Category Archives: wellness

(R)Evolutionary Mistakes

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“The truth is this: by learning from your mistakes and experiences and by evolving through them, you practice the greatest form of self-love which is to grow,” unknown.  “Mistakes” is a broad term and a matter of interpretation—we can choose how we define it.  Some people are gifted with the ability to look at any situation in life as an opportunity.  We aren’t all going for the same goals so things that might appear to impede some won’t impede others—not everything matters in the same way to everyone.  If we’re not planning on being a professional athlete, then it doesn’t matter if we don’t try out for any sports, you know?  What is true, regardless of defining a situation as a mistake or not, is what we allow ourselves to experience and how we interpret that experience determines what we get from it.  I struggled with letting go of my ego and expectations and the thought patterns those habits created.  I firmly believed I knew what was “right.”  I didn’t ever want to veer from that course because it was known and safe.  But it still felt wrong. 

By repeating patterns that I’d learned from my family and developed through my experiences, I was inhibiting my own growth.  I wasn’t getting anything new—I wasn’t even able to replicate what those around me had.  So I was quite literally getting no where—not on their track or my own.  I had misinterpreted the point of life as repeating what I knew to perfection.  It wasn’t until many years later that I understood there might be a different purpose: learning and alchemizing this information into a broader, more universal lesson—and in some instances, a more personal lesson.  Perhaps a more precise lesson on letting go of what we know and integrating it to learn something new.  To become something new.  Habits and thought patterns like we’ve been talking about this week are beneficial when it comes to survival because the brain thrives in the known—it’s easier to recognize when something is different/a threat when it doesn’t match the patterns we know.  But it inhibits us from spreading our wings—and we have spent millennia learning to fly. 

As we learn to adapt and create new experiences, we create new thought patterns.  We can redefine how we look at mistakes, and we can redefine what a mistake is.  Humans are indeed meant to grow and evolve.  When we allow ourselves to be our most authentic self, we are evolving not only ourselves, but the world.  We are bringing new ideas and perspectives to the world.  This isn’t a punitive thing.  This is a spiritual thing.  This is a learning curve and no one knows how high the bell is set.  We simply need to live our lives and share what we know.  A mistake isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Sometimes things have to go wrong so we know which way to pivot so they can go right.  Growth isn’t always easy and it certainly isn’t pain-free.  Change is hard and requires a lot of dirty work.  But it is all worth it.  Rising from the darkness requires a lot of pushing through the dirt and ash.  But once we reach the top, we feel the light and we bloom.  Don’t inhibit ourselves because we think we veered in the wrong direction.  Simply keep pushing forward and allow the course to correct.  As we allow ourselves to be who we are and to fulfill our highest purpose, we learn what love is: the unconditional welcoming and acceptance of who we are.  How evolutionary/revolutionary of us.         

Free Reign Thoughts

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“Do not allow negative thoughts to roam free, unregulated and unmanaged.  Take ownership of them and start to practice managing your thoughts so that they can work for you rather than against you,” unknown.  Control of the mind is truly one of the most difficult things to master.  Our thought patterns become set based on how we feel.  We associate how we feel with the thought and soon we train ourselves that our thoughts must be how we feel.  I’m paraphrasing Joe Dispenza where he talks about changing how we feel through managing our thoughts.  We can’t let our bodies dictate our thoughts.  That isn’t to say we ignore our bodies and what they tell us, but we need to understand the power we have to shift the feelings in our body.  So many of those feelings are temporary and they only become permanent because we continue to wire our thoughts that way.  The same is said for our thoughts.  We respond with the same patterns and soon we are thinking the same thing in similar situations or we are repeating the same situation over and over again.  We have so much more say than we are trained to think we do.    

Managing thoughts begins with recognition and awareness.  I know certain events from earlier in my relationship with my husband cemented responses I still have to this day.  I didn’t realize how impactful it was and I didn’t realize how much I repeated it.  Honestly it expanded even to simple things: expectations on dishes, laundry, and caring for the house.  For example, my husband gets home significantly earlier than I do so my expectation was helping a bit around the house (not on a daily basis, but not having to be told what needs doing).  I’d find myself thinking the same resentful thoughts every day when I’d get home and see that the things that needed doing weren’t getting done.  I had to stop and ask myself why those things even bothered me in the first place.  Does it really matter if the dishes are in the sink an extra evening? Doing so freed up space in my mind–Granted I still get irritated because any help is appreciated, so it’s not just because I have this expectation that isn’t fulfilled. 

