Posted by Kimberly Rex
Finding Serenity in the Midst of Challenges and Change
Finding serenity in the midst of challenges and change, well, is challenging. Serenity is defined as the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. In these times when challenging events continue to escalate, serenity would certainly be a welcome guest. The Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr, is well-known in 12 Step Groups for this reason. It addresses acceptance, empowerment, and faith to face each moment and day with a greater sense of balance and fortitude. This article will give you ideas about how it can benefit you, and your relationships to change your experience in the world in the midst of these challenges.
Serenity to Accept The Things You Cannot Change
Living in a world where there are overwhelming simultaneous events that signal the need for change, this prayer is especially helpful. It is as if all of the material below the surface is coming up into our view at the same time. This material begs the question: “How deeply are we able to address the muck or sewage coming up everywhere?“
In your personal life and relationships, the invitation is to look at where we are pointing our fingers. We are part of a larger collective. Our blame and anger buried into the numbness within the chaos create alienation from our needs for safety, nurture, kindness, respect, sharing, and focus. These are essentials to creating a life that is not only sustainable for ourselves but for all of us.
When you believe that you have control over everything in your life, this ironically can lead to feeling completely out of control. This can lead to sometimes carrying burdens that are not yours to carry. You cannot change other people by carrying their responsibilities or burdens in life.
In a Resonance Repatterning® session, the process works with your inner limiting beliefs, thoughts attitudes, and orientation to life. These are all influenced by your history and the underlying material. When we ask someone else to change to meet our needs, we are reliving patterns that ask for inner change. Blame is often a resonance with something within us that signals agitation or charge with the energetics of the material we dislike. In some repatterning sessions, we look at how the blame of another is a component of ourselves asking to be healed. If I believe that someone is dishonest, we look at how the charge and energy devoted to this are within us. We check for “I am dishonest.” In whatever way this energy is playing out within yourself it is projected into your field and into the world of relationships.
In fact, this dance of dishonesty between you and others might be one that has been going on for generational family patterns. Whether you have a charge around someone else being dishonest or are truly angry about the issue of dishonesty, it originates within you. How is dishonesty affecting your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations?
Here are some questions you might work with related to this topic, “ How am I being dishonest with myself? What truth am I not living? Where am I not completely ready or yet able to confront my fears or need for more truth about something?”
Accepting people where they are in their lives is a way of giving them respect and dignity. It allows you to give responsibility to others and authorship back to yourself.
Empowering Statements for Greater Serenity
- “If someone’s behavior is unacceptable to me, I cannot change it, but I change my interactions with that person.”
- “it’s no one else’s job to meet my needs. I am responsible for taking care of myself. This is a good thing because it gives my power back.”
- “It’s not my job to control other people, however, I am in control of my reaction to them.
Serenity to Change the Things You Can Control
.Feeling like you cannot change anything can stem from blaming yourself even when there is nothing you can do about a situation, or you resonate with having absolutely no control over anything in your life. This happens when you believe that you do not have the ability or power to make a difference. In other words, the situation or person has power over you. The inability to start or create can result from an unresolved traumatic experience where you are stuck in freeze mode. You might find yourself procrastinating or feel a lack of authority or power due to abuse, chronic stress, grief or overwhelm. Resentment, depression, anger, and fear over time can create a feeling of disconnection from yourself. This means that you are unable to use your body sensations, and your ability to respond to what is happening around you in a life-energizing way with self-care. This impacts your ability to pace yourself or conserve your own life energy for your own benefit.
Empowering Statements for Creating Greater Serenity
- “My past does not define me, I am always able to make decisions for how I will think and behave today, and into the future.”
- “Being perfect or having no flaws would not solve all of my problems, make everyone approve of me, or make it certain that I always get what I want.”
