Have you ever experience loneliness? Most of us have.
Have you ever explored your feelings of loneliness? We have days when we feel lonely or disconnected. The idea of loneliness stems from the belief that we are separated from everyone and everything. In looking at our loneliness we can begin to explore our belief about who we think we are. Are we this solid body that we so connect with, that we feel, that we see? Or are we spirit?
The actions we take to satisfy loneliness when we are connected to our physical self is always outside of us. We look for someone or something that can make the loneliness go away. When we know who we are, spirit, we don’t feel lonely because were connected to everyone and everything. We can know we are spirit in our minds but do we feel it in our knowing?
The easiest way to know where you are, is to look at how you Medicate around your feelings of loneliness. Loneliness is very hard to sit with. The feelings can be extremely overwhelming. So I urge you to explore what you do to suffocate the feelings of loneliness. Most people reach out to connect with other people, just to not feel the utter emptiness. Other meditators can be alcohol, drugs, shopping, or even negative thoughts.
I would say that loneliness is one of the main feelings with most people. I think Facebook is a way to medicate loneliness. Have you noticed how many people seem to post and check their Facebook obsessively? They seem to be fighting their feelings of loneliness.
We do seem to be social creatures needing contact but what if we could stop needing the contact? There is a part of me that believes that we are meant to be with people, to be in partnership but I also believe that it is our learning to grow from our aloneness. To just know that we are connected to everyone and everything, which would mean that we are never alone.
Can we embrace ourselves and other women in our pure femininity and beauty?
When we as women can look into our past without regret or shame knowing it was a learning experience and is brought us to our wise self, we bring all women closer to becoming their true self. When we self realize we help others become present to their strengths and wisdom.
When I witness another woman having self-respect and honoring herself, it reminds me of the importance of standing in my power and how it affects others. I’m not sure we understand the impact we have on others just with our behaviors.
When we see this divine in ourselves we start seeing it in other women, this is when we start seeing our body and mind as a holy vehicle, appreciating the feminine in us regardless of our age. We can look at all her beautiful sisters and appreciate their experiences as well rather than seeing other women as competition. It’s a beautiful thing to look at another woman and see the cycle she is in and honor her for where she is.
There are so many reasons for women to honor and embrace who they are. And every time one woman chooses to do this, all women move closer to this as well. When we do our work around ourselves and we bring our authentic selves out into the world, we help people to see who they are. This is one of the biggest gifts that I see in my retreats, people coming into whom they really are and finding inner peace.
Embracing our womanhood will allow us to shine from the inside out with all of the beauty, strength and wisdom that we will ever want to possess. In this aging process I have had to adjust my mind and embrace his beautiful being that I am and with that I can show up for other women in their journey.
I have found that no matter what age we are it is so important to have the support of your mother. I lost my mother when I was 26 years old and even though she wasn’t the most supportive mother, the little bit she did support felt lost when she died.
I notice in all of my mother-daughter retreats whether they are teens or adult daughters, the daughter is always looking to the mother for advice, support, and love, the need for a mothers care never seems to dwindle. The mother-daughter relationship is a very sensitive connection and it’s important to make sure that it’s healthy. This is why my mother daughter retreats are life-changing.
I just wrapped up in adult mother-daughter retreat where both mom and daughter came in completely closed off to each other and it was breaking both of their hearts. The daughter was very sensitive and needing love and acceptance from her mother. Through the retreat they came out the other end after looking at their own behaviors, projections and old beliefs and shifting them. One of the biggest things I noticed was the adult daughter still looking for the mother’s love and support. It just doesn’t seem to ever go away.
The daughter will see herself through the mother’s judgments unless she does work on herself to know that no matter how her mother shows up she is okay. Even though we work on them owning their own feelings, when a mother shows compassion and support it helps the daughter reconnect with herself.
The mother-daughter dynamic is so special and when it is broken it is hard for a daughter to be big in the world unless personal work is done and she has moved through it. It is possible for a daughter to not have the support of a mother and be perfectly healthy although when the mother is involved in the transformation, it makes a big difference.
How do you move into your center, to be with yourself?
It’s interesting that most of us avoid our life. It seems like this would be a pretty tough thing to do. Our lives are so busy with day-to-day activities like sleeping, showering cooking, running errands, work and also a lot of busy stuff that actually distracts us and keeps us from looking at what’s going on in our life.
One of the best ways to go inside and be with your center is be quiet and be with ourselves so that we can hear what’s going on with our inner voice and see what comes up. It’s also nice to find silence and just watch our thoughts and not attached to them.
