Personal growth

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

September 13, 2018 By gwynn

Without the ‘dark’ I would never understand how light the ‘light’ really is. And while I don’t care for the dark, I do appreciate what it does for the light. ~Craig D. Lounsbrough

Change is supremely inconvenient, uncomfortable and naturally scary. Yet we only move through life through the process of change, reinvention and renewal, and so bravery is our quintessential rebel for pushing us past our own limiting beliefs and behaviours. Bravery is feeling the fear, immersing yourself into it and through it so you can come out the other side. ~Christine Evangelou, Rocks Into Roses: Life Lessons and Inspiration for Personal Growth

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. ~Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Within each of us is strength, power, and daring. Our own. That of our ancestors. Within each of us is resilience, love, hope. Within each of us is a knowing, a trusting, a believing. It is there. We may not feel it. We may not be able to admit it is there, we may not be able to see it, but it is there all the same.

The work of reclamation is to unearth and reclaim these parts of our Self that we have buried, pushed down, ignored, or truly did not believe existed. It requires us to reclaim our bodies as ours, our strengths and skills and talents, our inner power and knowing, our courage, bravery, and daring to break patterns and cycles, to become the people we want to be.

Reclaiming those parts of our Self we thought lost, or worse that they never existed, is work that can only be done after the work of releasing and creating space, and allowing for the time of renewal to integrate the openness into our being. Once that space exists and is truly a part of us, we can begin to see those parts of us we couldn’t before. Those parts of us that we were told were vile, were ugly, or simply weren’t there in the first place.

Reclamation is the time of deeply and viscerally realizing that what we were told is “too much” about us is actually our strength, our power. Of realizing all the ways we were told we are “not enough” is actually where our courage, our bravery, our daring lives. Of realizing all the shame we carry isn’t ours, that we were never meant to have it living within our being.

Then, once we have all these realizations and can feel them in our bodies and at the core of our being, the work of reclamation becomes relatively easy.

I’ve described all these stages of this work in a linear fashion, first one then the next then the next. And while it is true that in many ways one stage does need to proceed the next it is also true that we are constantly doing all these stages of this work simultaneously.

I envision the path of this work to be like a three dimensional spiral. We travel along it, around and around, up and then down, revisiting the same narratives, the same wounds, but at different layers and from different perspectives each time. The work is perhaps never actually “complete” and yet with each layer we find our ways closer to the person we truly want to be, the person we truly are, and finding more and more freedom from the leash of our own trauma and the trauma of living in our current western culture.

I talk more about these ideas in the 6-minute video here.

This essay is the fourth and final of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring. I hope you have found it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed. We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women. You can learn more here.

In case you missed the previous essays, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring (this essay)

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving

September 6, 2018 By gwynn

Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. ~Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

And I feel like the Queen of Water. I feel like water that transforms from a flowing river to a tranquil lake to a powerful waterfall to a freshwater spring to a meandering creek to a salty sea to raindrops gentle on your face to hard, stinging hail to frost on a mountaintop, and back to a river again. ~María Virginia Farinango, The Queen of Water

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. ~Anaïs Nin

According to Merriam-Webster to renew has the following definitions:

to restore to existence : revive
to make extensive changes in : rebuild
to begin again : resume
replace, replenish
to become new or as new
to begin again : resume

If we look in the thesaurus, some synonyms for renewal are:

awaken
transform
metamorphosis
revolution
shift
radical change

When I think of renewal I think of the story of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess of Heaven and Earth. The very condensed version of the story is that Inanna travels to the Underworld to be with her grieving sister, Ereshkigal. Inanna had to travel through seven gates on her way down into the Underworld, leaving a piece of clothing behind at each gate to enter into the Underworld completely naked. The descent into the Underworld and removal of layers of clothing represents Release. Her time in the Underworld represents Renewal.

Ereshkigal was not happy to see her sister and had her hung on a hook to die. Inanna’s handmaiden, Ninshubar came after three days and helped Inanna back up through the gates, reclaiming what is rightfully hers at each gate, and back to the land of living.

This time in the Underworld, hanging on a hook dead, was the time of Inanna’s renewal, her own transformation, her incubation that lead to her rebirth.

It was her time in The Goo.