- “It is inevitable that not everyone is going to like, agree with or approve of me all of the time. It is more important for me to be authentic and approve of myself than it is to try to please others to earn their approval.“
Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it. ~Rabindranath Tagore
Serenity to Know the Difference
Either an excessive state of having to control everything or resonating with having no control is extreme. Being able to acknowledge these states creates a realistic way of accessing what you truly do have power over. Having unconditional love for yourself, others, and the circumstances that surround you lessens the struggle to accept life as it is in the moment even if it isn’t what you desire or even demand. This means that you can then begin to gauge what is in your sphere of influence and what is not.
Some great examples might be the following: While you cannot control the economy or politicians, you can control how you spend or save your money, and how you vote at the ballot box.
You might not be able to control another person, however, you can choose how you respond to them. You can choose to respond coherently in a way that promotes your greater peace. You have choices about how to think about the situation. You do have influence over how you feel and respond.
This also applies to your beliefs and thoughts about yourself. Shifting limiting beliefs about yourself goes a long way to transform underlying material so they can be woven into new possibilities for seeing and experiencing the world anew.
In the transformation process of creating greater serenity, some belief statements might include:
- “No matter what is happening around me or in the world, I always have a choice about what I focus on, how I judge the situation, and how I react or respond to it.”
- “No matter what happens in life, I know I am capable of finding a solution and that everything works out in the end.”
- “Sometimes life’s disappointments and challenges can lead to wonderful new possibilities that I never would have known I wanted.”
Serenity arises when you embrace the messages, lessons, and opportunities that the challenge presents to you. Getting to have choices with the material that the upheaval brings into focus is a wonderful reason to work with what feels unfamiliar, unsettling, and upsetting. It signals the potential for your readiness for substantial change in your life. By doing so, you give serenity and peace a chance!
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning®practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Finding Gratitude and Appreciation in Your Life
Finding gratitude and appreciation in your life can change how you feel and respond to what is happening in front of you. It can change your perceptions, and your physical responses and impact your thoughts. This can change your sense of boredom, apathy, or displeasure with life.
You can change how you see yourself and the world around you by choosing to find reasons to appreciate your life, who you are, and what you have right now. Even if you have felt isolated these past few years, find yourself trying to find calm in all of the changes taking place, or wish you were someplace else, there is the potential for choosing to find what is life-energizing. This has a positive effect on your health, relationships, and outlook on life. It can happen with simple gratitude and appreciation.
By creating a Gratitude and Appreciation Practice for yourself you can build a presence that feeds your body-mind-spirit system daily. This can contribute to your satisfaction with life. Physically, you might express appreciation and gratitude by acknowledging the wonder of your body and how it carries you from moment to moment, day by day. By doing so you reduce stress and calm internal conflicts. Your relationships can also improve through gratitude and appreciation to become more constructive with actions and interactions.
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation Right in Front of You
It is easy to get so lost in daily routine and automatic responses to life that you take for granted or become blind to all the nurture and support that is right in front of you. To make the shift, you first notice and allow your senses to take in your surroundings. Start by getting in touch with your breath. Then allow your eyes to scan and rest on the contents of the space you are in, your home, the sky, plants, flowers, and trees outside. Rest your awareness on the significance of each particular place you rest your eyes or what you notice. This can be a vase of flowers, a bud on a tree, or the sound or color of a bird.
You don’t have to look or travel far to give to find beauty or something that brings you pleasure. You live in your body 24/7 and on the Earth 24/7. Take it in what is right in front of you with appreciation. By doing so you create positive benefits for your wellness and well-being.
“Upon awakening, let the words “Thank You” flow from your lips, for this will remind you to begin your day with gratitude and compassion.”~Wayne Dyer
Start where you are, literally. Appreciate your body and what you wear on your body each day. This includes the vibrancy of colors, the patterns, and the texture of the cloth, warmth, fun, comfort, and joy you have experienced from your choices. What meaning and energy do these colors and feelings are you experiencing when you wear these clothes?
As the weather is changing and there is more opportunity to get out into nature or to safely attend gatherings to connect, I have opened my closet to what seems like a brand new wardrobe! Putting on earrings, and wearing a scarf or sweater I haven’t worn in a few years, is an absolute joy! And, I experience appreciation for these new opportunities.
