“Sometimes anxiety is your value system saying: ‘There are too many areas of your life where you are out of integrity.  I need you to realign with your values and take care of unfinished business,’” Xavier Dagba.  This is the case of living in two worlds epitomized.  We feel what we want and we are starting to listen to our knowing, but we haven’t let go of what we used to do because we still need it.  This is where we are truly tested because we are ready to take the leap but many of us are often scared about what happens once we do.  We don’t see the answers or the way on the new side yet.  There is a simpler way to look at this as well: we say we want something but we don’t do what it takes to get it.  We haven’t learned to live in alignment yet.  Going back to the precipice I mentioned the other day is another valid example here.  It is very true that once we take certain leaps we can’t undo it.  But the waiting and the in between causes more harm than making a choice.

Value is a personal decision.  We are taught values from the instant we are born.  We are taught what is worthy and noble and what our lives should be.  Not once do we learn to value independent thought.  We are even trained that we need guidance.  Now, there is a level of truth to it, but we don’t need to rely on the guidance of man.  We need to be taught to rely on the guidance of our connection with source.  People can absolutely be a conduit for that and share messages through their experience.  That is divine work.  But someone who comes along claiming to know all the answers is usually more of a red flag than not.  What we need is a connection with our intuition because that baby will tell you exactly what’s important to you.  It will tell you the exact direction of your compass.  What happens when your compass is trying to center?  It can’t tell the direction because it’s spinning all over the place.  Same with your values compared to action: you don’t head in any one direction because you’re torn and trying to go in a million directions at once. 

I don’t know if it’s optimism or ego or foolishness or hopefulness, but sometimes we feel we can do it all.  I know I bite off more than I can chew all the time because I KNOW I can do it.  But then I can’t.  I get overwhelmed, things come up, projects are left lying aside in a big old mess.  And then I start loathing myself.  Why didn’t I finish another project?  Why did I take it on?  Why didn’t I plan it better?  Yes, there is some truth to that—we should only take on what we can reasonably do well.  But there are some efforts of people pleasing, and there are other expectations so we ignore what we know we can handle and we end up taking it all on.  Those are your values in conflict with what you know.  It’s exhausting. 

The recommendation is to pause and take a beat to re-evaluate what you’re doing.  Take stock of all the open tasks so to speak and start asking yourself what really needs work.  What really needs to be finished and when.  That’s when you start seeing what’s important to you.  If it’s something you wouldn’t do in, or for five years, then don’t waste your time on it now.  If it takes the place of something important in your life in favor of someone else’s, it’s time to put it down.  If you won’t have the opportunity again and it’s calling to you, do it now.  And the hardest one: if it’s something that really is valuable to you and means the world to you, opens an experience you’ve been looking forward to but you have to decide if someone else will approve, go do it.  Don’t worry about letting anyone else down.  Worry about the chances you’re limiting in your life because of what you think someone else will do/say/think.  This is about your value and integrity and designing the life you want.  The more you align with that, the less anxiety you feel—and only you can determine that.

“Sometimes anxiety is your nervous system saying: ‘I need you to rebalance me, go slow, reconnect to the body and listen to its needs,’” Xavier Dagba.  In this society we are trained to move and compete at an alarming, and quite frankly, disgusting rate.  Our body, minds, souls, our heart, our hormones, and our nervous system are NOT designed to be under that kind of undue stress for any length of time—it’s all fake shit anyway.  All of the stressors we have aside from actual physical issues or natural disasters are completely within our control and often times made up.  And even fi they are not, it is our choice to continue to deal with them. I had a lot of trouble (and still have a lot of trouble) wrapping my head around that one.  But it’s the truth.  If your work environment sucks, you are able to get another job.  If your partner isn’t holding up their end of the bargain by choice, then you can leave.  We can choose to ignore the news and media and decide to do something good with our time. 

