mastery of your life. If I don’t understand myself, if I don’t acknowledge and question, what am I feeling? What am I thinking? What am I believing? How are my thoughts and feelings about who I am having an impact on my life? Then I just kind of stumble around blindly. It took me having to really, really dig deep and discover that I had a really powerful belief that said, you’re not valuable.

Like, no, you’re not important. Or it’s like, what was what now I’m trying to remember the specific words. You don’t matter. That’s it. You don’t matter. And nobody cares. And this belief came many, many, many years ago in my formative years as a child based on the certain dynamics that were going on in our household and the internalized beliefs that I created around what was happening. So that means that some seven to eight year old part of myself created this story about my own worth and value and it was for my survival. So I formed culprit cope coping mechanisms to sort of counter that belief and I incredibly loving and giving and supportive of other people. I became a people pleaser. I became very codependent. I was always showing up for other people because of this deep belief that other people are more important. Other things are more important.

I’m only valuable when I am helping other people. And that could be a whole other podcast about codependency and childhood emotional neglect and so on and the impacts that that has on our lives. But just to bring it back around, this belief has not only impacted just my self esteem, it impacted me on just like multiple levels of, you know, my existence, but specifically with my career and moving forward, recognizing that this belief that like I don’t matter and nobody cares. Is that an abundance money mindset? Is that something that says success? It’s like, no, that is the opposite of success. It is definitely a sustain small, stay safe. You don’t matter. Nobody cares. Why bother? Don’t even try. You should just quit. You’re not good anyway. And it’s been a long, crazy, intense journey of me battling these different parts of myself. And so now as I’m aware of this, as I’ve come to see that this is what I believe, I’m now able to go back and what’s called like reparent so I could reparent that part of myself that decided long ago that she wasn’t important and that nobody cared.

And so, you know, not just having that realization doesn’t, you know, make the realization shift automatically. I’ve got to practice de escalating that belief. I’ve got to practice changing that belief. What is the opposite of that? Of course I matter and people do care and making that my mantra and making that the place where I step off, where I’m inspired, where I’m about to take action, the thing I want to tune into at that exact moment when I’m about to take a leap, I’m about to put myself out there and a job or a relationship or whatever it is, something that’s challenging. I’m going to practice being like I do matter and people do care. I matter and people do care. That is very powerful. I can feel it in my chest, I could feel it in my body. When I say that, the, the fear that comes up that’s like, that’s not true and that that is the work.

It is choosing to love yourself regardless despite of instead of these hurtful, painful, negative limiting beliefs, ideas and feelings that we’ve collected over the years. I can show up in a room and I may not be the most beautiful. I may not be the fittest, I may not be the most creative, I may not be the most successful. I may not be the most intelligent, the most strong, the most, the most athletic, you know, the most gifted or talented person in that room. But that does not mean that I do not deserve my own love. It does not mean that I’m not lovable because I’m not all of these things or even one of those things. I still deserve my love and others love because I’m a great person because I’m me because I’m uniquely me. Just as you are uniquely you are love should not be based on our successes and definitely not our physical appearance because everything is fleeting and changing physical beauty.

I mean you can age and be absolutely stunning as you age, you can age and still be beautiful. It’s just different. It’s a different version of you. And based on our culture and our cultural beliefs in America, youth is idolized. And so when you know, we’re just completely bombarded over and over. Can you just turn on TV and movies and everything is geared towards teenagers or young 20 something year olds. And so there’s just not a lot that says value value. You know, these older women in particular are, you know, older men get roles all the time, different, you know, are valued in a very different way than as women age. The depletion of a woman’s worth based on her physical appearance that she is no longer viable quotes sexually and that, that her sexuality and her physical beauty or youthfulness is what gives her value and credibility.

And that’s a really powerful message we’re all receiving. Even if it’s just subliminal and it’s, it’s getting to the point where it’s pretty blatant. It’s, to me it’s pretty hard to miss at this point. I mean if you just pick up any kind of beauty magazine, the amount of anti aging product ads is unbelievable. I actually did a little test one day where I got a bunch of them and I literally counted how many there were per page. Like based on the pages in the magazine, how many anti aging ads there were end. It was ridiculous. It was a huge, huge, ridiculous amount. And the hilarious thing is also a lot of these anti aging ads had like 20 something year old women in it or extremely airbrushed people and it was like, this is does this warped, this isn’t real. This is crazy. And even though my conscious mind, speaking of the unconscious and conscious, my conscious mind sees that it’s still registering on some level, I have to stay young to be attractive, to be important, to be noticed.

And that’s painful. I mean then don’t even just get into the weight stuff. I mean, goodness gracious, the whole weight war right now is just unbelievable and I’m, I’m so incredibly excited to be able to witness in my lifetime body positivity and women really fighting for the right to be seen and the right to be acknowledged as beautiful and valuable at many different sizes and shapes and colors and gender fluidity, fees and so on. I think it’s just, it’s an incredible time to be alive in many ways as far as I feel like the evolution of things that are taking place now and it’s also incredibly confusing and overwhelming at the same time. There is so much information out there that it can feel, it can feel really daunting and ah yeah there’s a lot of mixed messages but I think that recognizing that your physical size is going to change through time, your face, your body, things shift and change with age.

It’s just a part of life and it’s natural. But if we become super attached to having to look a certain way and be a certain way, accomplish a certain thing, it’ll have a certain amount of money, you know, be recognized as a certain kind of person in a certain sort of light. We’re going to lose sight of ourselves becoming attached to any particular way things have to be in order for you to be happy is, it’s the setup for, for really being incredibly disappointed and for failing ultimately because things change no matter what. Things change and and so just really recognizing like self love is, it’s really learning how to show up and be the person you are in that room full of all those different people that I, I described all the different stories that could exist in one room, different beauties and ages and levels of success and creativity and artistic abilities.