Since the pandemic, I have limited the amount of clothing I cycle through weekly. I have also donated clothing with the thought in mind that someone else can also appreciate the items that no longer fit or have a place in my clothing choices. And, this makes me smile with the thought that paying it forward can multiply appreciation.
How about applying appreciation to the foods that come from the Earth to nourish your body? These foods come to your table from a wide diversity of places. Appreciate the soil, seeding, farmers and workers, and the growth process each of the foods you eat has taken, and how this, in turn, energizes your body. Appreciate the color, texture, and flavor of your food.
Acknowledge how food has created a story and connection with your family and friends. Perhaps there are favorite dishes, a particular holiday, or a ritual that has made your food story a special memory or has an emotional positive meaning for you. Bring this appreciation practice into your selection of foods and preparation as well.
Cook with love and with the intention of nourishment and well-being. Become aware and discerning of what foods are energizing to you and bring them into your kitchen to combine in creative ways for health and well-being. As you do so, you can also consciously become aware of foods that are not energizing to your body-mind system. And, express internal conscious choice to create even greater potential for your life energy, your moods, and well-being to appreciate.
Finding Joy and Appreciation for the Small Things in Life
It is often the small things that change your perceptions. A smile from someone, the laughter of children, a word of encouragement, a favorite song, someone holding the door open, a beautiful sunset, or appreciation for truly being seen and heard can mean the most.
Allow appreciation to take in the people in your life who have been there at a special time, made you laugh, consoled, or listened when you needed it most and who you learned from as you shared time with them. Appreciate the ups and downs of your own life as they have created who you are today. Notice and appreciate what is happening and speaking in your body-mind-spirit system today.
It might sound like a small thing, however, throughout the pandemic, my mother and I, both isolated, have had a daily appreciation and gratitude exchange close to sunset. She has a view of the bay in the West while I live in a circle of cedar trees. She sees the sky light up as it moves into twilight each day. Each evening by phone, she describes the colors of the sky and the shapes of the clouds to me. By doing so, we each experience the expansive qualities of the beauty unfolding through our senses and imagination.
“Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you. Then it will really be a good day.” ~David Steindl-Rast
Finding Gratitude and Appreciation for Others
By making appreciation a practice, include words, prayer, affirmation, journaling, drawings, movement, making music, toning, or spending time in places locally that you love or might not yet know. Your gratitude and appreciation meditation might become a walk or even a wake-up or calm-down around your sleep routine. No matter what you choose, this practice can easily become your daily experience as you recognize the value of life and its gifts each day.
In the same way, be sure to use appreciation with others. Everyone needs to feel they are appreciated and have a purpose. This can be done when you express gratitude for something or to someone in your life by including the reasons you appreciate an action or presence. This contributes to the health of your relationships and also supports creating greater motivation and life energy whether in personal or business relationships.
Research shows that gratitude and appreciation stimulate oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin neurotransmitters and hormones to build pathways within your body-mind system to create a sense of calm, satisfaction, safety, love, joy, trust, and bonding. This happens for both the giver and the person who receives it.
I am reminded of a recent experience running around doing errands while in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s in my town. As I pulled into the parking lot, I could hear the sound of singing and Native Drum. There was a Native American man with a sign next to him asking for support for his situation as his house flooded in the recent storms in this area. Instantly, I was taken into the space I have experienced in sweat lodge rituals, and when parked, I sat for a few moments with my eyes closed just to listen. I was brought back into my center and relaxed. I remembered the connection to the Earth and to each person in the lodge and with all my relations. And, although I only had a few dollars cash on me, I walked over to him and said, “I’m sorry, this is all I have.” He took my hand between his two hands and smiled deeply. The gratitude exchange between us was enormous and made something seemingly small more than enough.