But we are trained to believe that it is normal to run at top speed thinking about the sky falling all the time.  The irony is we are a species that was literally hunted by other animals at one point.  Those people knew what it meant to fear for your life because danger could literally be around ANY corner.  We still carry that with us and we behave as if the next comment on social media is going to kill us meanwhile we don’t even look up from the damn phone when we are crossing the street.  Do we not see how ridiculous this is?  We are told we have to take on and do as much as we can and work all the time in order to be worthy.  The truth is we do that so we continue to feed a system of consumerism driven by greed and hate and it fuels our fire to be witnessed and seen by others by pretending we have a voice.  It really isn’t about consuming anything anymore.  It’s about honoring what we can produce. 

So when we slow down enough to understand what’s happening, we see that we don’t need to run our lives like that.  We are worthy and our gifts were designed to carry and care for us.  We weren’t meant to monetize and devalue our gifts, we were simply meant to share them with each other and make each other better.  I mean, money is completely useless, it is a man-made thing.  And all of this nonsense around our country lately with inflation and recession is completely designed to induce further dependence on the system—that doesn’t work.  If we were really for each other, the government would put a ban on raising prices right now.  It’s like a bunch of children trying to compete for the most attention.  Again, another made up stressor designed to keep us feeding into the system so we pretend “they” have an answer.  We DON’T need it.

So for this one, I encourage you to really take a listen to what your body is telling you. If you slow down just a little, you’d be amazed at what you hear.  You don’t need to go all the time.  I know I can’t stand it.  I hate wasting my time on things that ultimately have no value because I’m told that it is the only way to be of value.  Meanwhile I face being replaced at the drop of hat if I don’t do everything in line.  If the purpose of business is to take care of people we have to meet them where they actually need us, not where we think they are.  We have to listen and identify where things are changing and there has been a MASSIVE shift over the last three years telling us where our priorities are changing.  No one wants to do the typical gig anymore.  They want freedom.  They don’t want to ask for permission to live their lives, to use their time with their families.  They don’t want to ask when it’s ok to eat or go to the bathroom.  We are fully grown adults.  I don’t need that added stress in my life, and neither do you.  Learn to hear what your body is telling you and let go of the rush, the pressure, the fear.  Settle, and hear.

“Sometimes anxiety is the friction caused by your intuition saying more loudly: ‘I need you to pay attention,’” Xavier Dagba.  This is a great follow up to shadow because this is the direct result of learning to ignore our intuition—it creates that shadow, our knowing that we repressed and hid in the shadows thinking they were bad.  We need to get in touch with our inner knowing, and when we reconcile the shadow, we understand that voice we’ve heard all along has simply been asking us to pay attention and honor it.  It wants us to know it’s safe to follow it.  We tend to treat our intuition like someone in a white van trying to lure us.  “Hey, I know all the answers, if you just let go and come over here for a minute, quiet the mind, you’ll hear it!” “Uh, no thanks, I have things to do!”  Buries face in phone and moves on.  Why?  Why are we taught our knowing is a bad thing.  Oh, right—something we don’t have time to examine in this post—if we find our knowing then we no longer are interested in mass consumerism and the broken system we have today!!!  Everyone else benefits from us ignoring our intuition.

Honestly, following intuition is a scary thing the first few times, especially as an adult.  When we are kids learning to crawl and walk, or we hear our parents telling us to not jump from the rocks or not go across the street but we KNOW we can do it, those are the first signs of intuition.  Granted those are moments of parents ensuring safety, but the point is you KNEW you’d be ok regardless of your mom screaming at you to stop.  We learn to doubt and overthink the steps we take.  We learn to not trust our knowing.  This training goes on for most of our lives.  We are taught what to think, what goals to have by those around us, what path to take, what patterns to repeat, what success looks like, what to eat.  And most destructively, we are taught that if we don’t follow those things, we are WRONG.  Anything against the grain or outside what is accepted as the norm is wrong.  Cue instant self-hatred and misconstrued beliefs that our being is wrong.