I started asking where else I allow thoughts to run free like that.  While driving.  While at work.  While waiting in the drop off line at my son’s school.  When interacting with friends and family.  When interacting with people at the grocery store.  The more I worked through the list it was clear how often I was thinking negative thoughts—and more importantly, how often they were automatic.  I’d spent so much time with these thoughts they were the track my brain followed.  And I wondered why I had felt negative and exhausted for so long.  The world wasn’t working the way my brain thought it should, the way I had been taught to expect it to work, and all of those things created stress for me (now I see it wasn’t real stress) and that turned into negative thoughts.  This was how powerful unregulated thoughts are in the body.  Not only do we think them before we can stop them, we feel them, and whenever we are in similar situations, we are triggered to feel the same way again.  Gaining control of our thoughts helps us gain control over our lives.  When we can put aside expectation and accept what is, we can limit the neural permanency we create through beliefs and thoughts that are likely not even originating from us.  If we find ourselves in the same situation repeatedly, start asking where our thought patterns come from and why we feel the need to continue to think that way.  Asking the question opens the door to an entire new way of thinking, one that feels infinitely more open, aligned, and authentic. It all begins with the mind.    

Your Mess, Your Choice

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You are welcome to make the mess, but you have to deal with the consequences of it.  Your mess is no longer my responsibility.  Simply, you are free to take the action/make the decision but you are not free of the consequences.  This was one of the hardest boundaries for me to learn to enforce.  The idea that people in my life simultaneously needed to see perfection and not feel the sting of their actions led me to constantly be a cleaner.  Someone needed money, someone needed advice, someone needed encouragement, someone needed me to do the heavy lifting on clearing their space, or making food, or putting an event together.  I created this sense of pressure in my mind that I constantly needed to keep things smooth for people around me.  That the goal was keeping things flowing.  I didn’t understand that sometimes the rockiness in life teaches us to navigate better.  It also teaches people how to recognize what they are and are not capable of. They learn the lessons and develop the skills they needed.  Initially I thought I was saving myself because I wanted things to be a certain way and if the other person wasn’t cooperating, it was just easier for me to do it.  Kind of like in school with the group projects—I didn’t want to get in trouble for not completing something on time so I’d often end up doing the whole project. 

Truthfully, I erroneously expected a sense of gratitude from the people I helped.  I expected they would appreciate what I had done for them and hoped they would either return the favor or simply express some gratitude.  What ended up happening is they became reliant on me to do the thing for them.  Often they wouldn’t include me in the fun stuff they were doing, they would seek me out when it came time to work on a project that they didn’t want to do.  The same thing started occurring in my adult life as well.  My husband made questionable decisions at times.  My friends would insist on doing something reckless.  People would want to have a party.  I’d stress myself making sure I could afford to bail us out as needed, or I’d be in the background with the car waiting, or I would end up setting up and cleaning for an entire party because someone cooked.  I exhausted myself being everything to everyone and quickly saw that they didn’t return the same favor to me.  I realized that they didn’t need me to do any of that.  Creating a false reliance on me wasn’t the same as creating friendships—and I had interpreted their “need” was friendship.  But that isn’t how relationships work.

For so long I thought I was helping people and never considered that I may be hindering them by not allowing them to experience the weight of their own decisions and actions.  By rushing to clean up, sure, I may have saved some outside opinions on how my friends/family looked as well as myself.  I mean, I didn’t want to be associated with someone who didn’t follow through or treated people poorly or was selfish.  But in protecting them, I stopped them from being who they are and from figuring out what they wanted in life.  They never saw the truth of the work it took to achieve what they wanted.  It was never my choice to determine what they were capable of.  It was for me to be a friend and allow them to figure out what worked for them in their own time and in their own way.  I had to learn to cut out the reliance I had created—and I had to learn to dive into my own wants and needs and stop using the excuse that I couldn’t work on my stuff because people were taking advantage of me.  I had to face my own demons and develop my own story and I had to allow others to do the same in their own way and time.