With practice and over time you can see how small steps in the direction towards creating an internal and external environment for gratitude and appreciation to thrive that you will begin to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
Making a daily appointment and commitment to create new neurotransmitters that communicate life-energizing vitality to your body-mind-spirit system can also expose or illuminate negative patterns and beliefs. By consciously choosing new ways of seeing and experiencing life, you actually gain more confidence and motivation for the process as your internal barometer begins to change. So the takeaway message is to start the process and keep coming back to find gratitude and appreciation with conscious choice.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world by Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Updating Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects
Resonance Repatterning® works with updating your mothering and fathering aspects in your life today by repatterning your life to experience greater integrity in your wellness and wellbeing. The process gives you a way to access energetic material from your pre-natal, pre-verbal, and early experiences as well as ancestral patterns through your DNA.
What are Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects?
As you move through life the quality of the relationship you had with your mother and father impacts the mothering and fathering aspects of yourself, in how you respond to life and take care of your needs as an adult based on your early experiences. This includes both the positive and limiting qualities you took in through growing up in your family related to the qualities of absence or presence, criticism or nurture, suppression or expression of emotions, neglect or positive attention, neglect or encouragement, danger or safety, lack of safety, or the building of trust and protection.
Your mothering aspect is translated into your life today through how you experience nourishment and support. This is reflected in your ability to feel at home in your own body and in the world around you. The ability to feel stable, grounded, and imaginative while being about to digest and integrate experiences in your life create greater experiences of harmony and balance.
Your fathering aspect is related to your ability to move out into the world in an assertive way. In Chinese Medicine particularly related to Father is Metal Element. This element relates to your values, the Divine Masculine, your ability to draw upon your own truth, money values, your self-worth, inspiration, and letting go and connecting to your inner brilliance.
This also rolls out into what you observed as a child related to the conflict styles of both parents. According to the Gottmans, it is not so much that children experience conflict, as much as how children observe conflict resolution or the lack thereof in their family that determines personal conflict responses and attraction to partners with similar compensation, resistance, or conflict styles as their own parents.
Updating Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects
In Twelve Step programs, the importance related to mothering yourself is vital. The work of accessing your inner child with your adult self is essential in that you are invited to nurture and support the earlier parts of yourself by updating your mothering and fathering aspects.
To survive early on, you might have had to compensate for your basic needs being met by your parents These early patterns became wired into your developing survival and emotional brain as implicit memory imprints in your unconscious. It is then no coincidence that your association with survival and bonding continues into relationships in your life as an adult.
If your body-mind-spirit system experienced significant fight or flight experiences early on, you are wired for that frequency and continue to activate those neural, biochemical, and thought pathways related to those limiting beliefs about who or what is safe or dangerous.
This creates repetitive interactions and situations that replicate your early learning as it is familiar. You are actually matching up conflict styles, and stressful frequencies while en-training with another through your own Nervous System.
Becoming aware of these internal patterns is actually the first step to moving more into your ability to self-nurture through moving into the safe zone with self-regulation. In fact, the more you can see of yourself equals your ability to see more of another by expanding your ability to calm, nourish and support your decisions, values, and mental health.
By doing so, your mothering aspect becomes more aligned with your unmet needs from your earlier experiences. This means where there was neglect, you give yourself time and space for self-care. Where there was abuse, trauma, or chaos, you offer yourself the warmth, compassion, safety, and care your need. Where you felt unsafe being in your body and trust your intuition, you begin to check in with what your body is telling you and follow through with self-care.
Polyvagal Theory offers an avenue to bring your body back into the safe zone for healthy social engagement that allows you to move back into a greater sense of calm, relaxation, grounding, and stabilization. Acquainting your body with this information, interoception and neuroception give you the opportunity to learn how to identify the triggers that have served as gateways to the states of fight-flight or freeze.
“Trauma is chronic disruption of connectedness.”~Stephen Porges
This also gives you an opportunity to work with returning to natural states of safety that create calm, expanded awareness, and ease. By doing so you add your body’s memory bank to be able to resonate with greater choice, discernment, values, and direction. This leads to your ability to attune your body-mind-spirit system to safety, nurture, and support within and with others. This changes the internal biofeedback of your experience related to the dynamics at work in your relationships.