There are those of us who are fortunate enough to start HEARING.  Sometimes that hearing starts as a feeling, where we can’t quite put our fingers on it but we feel something is off about what we are doing.  We know the patterns we repeat every day are no longer serving or they lose their feeling of power over us.  Sometimes that starts with a simple, “I don’t want to do this today.”  Soon that escalates into, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”  Yes, THAT is intuition.  The scary part comes when there is no additional insight into what you DO want to do.  But that is the beauty of getting in touch with our knowing: we are supposed to try things and have fun.  I spent a HUGE majority of my life doing exactly what I was told, expecting the promised results only to never get them.  That left me wanting and questioning a ton of things.  Resentful, too.  As good as I was at doing what I was told, I always had another side, another inkling of things I wanted to create.  I tried getting through the “have-to” as quickly as I could so I had time for the “want to.”  As a late teen and early adult, I never realized that too was my intuition speaking.  If I have to rush through the “obligations” to get to do what I want to do, then I’m spending my time incorrectly.  Maybe that is a wake up for you as well.

So this is a precipice that I’m standing on personally now.  I know what I want next.  I know what isn’t working for me any longer.  But I haven’t quite jumped into the other side yet.  The tracks are getting wider and wider and I know soon I won’t be able to straddle both sides: I’m going to have to make a decision.  You will, too.  You can always ignore what you KNOW and go along with what you are comfortable with.  You can always go back to what you do every day and be content with that (or be miserable with it).  Or. You can take the chance and start hearing what you’re intuition has been trying to tell you all along.  I’ve taken a long look behind the curtain and I have been gifted with some insight into what is on the other side: pure freaking magic.  I have seen the creations and the flow that comes from following it and that looks like pure freedom.  The goal of life isn’t to chain ourselves to one way of thought or one pattern.  It is to learn what works for us and to create the life we are meant to have. So pay attention.  Hear it.  And when you are ready, follow it.

“Sometimes anxiety is the friction caused by your shadow saying: ‘I can no longer contain the light you repressed here decades ago.  It’s time to claim it all.’” Xavier Dagba.  So often we look at shadow as a negative thing.  Something that consumes the light, something dark.  But what if the shadow is the tool we use to dim the light that already exists because we are afraid of being seen? What if we use the shadow as a tool to make ourselves more palatable to other people?  What if the shadow is merely the hopes/things we wanted to do but were told were too crazy so we covered it, dimmed it down?  What if the shadow makes so much noise and seems so terrifying because it contains all the energy we hoped it would and it doesn’t know how to handle it?

The shadow becomes all of he things we reject about ourselves whether it is because we are told to reject them or because we fear we won’t be accepted.  If we self-reject, it somehow seems less painful to us in the moment.  But the mind doesn’t know that, it categorizes it all the same.  It’s a piece of us that can’t be shown and we learn to develop shame around it.  And then it turns into this monster thing that we can’t ignore, that we try to run from.  The reality is, it becomes a ten ton weight we drag around that is simply waiting to be acknowledged. It’s part of us and we are taught that we can compartmentalize and reject what we think is negative when really it is waiting to be integrated into our lives.  

Shadow isn’t a bad thing.  It is often the reflection of what we need most in our lives, and we are often too afraid to share that.  We are taught to deny our own needs, to ignore what we know our instincts are telling us for fear of rejection.  So all of what we know is blanketed in this dark cloud because we are taught that’s how it has to be instead of embracing what it really is: the very essence of who we are.  Truth be told, it could be beneficial to deny our needs if it truly served the greater good or if we were allowed another outlet, if we weren’t taught that we need to give up who we are to get anywhere—or if we were taught the value of helping others—instead we are guilted into feeding the machine because we are told it will help others.  It is again a conflict in what we know ad feel versus what we are told.

Our opening quote today is a reminder that we need to make peace with our shadows.  They don’t need to be baggage—we can leave parts behind and honor what we truly are.  I love this because the shadow is destroyed by light and that light is needed to guide our way forward.  How beautiful is it that the very remedy to what we need to progress in life is already within our grasp?  We simply need to let it out.  Allow the light to shine.  Forget what we are told or what we think people think.  AT the end of the day it doesn’t matter regardless.  It is time for all of us to make peace with the gifts we are given and accept them as such.  Don’t let anyone tell you the gifts you innately possess are bad.  Allow them to light the way for others who see you for all you are.     

