If you follow me on Insta you might have noticed I’ve been quiet. That’s because I’ve been focusing on my program Emotional Mastery… as well as being fully present to my own emotional mastery in my personal life.
My partnership is in a tough spot.
I’m dealing with some non-life threatening health stuff.
I picked up some side work that’s I'm earning well in but is bringing up old emotional wounds for me to work through.
I’m communing deeper than I ever have with my business Women Can Heal and clarifying so much about my gifts and mission in the world.
My 40th birthday is coming up in April and it feels like... a really big deal.
It’s a lot.
Some days I wake up and after my morning routine of prayer, meditation, writing and somatic practices…I’m feeling so filled up and trusting that I’ll make it to the other side of all of this seeing clearer and a stronger woman.
Other days, like today, I wake up and do the routine but I can’t seems to get that feeling of trust that I’ll make it through. I don’t get my traction and my fear-based thinking is on max volume.
Before I figured out my hack with this I’d get so obsessed with fixing (or numbing) this feeling of not knowing or having answers.
It created a great deal more of emotional suffering and insanity for me.
I have a lot of experience in the 12-step tradition and a friend told me once that she needed to retire from "Figuring-It-Out Anonymous"... I laughed hysterically at that one.
I definitely need to retire from this group too!
So my hack when my mind is spinning on fear of the unknown and I feel the pressure to figure my life out is go to the backyard and rake pine needles.
There are so many of them where I live.
Our house is nestled right under tons of pine and cedar trees and the needles fall daily right in our back yard.
The first time I realized doing something hard, labor-intensive and even repulsive could be a way out of fear based mind-spinning was when I was helping out behind the scenes of a residential transformation program. The program was hosted on a huge plot of land in Northern California what had animals that needed tending too.
I don’t know why but a group of us were asked to clean the chicken coop.
I know, you might be thinking some things but that is how I rolled back then.
That day I was seriously activated by many things in my life. In a lot of my own victim consciousness. Fucked up. insecure. Emotional.
In a lot of worry.
I didn't know what to do with myself that day and was game to be of service is this confusing and random way.
I also had NO IDEA what I was getting myself into.
Michele, it was the most repulsive smelling, looking and feeling thing I’ve ever done.
It helped that I had some good friends to share the experience with but damn it was intense.
There were gags and there were laughs.
There were jokes about how we were literally shoveling shit and namings that on some level we were cleaning up stuff inside ourselves too.
The thing is, after we spent some hours on it and made a big dent in the task I felt SO CLEARED OUT.
My mind was still.
My body was lighter.
The issues I was worrying about were still there but my relationship to them had shifted completely.
To this day I don’t really know what the specific magic of this emotional alchemy via labor intensive tasks is but I know it works.
So, I don’t have a filthy chicken coop out here in Northern Cali but I do have a maddening amount of pine needles that need to be raked into piles and stuffed into a yard waste bin.
I just got back from an hour of work back there.
My mind is more still.
My body is more light.
I’m trusting again I’ll make it through.