It’s exhausting to not even know what this inner voice is saying and be on autopilot, just acting out of it. If we just take the time to quiet our minds it allows us to connect to what it is saying so we can either make a decision to act out of it or not.
To start the process of being more present and less absent in your life, you may want to set aside just a few minutes in the morning and maybe at night to just sit and be with yourself. Not reading a book or watching a movie but just sitting and going inward so that you can see what you may be avoiding inside.
I love sitting in the morning. I meditate and to see what comes up. It’s a moment when I get to be with myself, loving myself, exploring myself and giving my body a moment to not be in action.
In all of my retreats, whether it be, the intensive, the mother-daughter, or the couples retreat you will learn how to sit and be with yourself, love yourself and replenish your spirit.
If you are easily agitated, a personal retreat would help you to see what is going on and move through it.
What I notice with people that are on edge and easily agitated, is that there have been many triggers that have built up. What happens is life does what life does and if we don’t go inside and reflect on how we feel about certain situations, it will get the best of us.
Life isn’t going to be all peaches and cream and happy, happy, it is going to be up and down. It’s really all about how we perceive the situation and act on it. If we are triggered we need to explore our old patterns and beliefs around the trigger, not just pretend it didn’t happen. When people are easily agitated it’s usually because they haven’t been doing their internal work. They’re on autopilot in their life, just trying to make it through.
One area I notice that this shows up is with moms and daughters, because there is a familiarity and this feeling that family will be there no matter what, so the agitation tends to be projected onto family members more. This is why adult mother-daughter retreats are so powerful because both mother and daughter learn about their triggers with each other and how to move through them and do their healing instead of dump their feelings onto each other. It’s so transformational to do this work together.
I had a friend come stay the weekend awhile back and I noticed that she was a bit snappy because she had a lot going on in her life and when we talked about it she realized it was because she wasn’t processing through it. It is so important to process through the turbulence in our life so that this turbulence doesn’t stay in our body.
How can you stay calm in this world of total chaos?
How do we maintain a sense of calm in a world of unrest? The world is pretty chaotic right now and it’s important for us to maintain an inner calm so we don’t add to the chaos. Something I have noticed with what’s going on politically is that even the spiritually balanced people seem to be getting extremely upset.
Have you ever been around someone that no matter what the situation holds they maintain an inner peace that makes everyone around them feel less anxious? It’s important to go inward and find out why we are taking what ever it is outside of us personally and therefore creating chaos inside of ourselves. If we can figure out how to stay calm and chaotic times it will help us to function better in turmoil.
It is our inner-chatter of our ego minds that throw us off balance with every piece of disturbing news that comes our way. When we listen to our ego mind it puts us in a very emotional state, which makes our thoughts very unreliable. The thoughts from our lower mind are all fear-based. So when we hear things on the news we immediately go into fear with our ego chattering and then we become off-balance.
The idea is to find our stillness through our higher minds through all situations that cause volatile emotions. When we find this place inside of us, this inner knowing that all is well, we provide a safe place for friends and family. Being around people that find that still place inside them selves is very comforting.
Most of the time these unsettling feelings come from feeling out of control. So part of coming back into balance and letting go is surrendering to what is and realizing we don’t have to control everything. Actually we have little control over anything. Besides doing your inner work around how you feel it’s always good to continue to meditate, Journal and read spiritual books that always helps us come back to ourselves.
Attaching meaning to neutral events can create a lot of suffering in our Lives.
The meaning we place on our experiences whether it be disturbing or pleasant, completely determines how much we suffer or don’t. The actual event is very neutral but our mind translates the event through our woundedness. It is critical to know how we see things through our belief system so that we cannot buy into them and create a more positive outlook.
If we see the world through our wounded self it will have an affect on how we feel about ourselves, other people in the world. If we want to see the world in a more positive way it’s important to see things through our higher mind.
An example of this might be if you get laid off at work and you are having difficulty finding a new job, you have a choice how you view the situation. You can either see it through your lower mind that says you’re not good enough or something’s wrong with you or that this is a new and exciting time for you to explore other areas of your life and it’s an opportunity for higher learning.
It doesn’t matter what the event is you have a choice to view it as an opportunity to grow or a negative experience. Whether it is a loss of a job, an illness, loss of money, or a fight with a loved one. All of these events don’t have meaning until your mind places meaning on them. Life is always happening around us and it is never just happy, happy. It comes with ups and downs, like getting a fantastic job that we absolutely love than three years later losing that fantastic job and having difficulties finding a new one.