“Sometimes anxiety is the friction caused by your soul saying: ‘I need more space in your life,’” Xavier Dagba. Most people go through their days in some kind of hustle or other.  They always have places to go, things to do, people to meet, and they are always moving to the next, next, next.  We’ve normalized and glorified that, thinking that is just how life is.  We make ourselves feel like failures for becoming tired, or disorganized, or overwhelmed.  We criticize those who can’t keep up.  We also criticize those who don’t go for the latest and greatest technology, clothes, cars, etc.  We are trained to seek everything externally and want validation based on what we accumulate and what we look like.  The soul doesn’t give a damn about what things look like, it knows what it feels.  The soul operates in the space of knowing, not showing.

The anxiety comes in when we are ignoring that message.  We are trained from birth to ignore what we know and what we feel.  We are indoctrinated with messages from every angle for every thing we could possibly think from religion, to politics, to what products to purchase, to what it means to be “normal.”  I think we need to redefine normal and understand that normal is what works for each individual.  There may be trends of course that apply to similar focused groups, but there is not ONE normal.  We need to stop training ourselves to let go of our knowing because that knowing would have told us a long time ago that we need to make peace with nature rather than find a cubicle.  That knowing would have told us to create something useful for everyone a long time ago.  It would have shown us how to fulfill a massive need a long time ago.  It would have told us to make peace with everyone a long time ago.

I’m not turning this into a religious exercise because that isn’t how my faith falls—personally I believe that religion is man’s work, not a higher power’s.  Everyone has every right to believe what they want to believe.  But the point is to find that faith and to hear the messages you are naturally given but were told to ignore.  The true essence of who we are needs to flow and be expressed otherwise there is friction between what we actually do and what we want to do.  Sometimes that opens through simply listening to what the heart knows.  That means breaking the shell around our hearts that we’ve been trained to build and stepping into the uncertain as we learn to hear again.

In my experience, when the soul wants more attention, it begins as an uncomfortableness.  I found myself bored with everything.  I didn’t want to do anything that I had been doing AT ALL.  I started feeling guilty because nothing “productive” was getting done in my life.  But a general awareness seeped over me that the way I was doing things didn’t work.  I was distracted by everything.  I mean, any excuse to not be where I was felt amazing.  If I got to leave my 9-5 early, fantastic, you don’t have to tell me twice.  People need a random chat session, I’m there.  Maybe the better word for it was a restlessness.  I felt myself pulled toward other things.  It feels like living in two worlds because once I started really hearing the message that I didn’t want to be where I was, I realized I didn’t know WHERE I was meant to go.  That’s a friction of soul as well: you know you can’t stay here but you don’t know what’s next.  And there’s the faith.

So full transparency, I haven’t made the big leap to anything.  I have all sorts of stories I tell myself, but the bottom line is I have fear of failing and I don’t want to jeopardize anything for my family.  But the good news is, I KNOW now.  I may not be able to take the crazy huge leap right this second, but I have managed to take tons of tiny steps in the right direction.  I’ve turned the sail and those little turns are taking me closer to where I need to go every day.  But none of that would have happened if I continued to ignore my inner knowing.  That voice we hear that isn’t quite our own, is a gift.  When we learn to trust it, we are shown more.  So sometimes anxiety is simply telling us to pay attention to that voice because it is going to take us where we are really meant to be.  We can’t live in two worlds forever, we need to reconcile what works and what doesn’t and see how that aligns with what we know.  So, for today/tonight, ask yourself how you can make some space for that voice.  More importantly, what action can you take to honor it?  Some may not be ready for that, it’s ok.  Just learn to make peace with the idea of hearing it again.  Little by little, you will understand. 