If you are new to me and my work, The Goo is the time in the cocoon when the caterpillar has fully disintegrated and decomposed yet not yet formed into a butterfly or moth. My feeling is that this is a very uncomfortable time. The Goo is no longer what it was (a caterpillar) and also isn’t yet what it is to become (a butterfly or moth) and honestly I believe The Goo has no idea what the future holds for it, and so it is a time of unknown, a time of needing to trust in the future without being able to see it. It is the time of great change, great shifting, profound transformation.

While The Goo is uncomfortable, likely terrifying, it is a time of quiet restructuring. To the outside world when we are in our own versions of The Goo, it may look like we are doing a whole lot of nothing or that we are resting. This is because The Goo is not a time doing, it is a time of being. It is a time of outer stillness in many ways. Not stagnant, for there is much movement internally, but stillness to allow for the internal restructuring and integration to take place.

The Goo is when we learn what it is to tolerate discomfort, to accept the unknown, to be able to be in the in-between spaces of life without trying to force things in one direction or another. It is a time of acceptance. Of surrender. Of allowing what needs to happen to happen.

It is not an easy time. Like the stage of release, but to a greater degree, it is a time of unlearning, unraveling. A time of allowing old neuropathways to atrophy and new ones to sprout and take root. It may be a physically painful time, it is always an emotionally painful time, and there may even be moments of psychological pain as we let go of old coping mechanisms that no longer serve us, but in fact are now causing us harm.

The Goo may feel unbearable at times, but it does not last forever. Even the most profound of transformations do come to an end (to allow us to move into a new time of transformation). The discomfort doesn’t last forever, pain does pass. The person we become on the other side, I believe, is worth all the work, and discomfort.

I talk more about these ideas in the 8-minute video below.

This essay is the third of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring. I hope you find it helpful and informative.

In case you missed the other essays and videos in this series, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving (this essay)

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

August 30, 2018 By gwynn

You cannot let go of anything if you cannot notice you are holding it. ~Neale Donald Walsch

Letting go helps us live in a more peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. It allows others to be responsible for themselves and for us to take our hands off situations that do not belong to us. This frees us from unnecessary stress. ~Melody Beattie

We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle. ~Marilyn Monroe

Last week I shared with you where these stories of being too much and not enough and the shame we carry originates. Not a one of us were born with these stories, and yet they seep into our skin, bones, and sinew and impact the ways we are in the world and with ourselves.

Here’s a thing though: we don’t have to hold onto these narratives. We don’t have to allow the shame to continue coursing through our being. We can do the work of release, renewal, and reclamation – over time, with patience, practice, and self-compassion. It is work that is done in layers, over and over throughout our lifetimes. It is work that is perhaps never actually done, and yet the more we are able to move through the process the more we are able to move ourselves from a space of living only to survive and into a place of living to thrive.

As I mentioned last week, naming the narratives is a vital first step in this work. Until we name those stories that spin through our heads, and consider where they came from, we can never move into the work. After we name the narratives and realize they are not our own but were given to us by our families and culture, we can move into the space of release.

Release does not happen over night. It does not happen simply because we think it or wish it. It requires intention, ritual, practice. It requires patience, self-compassion, and time. It requires a deep, visceral understanding that these stories are not yours to carry.

A truth is we can know, logically, in our minds that these stories are not ours; that they are not actually true; that they have little to actually do with us, individually and everything to do with us collectively. However, knowing in our minds is not the same as deeply knowing in our bodies, in our core being.

To move from a mind knowing to a body knowing means… you guessed it… coming home into our bodies, finding where those stories live in our muscles and cells, and inviting them to leave, allowing for an openness to be where these stories once lived.

Coming into our bodies and releasing these stories that affect us in so many ways, is challenging work. It is uncomfortable in the beginning. And yet the shifts that come from this work can be amazing.

When we intentionally do the work of acknowledging those stories that do nothing more than cause us harm, we are able to begin to move into new ways of being with ourselves and others. This new way of being takes time to integrate into our bodies, minds, and spirit. It requires space for shifting which means that we need to learn to tolerate that sense of openness, that may mistakenly feel like emptiness, so our new ways of being can take root and grow. (More on this next week. Stay tuned.)

I talk about these ideas in the 9-minute video below.

This essay is the second of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring. I hope you find it helpful and informative.