Our suffering comes from the lens we see things through. When we start to bring consciousness to what we are making things mean, we may be surprised at the messages we’ve been feeding ourselves all these years. We have the choice to view things in a positive or negative manner, what choice will you make?
Not only are people afraid of telling the truth they don’t like to hear the truth. It’s amazing what people do to get out of being truthful. I get it; it’s difficult and uncomfortable. I just had a situation where I was getting to know someone, dating them and I came to a place where I knew it wasn’t yes, it was a no. It was very clear to me how I felt and yet there was still discomfort around telling him the truth. What came up for my little girl was that she doesn’t want to do something wrong and if you make someone feel bad, than she is making them fell bad. No one can make anyone feel bad; everyone is responsible for their own. So the first thing I do is get to my little girl and let her know she is not responsible for how other people feel and that we are allowed to speak your truth.
It’s critical to know what your little girl’s old beliefs are so when faced with emotions, you are able to figure them out and not act out. Most of the time when we are uncomfortable sharing our truth it is because we are buying into the belief system that is ego based.
We have all been in a place where we have a piece of truth that we were afraid to share because it wouldn’t land well on the other person. There have also been instances where we are not able to handle the truth coming at us. A perfect example of this on a small level is for the last two years my air conditioning repair guy has been telling me that I need a new unit, because my unit is 22 years old. I just didn’t want to hear this for obvious reasons, money. On a bigger level we may not want to accept that someone close to us is pushing us away.
It is almost always pretty clear to see things we don’t want to see if we choose to but we have a sneaky way of hiding the truth from our self, no matter how obvious it is.
We mostly avoid the truth because it scares us, makes us uncomfortable or angry and we don’t know what to do with it. Ultimately, there is no way to avoid the truth, so the sooner we are real with ourselves and look at it, the better we will handle the situation, the more authentic our relationship will be with herself and others.
I read this short piece of an article about shame and found it interesting and though I would give you my slant on it. It’s from DailyOm, which I love and I think it’s a great topic. Here it is:
Shame is a loaded word for Westerners. Like most things, it can be seen in a positive or negative light. Negative shame is accompanied by guilt and self-denigration. It is pointless and doesn’t help us even slightly. Positive shame, on the other hand, is recognizing when we’ve harmed ourselves or anyone else and feeling sorry for having done so. It allows us to grow wiser from our mistakes. Eventually it dawns on us that we can regret causing harm without becoming weighed down by negative shame. Just seeing the hurt and heartbreak clearly motivates us to move on. By acknowledging what we did, cleanly and compassionately, we go forward.
The word shame to me has a negative connotation and as long as it’s shame it isn’t positive. The definition is: A feeling of guilt, regret, or sadness that you have because you know you have done something wrong. : ability to feel guilt, regret, or embarrassment. : dishonor or disgrace.
We can admit our mistakes and clean up our mess without feeling shameful or guilty. The feelings of shame and guilt come from our ego beating us up. What if when I make a mistake, I simple don’t judge it as being bad, I just look at how I want to shift my belief system, clean up my mess with the situation and feel good about the learning. I don’t believe it has to have shame or guilt. Shame and guilt comes from a possible old belief of always doing something wrong, something is wrong with me, or I’m not good enough.
We are humans suffering with the human condition. We are going to make mistakes! It’s what we do with the mistakes after they are made that is important. If we make mistakes, clean up our mess and keep making them, we might want to take a look at that. And if we make a mistake and beat ourselves up, that would be another area to look at.
I think if we are conscious about our actions before, during and after, we will be better equipped to live our lives from a more awakened state. Let go of your shame and guilt around being human, you are going to make mistakes. Just clean up your mess and be conscious not to continue making the same mistake.
How important is it to you to be bonded to your mother or your daughter?
Becoming more and more obvious to me is how important the mother-daughter relationship is. It seems to be so close when we are younger, then we go through our teenage years and it becomes a struggle and sometimes we make it to the other side after our teenage years. But what I see often is a more tumultuous relationship with the adult daughter and mother.
I think we have an understanding for going through difficult times when our kids are teenagers but when we become adults, we expect to be able to work through our issues and have a harmonious relationship. This is not always the case. What usually happens is the issues from childhood get stuck in us as an adult and tend to play them out in our adult life. In other words if we don’t clean up our childhood wounding we will act out of it more times than not.