Your Mothering and Fathering Aspects: Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation
Through the lens of your social engagement system from your earlier experiences, you interpret other people’s facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and words. These interpretations are orchestrated through your Nervous System. Some feedback might be comforting while other states feel destabilized or uncomfortable based on past experiences leading to misinterpretation.
When you identify and work with the root of limiting earlier experiences that shaped your social engagement responses, you can then feel more at home in your own body and can begin to recognize and discern your own internal biofeedback, attention, and focus in the present. This then creates a new connection within and updated reading of another person through your energy exchange.
The possibility of registering your experience while with others leads to your ability to choose relationships that contribute more to your safety and calm. This translates into creating more co-regulation in relationships that are built on safety, trust, curiosity, and mutual choice.
Through updating your mothering and fathering aspects, you create greater integrity in your body-mind-spirit system that results in better health, less stress, and more appreciation for your own choices with your ability to experience a more fulfilled life.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
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Creating Nurture and Support Within
You can create nurture and support from within. Late summer is the time of Earth Element related to your stomach and spleen in Traditional Chinese Medicine. This translates into better digestion as well as a better ability to adapt to transitions on the emotional, mental, and spirit levels. You are what you digest and then assimilate whether that be food, ideas, feelings, or where you place your attention.
Nurture and Support on the Physical Level
The spleen plays its part in the digestion process and transformation of liquids, blood in filtering out old blood cells and storing white blood cells for immune function. When Spleen is out of balance you might be experiencing issues with digestion, fatigue, menstrual issues, processing of blood sugar, issues with abdominal pain, anemia, edema, insomnia, hypo-or hyper-acidity, gout, or eating disorders particular to anorexia.
If you find yourself in a spin cycle of worry, look at how, when, and what you are eating. It is important to choose whole foods, eat slowly so you can savor and appreciate what you are ingesting. If you find yourself craving sugar for endorphins, know that you are needing sweetness in your life. If you crave sugar and are having digestion issues, you might have an Earth Element imbalance. This imbalance can actually create an increased growth of bacteria that can create greater disharmony in your body-mind system. However, again, this craving is a signal to create a calm, nourishing, and supportive environment in your life.
To encourage healthy digestion and assimilation for energy for your body-mind system, you can also use food and fragrance to support your overall health and well-being. Some of the essential oils and herbs that you can use in aromatherapy such as Frankincense, or cooking with some of these herbs, making teas like fennel, wintergreen, peppermint (spearmint if peppermint is too hot for your digestion); lemongrass, or lavender. Are supportive for digestion of both food and ideas, nurturing and letting go.
To create more tissue and muscle tone, nurture and support your body by taking walks two or three times a day while swinging your arms. This is good for your back and for healing your stomach area. This will also allow you to experience more energy in your body and engage more deeply in the present moment feeling more secure, stable, and balanced.
Handling transitions in life can produce worry when you do not feel at home within your own body or have a sense of direction for what is coming next. When Earth Element is out of balance, you can feel out of sorts within yourself meaning that you feel ungrounded, perhaps more in struggle, and disconnected from appreciation and gratitude for what is present to offer you true support and nurture in the moment.
Shift your attention to what you love, to your friendships, what you enjoy, and what brings laughter into your life. Get in touch with your own creativity, sense of purpose, spirituality, and what brings meaning to your life. Give yourself time for relaxation, sleep, and experiencing beauty within yourself and around you.
“Your mind takes its shape gradually from what you routinely rest your mind upon.”~Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
Nurture and Support on the Emotional Level
In order to create more harmony and balance, it is important to work with transforming the energy of resonance from lack of support to resonance with support within and from the world around you. This imbalance can be expressed in self-doubt and a poor sense of self-worth. One way to shift this material is to work with gratitude for your own life. Become more aware of your body, your journey through life, and the ways you have been able to choose what is life-energizing. Use affirmations like, “I am grateful for my intentions for what I know is right for my life,” and “ I appreciate who I am.” Make a practice of looking for the sweetness in your life as you go through the day.