Links to other essays in this series:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame (this essay)

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

August 23, 2018 By gwynn

You cannot heal what you will not unveil.

~Sanjo Jendayi

You will be too much for some people. Those are not your people.

~Unknown

The most important day is the day you decide you’re good enough for you. It’s the day you set yourself free.

~Brittany Josephina

Let’s talk about our stories of how we are too much; how we are not enough; and all the shame we carry within our bodies. Super fun topics, right?

Here’s a thing about these narratives we carry in our minds and bodies and spirits need to be named. They need to be brought out of the dark shadows they live in and into the light.

Naming these narratives we all carry is powerful. It actually helps us to claim power over these stories instead of allowing them to run rampant in our unconscious and impact the ways we connect (or don’t connect) with others and with ourselves.

Naming these narratives, admitting that we each carry them in our minds and bodies and beings, is only the first step however. Once we have named them we need to find intentional ways to release them from our systems; to create space for our own incubation and transformation (and learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, because believe me, transformation is very rarely, if ever, comfortable) and to reclaim those parts of ourselves that we hidden, stuffed down, and or ignored: our own strengths, power, and daring.

Before we can move into this process however, I believe it helps to understand where these stories may come from, how they get under our skin and into our being.

I believe these narratives come to us from two different types of trauma.

The first is inter-generational trauma. I define inter-generational trauma as the trauma that is passed down to us by our family of origin through their words and actions. It is a lived experience trauma and we all experience it to varying degrees starting when we are very young. It is passed down in the ways we are told what we “can” or “can’t” do, how we “should” or “shouldn’t” act. It is passed down in the language used in our families and the ways we are told we are wrong, told we can’t trust our own inner wisdom, told we don’t know what we are talking about (even if we are actually an expert in the particular topic).

It is passed down in the ways we are silenced by our families, in the ways we experience from our primary caretakers that we require too much of their time or energy, that we are too loud, too opinionated, too fat, too thin, too quiet, too sexual, too studious, we take up too much space, we are simply too much.

It is passed down in the ways we are told we aren’t (good) enough by those who are supposed to love us unconditionally. It is passed down in the ways we are encouraged to compete, how we are reminded that our sibling/friend/neighbor/enemy/person we have never met is better at this thing or that thing (or all things) than us. It is passed down in the ways we are corrected (often “for our own good”). It passed down in the overt and subliminal messages we receive that our best efforts are never good enough.

All of these messages are passed down to us both unintentionally and intentionally by our caregivers. Likely all these messages were also passed down to them as they were passed down to our grandparents by their parents, and so on up our family tree.

These messages are most damaging because they come from the people we rely on for our very survival. These messages impact the ways we are able to form attachment bonds with not only our caregivers, but in later life with our intimate partners and close friends.

These messages are then solidified through what I call Cultural Relational Trauma (CRT). CRT is the trauma we experience living in our current patriarchal, white supremacist, misogynist, ablist, hetero and CIS gender-normative, capitalist culture. It is in the ways we other people not like ourselves. It appears in the media, in our homes, in our schools, in our places of worship.

It also shows up in the ways we judge ourselves. If we do not meet the “standard” or “normal” or “expected” ways of being in this world, due to our gender, the color of our skin, the ways our body functions, whether we have “enough” financial resources, etc, we internalize the message that there is something wrong with us. We internalize the message that we are not good enough. That we are too much in some ways. And the shame of who we are, how we exist, burrows deep into our bones.

Essentially, if we are not a white, CIS-gendered, hetero-sexual, able-bodied, wealthy male who has a strong dose of toxic masculinity running in our being, well… then we are certainly considered by our culture to be “not normal” and thereby not good enough and to take up too much space. Furthermore, we also receive the message of how we should feel shame for not meeting these “normative standards.”

I want to quickly clarify that something being normal does not make it right or just. Racism and misogyny are normal in our current culture. Neither is right or just.

We receive these messages from our families and the messages are compounded by the outside world. It is no wonder how we have internalized these narratives. Culturally speaking, this is intentional. What I mean by that is the status quo requires us to buy into the messages of how we aren’t enough, how we are too much, and how we should feel shame, so it can keep on keeping on. If those narratives weren’t running through our minds, bodies, and being 24/7, can you imagine the world we would live in? I am highly doubtful it would be in the authoritarian oppressive world we currently have.