And you know, all the things, all the intellects and gifts that people have that no matter what, it’s okay for you to be who you are and to love who you are and to recognize and appreciate all of your own special gifts and talents and your own unique beauty and own that. Owning that it’s, it’s a choice. I can see somebody who’s younger, thinner, fitter, more quote, beautiful than I am, who has more money than I do, who’s got a quote, better job or a better house or a nicer car. All those things. And I could make that mean something about me and diminish myself. Or I can say, you know what? Good for her and that’s amazing and I’m going to choose to love myself anyway because self love and loving who we are and recognizing that it’s okay to be who we are.

It’s not about settling and sitting on a couch and just being like, I love myself so I don’t have to do anything. It’s about recognizing that self love is powerful booster for actual transformation and for creativity and for growth and inspiration. If you’re not spending inordinate amounts of time wishing you are something else and beating yourself up and all the energy that goes into that, think about all the freed up space. You have to actually create something to go out and seek the job that you’ve been wanting to take the risk to ask the person out to start exercising, to eat better, to you know, just discover who you really are and form a stronger relationship yourself. That is so empowering and that is a key to creating a truly magnificent life. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s talk on self love. I will continue to post and create and expand on all of these ideas. Thank you for joining me. You can find me on Instagram at emotional medicine, a medicine coaching on Instagram. Thank you everyone. Have a great week.

The post Self Love: An Ongoing Journey [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.

Hello everyone and welcome to Emotional Medicine with Amber Desmond. I am your emotional awareness coach. I am at www.emotionalmedicinecoaching.com and I’m here just to introduce myself today. I am new to this podcast universe and I wanted to come on and tell you all a little bit about myself. As I said, my name is Amber and I am an emotional awareness coach. And what that means is I help women dive into their beliefs about themselves, their thoughts, their thinking, their feelings, their emotions, what is holding them back, what is creating these same patterns and cycles and you know, habits that we keep getting stuck in and repeating over and over again. What is the cause? Why can’t we stop these things that are maybe hurting us or just keeping us small or unhappy or unfulfilled? Why are we unable to change these patterns for any long term time? Why do we keep falling back into the same patterns over and over again?

And it is my absolute deepest love and intention to help women like yourself. Find those answers, find those limiting beliefs, find those unconscious patterns that were formed long, long ago and to help you become aware. So if you can feel it, you can heal it. My journey started a long time ago when I was a teenager and I was seeking and I was depressed and anxious and confused and I made it my life’s purpose to explore what it really means to be a human being, what it means to have emotions, what and how can I experience my emotional self in, you know, a really healthy and connected and aware way. How can I be awake like really awake in my life and not keep falling into the hypnotic trance of our general society’s concept of what existing is. And it’s just work money, kids, house work, work, work.

Maybe have some sex with your partner, have some kids eat some good food, then you die. And that just wasn’t enough for me. And I really have just come so many people throughout my journey. I’ve had so many clients, friends, family, random strangers that I can see that they are also searching for the meaning for the deeper truth to their own lives. And knowing there is something more and there is and we are incredible, incredible, powerful beings. And my intention is to help unlock the real power and fire and amazing passion that lives inside each and every one of us. And for us to be able to harness that energy and to create a more satisfying, fulfilling, exciting, engaging life of curiosity and play. Not just the monotony of doing the same thing over and over again. Or maybe your only escape or enjoyment is, you know, having those glasses of wine after work and whatever it is.

But learning how to be present with all the aspects of yourself, all your emotions because that my friends is the key. You know, you’ve got to feel it to heal it. And that means sometimes it means getting really uncomfortable and moving way outside of our comfort zones. And when we do that, we burst the bubble of our self created limitations and that that is what I aim to do. And I’m going to create a podcast every week involving body image and self esteem and self love, and mostly about reflecting on our beliefs and how our beliefs impact all of those things I just mentioned my beliefs about I value what am I capable of? Am I valuable? Do people value me? Do I value myself? Do we truly know what loving myself means? What would someone who loved themself do? What does that mean? How does my life look when I’m loving myself, when I’m taking care of myself, when I’m honoring each and every feeling that comes up, even if it burns and it hurts, I’m going to recognize my ability to be with that, to acknowledge my power because we are so powerful or so powerful and we just do not give ourselves enough credit at all in our lives and we are too terrified, most of us, of our, of our own thoughts.

We don’t even want to think our own thoughts because our minds seem like these incredible, chaotic, messy, scary places filled with things we don’t want to even think about or look at. That is where had amazing creative power lives is in exploring, exploring this bizarre, dark nooks and crannies in ourselves to unleashed the fullness of who we really are, our true, authentic power. And to be able to harness that and express that and use that in our lives and create from a place of wholeness. Self-compassion, loves sensuality, empowerment. How can we take all of those parts of us, even the parts guilt, the shame, and guilt and fear and pain and trauma, and integrate those parts into us to find the juice that lives inside all of those feelings and all those past experiences. They don’t have to be things that create only pain and sadness and limitation. They are places of transformation waiting to happen. So it is my goal to weekly post here on this podcast, new ways for us to explore all those parts of ourselves from the nitty gritty, ugly, dark, scary to the beautiful, succulent, passionate and empowered. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you.

The post What is Emotional Awareness Coaching? [PODCAST] first appeared on Emotional Medicine Life Coaching.