Today I am grateful to remember the need for other people.  I have felt so drained with every interaction with other people over the last two weeks, I felt myself isolating from everyone.  I didn’t have the energy to deal with one more person needing something from me.  Even if it was for something good for myself or energy needed to go into my business, I simply didn’t have it.  I knew yesterday was going to be a high energy demand day because we had two events, neither of which I wanted to go to.  Alas, we went anyway.  To my absolute surprise and delight, both events turned out great.  We didn’t stay longer than we wanted to, we had great conversation, we had fun, and while it was still tiring, it was also replenishing.  Sometimes you just need to let it go and see what happens. 

Today I am grateful for signs.  Part of why everything felt so draining this week is because I allowed myself to sink into a bit of a funk with my faith.   Things aren’t going the greatest at my 9-5 but I’m conflicted because even though I’m trying to move away from it, I still need it.  We haven’t had much progress with our business because we’ve been sick—again—so we haven’t been able to put much into it.   I’ve been getting a ton of outward signs to be grateful and have faith that everything is well and on track and that some of my work is about to pay off and things are manifesting etc, etc. But the outward results aren’t happening at all so I was getting depressed.  But today I received a reminder that there is plenty of time for things to manifest and that things meant for me can’t be missed.  It specifically said to let go of my anxiety—and I’m about to share our anxiety series that I mentioned yesterday.  So keep the faith and keep going.

Today I am grateful for cleansing.  We need to do a deep clean of the house as we are entering fall and we’ve been sick for the last several weeks.  Thank you Petrie dish of young children. Regardless, I am grateful we have the means to create a safe, clean space for all of us and to help each other be a bit healthier.  It’s amazing how good it feels to clear and clean space.  Sometimes we just have to get in the weeds to make it feel good again and taking care of our space is a sacred connection to source as well as shows appreciation for what we have.

Today I am grateful for reminders of who I am.  It’s so important to remember that we can’t grow who we are if we are trying to be who someone else tells us to be.  I work with an incredible team and there are moments it feels like the only way to move forward is to be exactly who they think I am.  There is an expectation of following the system and repeating known patterns of success.  But as I dive deeper into it, I know this is a challenge for me to not look for approval from others.  It’s about finding what works for me.  Yes, there are moments I know I need to be pushed—and that was something I was never comfortable with.  But more importantly, I know I need to stand in who I am and head toward my personal direction.  I’ve learned (even though it’s hard to do it) that it’s worth letting everyone down if it means becoming who you are.

Today I am grateful for acceptance.  I have a tendency to set really high expectations of myself and others.  Not that they are unrealistic, but they definitely take work.  But I’m learning where that may be slightly destructive or sabotaging to my success.  It’s great to have a big goal, but things come with that.  There will be obstacles.  There will be detours.  Things will turn out differently than you’d like.  The acceptance is tricky because it can feel like failure if it isn’t how you envisioned it.  The reality is moving any step in the direction of your/my dreams is key.  Magic happens in alignment.  It happens in flow.  It happens when we let go of the reins and learn to go with it.  Acceptance isn’t lying down in defeat or submission.  It’s acknowledging what is and learning to incorporate and adapt to what the circumstance IS over what you think it should be.  I know I can’t let my expectations destroy the joy of where I’m at because it’s better than where I was. 

Today I am grateful for fun.  We had a busy weekend.  It was fun but it was really full.  Sometimes I don’t mind it, but there are times it takes a lot of my energy to even wrap my head around going.  I mentioned we had a few events yesterday and that we were going through the house cleaning today—and I was exhausted.  I really wanted to get everything done.  But we needed a break at a certain point plus I realized there were a few things I had forgotten at the store.  So we got together and went to the store.  After, my husband asked if we were hungry so we had a surprise stop to get some food.  The place was having a car show so that was fun to see on the way in.  We had a really nice meal—nothing fancy, but we were engaged and having fun together.  Sometimes you need to slow down to go faster.  We all felt more energized after.  No, not everything got done.  But we certainly felt better.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.