Odyssey of Self Discovery

06/01/2024

the message was to keep busy. so we kept busy. sometimes out of shame, sometimes to avoid certain truths. most times to survive. to be made to feel lazy and useless if you didn’t stay busy is what we experienced on a collective level, maybe so we wouldn’t slow down and thaw. maybe to prevent us from asking the important questions. what frequency do you want to live on? how do you want to design your life around time? how is a powerful system capitalizing on my energy? what was so traumatic for me that the one thing i don’t want to do is to stop and think about it and feel into its pain, or protect myself from reliving a sense of lack? why do i think if i look busy, i am enough? what does productivity mean to you if the fruit is never within your reach? (-by Susan Frybort)

31/12/2023

31/12/2023

The Personal Growth Project - Emotional Abuse Awareness

31/12/2023

Filed under “Easy to read, hard to remember.”

****My program, “A year of compassionate growth” starts in my online community in just over two weeks. Grab your spot on the waitlist to be notified when registration opens (including sliding scale spots). Grab your spot @ linktr.ee/natepost

I’m so glad you’re here! 🫶🫶✨✨

31/12/2023

shared by Pat.e.l.e.n.m.a.r.i.e

31/12/2023

elizabeth fedrick

31/12/2023

31/12/2023

100% the truth

Shar med by Carly

31/12/2023

Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life

31/12/2023

Don't beat yourself up for being human 💜

~ Lilly Hope Lucario
💜
Healing From Complex Trauma and Ptsd/cptsd

31/12/2023

Power of Wordz

31/12/2023

💜

31/12/2023

shared by Pat.

31/12/2023

Dr. Sara Kuburic

14/12/2023

🧱Lay the foundation for a great 2024 👉 https://bit.ly/3SzbCf9

This is a profound article written by my daughter after her father died.

"In the 12 years since entering the grief club (I guess it’s a club, I’m not sure what else to call it), I’ve learned that grief never goes away, not completely anyway. It is my experience that once the threshold is crossed, it’s something that stays with you forever. It’s almost as if you become a time traveler or that you straddle two realities or two worlds; the one before and the one after, and you’ll tick tock between the two, probably forever.

Like I said before, grief is forever, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing because the things that we feel surrounding grief are the reminders of someone or something that meant a tremendous amount to us. It’s the reminder that love was present, and that even if it’s no longer in its original form, that love still exists."

(Grief is personal. Allow yourself to feel it. Allow yourself to move through it. But don’t allow yourself to live there.-Barb Schmidt)

14/12/2023

Shared by Pat.

14/12/2023

Shared by Pat.mama.healing

14/12/2023

Spectrum Serafina

Shared by Carly

08/12/2023

The past is where I go, as a detective, to discover my code—how I was programmed by my past circumstances to operate in the world.

I was brought to a particular memory today, because something scared me, and to stay buoyant in the moment, I used shame. “Get it together,” I told myself.

I then flashed to a moment from when I was 11. I’d been playing with a friend. Friends didn’t often come over because I was still being bullied a bit.

But this friend was over and we were having the best time. I felt like me on the inside and me on the outside. And we were laughing and chasing each other around the house. And I was running with a hairbrush and she was trying to catch me and I looked behind me in hysterical giggles to see if she was getting closer, and next thing I knew, I had gone through the glass storm door in the kitchen.

It was shocking—the loudness, the breaking, the being on the wrong side of the door, the blood, the shards of glass sticking in my arm, the look on my friend’s face.

I was scared, really scared. But before I could process my fear, in stormed my stepmother (my first stepmother—there was another one after her) and she let me have it. “What the hell did you do? You clean up this mess! How could you be so stupid?!”

My friend was sent home, and there I was—kind of outside my body. I had been jolted from my fear, but by shame instead of empathy. And I stood there feeling unredeemable.

I didn’t get compassion growing up. Shame was how I got my bearings.

Shame didn’t feel good, but it was all I had to deal with pain and fear all alone. It’s not that I accepted my stepmother’s insults and meanness. But I realized I had to survive scary and painful moments alone because no one was going to be there to soothe me.

Underneath the surviving, though, was sadness. A longing for that hug I should have gotten. A yearning for someone to get down to my level and examine what happened to me, to ask if I was ok, if I needed anything, to reassure me that it had been a mistake, that everyone makes mistakes. That I was still lovable.

And I think I’ve traveled to my future with that same longing for gentleness and compassion and understanding—but yet that younger self has continued to keep her fear and shame a secret, because she’s become pretty sure that such things don’t exist for her and never will. And the rest of my older selves have kind of believed her.

After all, it makes good sense to hide our fear and pain so that we can make damn sure no one will ever shame us for them ever again.

My current self, of course, knows that this isn’t true. But my current self also knows that in order to heal, *I* have to be the one to go back to those scared, hurt selves and stay at their side until their longings have been met, until they feel that someone has finally arrived to let them know that they are safe, that they are loved, and that all their feelings are valid.

If you find yourself muscling through difficult moments and abandoning yourself when your self needs you the most, take a moment and see what memory is right at the surface. Bodies are interesting like that.

They store important clues right beneath our skin. And when we take the time to give these memories our attention, they can sometimes give us a better understanding of why we are the way we are.

And then, instead of resorting to those old default ways of coping, we can show up in new ways that make a difference for ourselves.

-JLK

(This piece is part of my new book, Once Upon an Upset, an illustrated collection of stories, essays and reflections to help make sense of difficult times. I’ll paste a link in the comments in case anyone’s interested. 💛)

08/12/2023

People are so complex. They can be skilled and brilliant in one area and totally helpless and unable to cope in another.

I used to think that a ‘together’ must be part-less. That a ‘together’ person must be a streamlined being who functions optimally at all times.

Now, I think the notion of being ‘whole’ simply means that we make a consistent effort to be aware of the many, often disparate parts of ourselves, accept them all as parts of ourselves, and give them our attention, understanding and compassion.

I think it’s possible to celebrate the best parts of ourselves that are naturally brilliant, while making an effort to gain skills in those parts that have a harder time coping and functioning.

One part doesn’t need to detract from another when we understand that our purpose is to expand our awareness and breathe our growing compassion into those parts that may have never received any.

And as we begin to accept the whole of ourselves, we may find great admiration for who we are through recognizing that really, we’ve been doing the very best we can with all of our varied circumstances, many of which we’ve had zero control over.

And then we can extend that compassion outwards toward our fellow human beings, who like us, have both aware parts and asleep parts, skilled parts and reactive parts, values and impulses, ways to cope constructively, and ways to cope destructively.

-JLK

08/12/2023

The world is more than ready for what you have to offer. It’s desperately in need of it…

08/12/2023

On relationship ambivalence…

04/12/2023

Artist - mayedoodles