I talk more about these ideas in the 11 minute video below:

This essay is the first of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring. I hope you find it helpful and informative.

To view the other essays and videos in this series, go to the links below:

The impacts of inter-generational & cultural relational traumas (this essay)

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, & Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

Wants, Needs, & Unraveling Cultural Relational Trauma

June 15, 2018 By gwynn

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime. ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. ~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Time has always been an anxiety producer for me. I wrote a bit about that over on IG a while ago. Being on time, having enough time, spending quality time… all those things can send me into a bit of a tailspin of not enough, not enough, not enough.

Because a truth for me is, and for many I know, there simply aren’t enough hours in a day. There is always So Much To Do. There is always so much I Want To Do. There is always so much I Need To Do. There used to always be so much that Others Expected Me To Do but I left that list on the side of the road a long while ago.

Anyhow, all I need and want to do in any given day, never seems to fit into the 24 hours I have that particular day.

This has been leading me to consider what is truly important to me, what do I actually want to do and be doing with the time that I do have.

I’ve been slowly working through Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map workbook to figure out what it is I do want, how I want to feel, in my work, in my life, where are my wants and needs and how am I meeting them and how am I not and how could I meet them more often and perhaps even better?

What is it that lights me up?, as Danielle asks.

It is one thing to know what I don’t want, what I want less of, what I don’t need or desire. I can find my clear no very easily. It is the finding the yes that can be a challenge for me.

Finding the yes is the vulnerable thing. Finding the yes is revealing. Finding the yes, the want, the need, the desire… that is when we put who we really are out there and on the line.

That is when we own who we are.

And that can be terrifying in so many ways.

Noes are less vulnerable. Noes don’t reveal a whole lot. They set a line, yes. They create a boundary, absolutely. They often close doors, of course. And those are such important things to be able to do, to be able to find and honor within ourselves.

And.

When we start to look at those wants, those cravings, those needs… Well we are opening ourselves up to be told no – by others, by our culture, by the stories that whisper and scream inside our heads, by life itself.

Which then leaves us in the wanting or needing… and then what?

Well, I don’t honestly know, because I’m still at the stage of even acknowledging what my wants and needs are!

Here’s a thing: We have all been raised in a culture that tells us wanting is a sin and needing is a sign of weakness. And none of us dare to be sinners or weak.

This is part of Cultural Relational Trauma. It is part of what harms our psyches, what traumatizes us, what leaves us in a space of loneliness and disconnection from our Self and other humans.

This is our socialization. Our training. Our conditioning. It seeps into our minds and bodies and being.

It is not such an easy thing to shake. Because even when we know in our logic mind that these stories are all a bunch of crap, those messages have been ingrained and internalized. They have their own neuro-pathways in our brains, and they live in our own cellular and body systems memory. It takes intentional, mindful, and relatively consistent work to undo the training, to create new neuro-pathways that say “It is human to want; it is acceptable to want; wanting is part of living; needing is part of being reminded we are alive; asking for our wants and needs is part of our surviving and thriving.”

It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. It takes mind work and body work. It is simple and complex. As one ingrained and internalized story is unraveled another will pop up. There will be days we are too tired, there will be days we are impatient, there will be days we simply don’t wanna.

And.

There will be days where we look back and say, “Wow. That story doesn’t have the same grip it used to.” or “Holy heck I just used my words and asked for what I needed and I received it.” or “Woohoo I just allowed someone to care for me.”

This is the ebb and flow of this work.

It takes three to ten times more “positive” messaging to create a relatively permanent (knowing these are never truly permanent) neuro-pathway in comparison to what it takes to create a “negative thought” neuro-pathway.

Three to ten times. Three to ten times more effort, more intention, more practice.

So.

Yes it takes work.

Yes it takes intentional time and energy.

And to have our wants and needs met, to begin to feel safe and at home in our bodies, to begin to thrive in our lives instead of only surviving… isn’t that worth the time and energy?

Aren’t you worth it? (Let me answer that for you, YES YOU ARE.)

May we all connect to our wants and needs, acknowledge them, embrace them, ask for them, and have them met.

…

Originally published on January 14, 2018 as a weekly newsletter and revised for publication here. Did you enjoy reading this? If so, I invite you to sign up to receive my weekly love letters right here.

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