Nurture and Support on the Mental Level
The same holds true for transitions and change in your life. Worry, speed and pressure take you out of your center. The stress from these states narrow your physical vision and send you into a spiral out of your thinking and problem-solving brain into your emotional and survival brain where expansive thinking is not possible. Taking time to “rest and digest’ allows you to create, sustain, and let go of what is needed to create sustainable and tangible change in your life. When you are faced with change, acknowledge your need for stillness to process your feelings, thoughts, and body sensations to allow you to be more present to create a broader vision of what is possible.
At the same time, it’s important to take a look at where you are overextended in taking care of others and in situations where you attempt to be needed or wanted based on your offering of sweetness. Grounding yourself creates balance within that creates true nourishment for your life while setting loving and healthy boundaries with others. This allows you to resonate with being enough while you support yourself moving through life in the moment.
Asking for or receiving support and nurture from others is also another possibility on your palette for coherent giving and receiving. Internal awareness allows you to move towards recognizing and taking what benefits your life and attracting empowered people.
Resonance Repatterning sessions work to create greater harmony within to benefit your awareness, and personal, and relationship coherence. In this time of transition. it is an opportunity to work with the strength of Earth Element to create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being. Experience a personal, relationship, Meridian or Seasonal Repatterning to identify where in your life you can update your resonance with greater support and nurture from within yourself and in your relationships.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
Find out how Resonance Repatterning benefits your life. Set up a personal session or sign up for a free monthly newsletter with articles, natural healing modalities, and exclusive group sessions here.
Read MorePosted by Kimberly Rex
How Attitude, Beliefs, Challenge, and Development Lead Your Response to Life
Your attitude, beliefs, challenges, and development lead your response to life. The question is, “What is driving?” Is it fear or reactivity from the unconscious material, unresolved issues, or the conscious desire to create kindness and resonance with direction and positive change? This article will explore the influence and possibility of attitude, beliefs, challenges, and development to expand your experience of life.
Attitude Leads to What You Believe
Your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings create your view of life. When your attitude diminishes yourself or others, this leads to life-depleting and limiting outcomes. If your mindset is fixed you are more likely to feel like you cannot try or experience life differently. When you experience a mindset based on the potential for growth, a growth mindset, you are more likely to engage energy, motivation, and respect for your journey whatever it is and where ever it leads.
Having an attitude for example that “I can’t learn that material because it’s too hard ” vs. “I haven’t learned that material yet, but I want to learn,” creates different views of the world. Which view opens the door to new possibilities?
Taking inventory or questioning your attitudes about different areas of your life can give you insight into what holds you back and what can also shine a light on opportunities for growth and transformation. Asking yourself what holds you back from getting an inspiring job, a nourishing home, a relationship, experience of peace or relaxation is a way of beginning to sketch out what your life experience is attempting to teach you at the moment. Asking and then working with the response is essential to positive change. How would your life be different from a new perspective?
Beliefs Lead to How You Meet Challenges
Beliefs create an automatic filter through which you see and experience the world. Your brain is wired for bias to create survival behavior. However, the threats in earlier evolutionary stages of the world as well as of your body-mind system can overshadow your ability to experience greater calm, joy, love, and vitality as well as your experience of safety in the world.
Tara Brach speaks to Papancha, a Pali word for “mental proliferation,” the chain reaction of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings that causes suffering.
Pause and notice you are in a spin of suffering, name it and allow it to be present. Allow it to be. Give it space. Get in touch with what you are believing and the stories you are telling yourself. Each time you interrupt the pattern and chain reaction allows you to return to mindfulness and create the blueprint for new pathways to reconnect to your innate inner wisdom.
Take time to get in touch with inner kindness and wisdom by asking yourself these questions.
- Can I get in touch with my breath to take a pause until I can begin to shift inner awareness and consciousness about what is happening?
- What am I feeling or sensing in my body and my heart? Get in touch with your body sensations and what this tells you about your feelings.