It’s important for us to look at what happened in our childhood and use these situations to do our healing so that we can show up as mature adults acting out of our higher self. Otherwise we look like adults but we are acting like children! I’m sure you have seen this playing out in many adults.
In my adult mother-daughter retreats, both mother and daughter will learn how their childhood wounding is showing up in their life as an adult. They will also learn how to shift the limiting beliefs that they created and move into a place of love in this relationship. I have seen powerful shifts with these mother-daughter retreats. I always feel so honored to witness the love coming forward that has always been there, but has been blocked by the wounding.
Our biggest healing can come from our mother daughter relationships!
These mother-daughter retreats not only strengthen the mother-daughter bond of love for each other, they help shift all relationships in their lives. When we work through and heal our wounds from our childhood and shift our limiting beliefs we show up for self and others in a more loving way. Ultimately this is what we want to do and when we don’t show up in a loving way it moves us out of alignment with our self.
The reason to enter into a partnership is to create something greater than we can create alone. Not because we have a hole inside of us that needs to be filled but more because we want to heal the hole inside of us.
Going into a relationship requires both parties to be conscious and awake regarding their own patterns. If we have one person that’s willing and the other is not it will be pretty hard to create a coherent holy relationship. When I say holy relationship I mean where both parties know that the relationship is bringing up old stuff to be healed and they do their work around it and don’t project. Therefore creating a very vulnerable and intimate relationship together.
So it’s very important to choose a partner that is willing to look at his or her own patterns and work toward healing them. What I often see while working with couples is that one person is willing to own their own wounding and the other person isn’t and therefore a lot of issues are swept under the rug and they cannot reach a resolve. So if you are single and you do this type of spiritual work, it is important for you to move slowly and consciously in regards to looking for a life partner.
People that rush into partnership are usually trying to fill a need rather than create a holy union that serves their personal growth. Most of the time relationships are just a place to park your woundedness and not heal it. This behavior isn’t okay for people on a spiritual path, because these relationships feel stifling.
I just wrapped up a one-day retreat with a couple and the beautiful part about both of them was their commitment to their own growth through the relationship. In this retreat they learned the tools needed to do their separate work so they could create a powerful, loving, conscious relationship.
I believe that this is what we all want but we don’t know how to achieve it. If your partner isn’t able to look at his or her patterns, a couples retreat would be a great place to start. At least after the couples retreat you will have the tools needed to go deeper into your own limiting beliefs so that you don’t project them on your partner.
The importance of speaking your truth can sometimes feel like a life or death situation. If we hold our truth in it feels like it might eat us alive. Keep in mind the truth I’m talking about is from the higher self not from the ego mind. When we stop the ego from acting out this is a good thing.
I have a client that faced having to act out of her truth and build a bigger wall between her and her daughter or just pretending and making nice just to keep her relationship with her. She had to disengage from the situation, knowing that her daughter’s decisions have nothing to do with her. That this is her daughter’s learning and that part of her learning is to let go, not judge the situation and not take what her daughter is saying personally.
This may have been an easier situation to handle if it would’ve been a friend or colleague but it was her daughter, which makes the cost so much higher. If the mother wouldn’t have spoken her truth and just held it in, resentment would’ve grown and eventually she would projected onto her daughter anyway.
In some important for us to stand in our truth, even if it means the loss of loved ones. I know that I have told the story before about my father and his drinking, but here it goes again. When my mother died, my father became a full-time alcoholic or before he was just a binging alcoholic. I would take my daughter’s then four and five years old over to see him and he would be drunk. I asked him if there was any time during the day where he wasn’t drinking where I would be able to bring the girls over to see him. He accused me of telling him to stop drinking, when actually I just wanted to know if there was a time when he wasn’t to bring the girls. I made this choice because it was a healthy choice for my girls and myself, didn’t see it that way and continued to drink my father so I stopped seeing him.
This felt like a very conscious choice for me but a hard decision to make because my dad thought I was being a horrible daughter. But I was just taking care of the needs of my daughters and myself. So I had to let go and not take it personally. So the loss was huge for me because I lost the relationship with my father. Even though I know that having a relationship with an alcoholic isn’t really a relationship with love and connection anyways.
It is very tricky when looking at speaking your truth because we have to make sure it’s her truth from our higher self not our ego minds so before we speak our truth we first must examine where it’s coming from. Then and only then do we either take action that supports our truth or speak if we need to.
I would say that loneliness is one of the main feelings with most people. I think Facebook is a way to medicate loneliness. Have you noticed how many people seem to post and check their Facebook obsessively? They seem to be fighting their feelings of loneliness.