- Who am I blaming? Can I forgive or just be this awareness? Can I give it space, give kindness, and allow the feelings? This allows you to build neurotransmitters for other perspectives, intelligence, and awareness of possibilities.
- Begin to examine your reactions, responses, or behavior in different situations. Identify your triggers, and ask yourself if you want to continue responding in the same way. If not, how could you interrupt or respond differently to break the cycle of the fight, flight, or freeze reaction? This allows you to connect to the good within yourself and others.
By doing so you start to change the inner landscape of your vision by expanding the rules and circuitry of your belief systems that have been embedded by earlier experiences, family system rules, and inculturation.
Challenges Lead to Your Development
“Life is a challenge. Meet it.”~Mother Teresa
When meeting challenges of any form, it’s important to know that what you believe upfront will determine what comes next. All of us have been thrown into situations where we felt overwhelmed, afraid, confused, hurt, betrayed, etc. It is for this fact that resonating with having been able to move through and out the other side of challenges in the past can allow you to work with a challenge in front of you now.
Challenges come in different durations and intensities. Putting challenges into perspective allows you to meet what is in front of you with both inner strength and wisdom when you resonate with having met challenges that created a sense of empowerment. This awareness reduces resistance and creates encouragement for what life is dishing out right now.
Of course, some challenges are larger than others, and not all challenges might feel like they are met with success. For example, if you spill coffee on your shirt, it is different than receiving a phone call about an ill family member that needsyour help that you can’t provide at the moment. Getting centered in both circumstances is beneficial. Being able to calm yourself first allows you to be more available to problem-solving, decision-making, and delegating.
Instead of reacting with the fight, flight, or freeze, it’s important to move out of fear into a greater sense of calm so that problems can be solved by calming the stressed mind to allow life-enhancing and creative choices to be considered. This also allows you to be kind to your own life to learn from past experiences where it might have felt you “failed” so you can apply what those experiences taught you to your current situation.
This is why getting in touch with your breath, taking a few moments, or using a phrase to remind you that you are in the here and now is beneficial. My personal favorites come from 12 Step Programs: “ First things first,” “Keep it simple,” or “One day or one moment at a time.”
Having the strength to get through some life challenges takes time and effort over the long run. Resonating with continuing to come back into your center allows you to pace yourself over time.
Development Leads to Direction in Life
Earlier versions of yourself carry information that can inform your life today. In the same way, your current version of self is able to inform earlier experiences and parts of yourself. You are not an abridged edition, rather you are an expanding and developing being of light and sound.
Your unconscious and conscious material that inform your attitude, beliefs, and responses to challenges make up your overall experience of life.
It’s important to acknowledge that the newborn version of you did not know what you knew as a 2-year-old. Your 7-year-old part of yourself did not know what you knew as a teenager, etc. The way that your body-mind system developed allowed primary functions for survival and feeling states in stages then became more complex with reasoning and logic paired with increasing networks of communication and creativity.
You would not expect your 2-year old part to drive a car, balance a checkbook or make scrambled eggs, yet earlier parts continue to inform and influence choices about bonding, separation, fear, calm, and safety as an adult. This is due to the developmental stage memory imprints from the past that continue to signal to you today.
Your adult self has navigated many developmental stages, challenges, relationships, and structures over time. Taking care of and listening to earlier parts of yourself is essential to developing greater harmony and balance within your life today.
The direction you take in your life is led by your personal and family system’s unconscious material. It conducts your journey until it is brought into the light to create greater conscious awareness and understanding of new possibilities from the perspective of your adult and Greater Self.
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, a Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and a Person-Centered Expressive Therapist. She works with clients all over the world with Resonance Repatterning sessions that work with personal and generational unconscious material to facilitate this process of updating your body-mind system to experience greater integrity in your wellness and well-being.
This is your personal invitation to continue on the path with monthly healing modalities and repatterning events from Windows to the Heart Repatterning. Sign up for monthly newsletter here: Newsletter and Exclusive Re-pattern Your Life Events
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