When you know who you are becoming
“When you know who you are becoming, it is a lot easier to make peace with who you’ve been. It’s a lot easier to dissect the past for the lessons you needed to learn, and then let the rest go.
The experiences that delivered you those essential pieces of knowledge - no matter how uncomfortable they were - they were not useless. They were not wasted. Your pain was not for nothing; your hurt was not meaningless.
You completed the most daring task of all, which is to look into the recess of your own fear and find hope, meaning and find a greater truth.”
Brianna Wiest Day 65 THE PIVOT YEAR
Making peace with the past - this has been me recently - on a mission to move forwards and away from the stresses of the past - a summer cleanse if you will, brought on by some time away on Retreat in Ireland with Tanis Fishman, my Yoga Nidra Goddess.
I have been going back through old journals and re-reading my heart-opening off-loading onto paper, and as I re-lived some of the more difficult moments, I felt a deep sadness and heaviness. I re-visited a time in my life when I was being bullied, threatened, worn down, belittled and negated during the years of single parenthood - and how I carried so much fear, loss and struggle. It was not possible to walk away. I felt trapped! Thank goodness I had my yoga and meditation practices to keep my head above water until a time when I could breathe again.
Then I read more recent journal pages when I was in situations where I was struggling to be happy, to speak up for myself and set boundaries around my time and energy. I wrote about my nervous system in overload, not sleeping, feeling stressed and anxious… and yet, even though I could change things and walk away - I stayed silent and miserable - I allowed myself to feel trapped!
Why?
Because I have a habit, a learned behaviour, a Limiting Belief about ‘Suffering in Silence’. I know where it comes from. I can clearly see myself as a child, picking up this lesson from my Mum - who was an expert in the field - noting it down and etching it into my heart…
‘AT ALL COSTS, AVOID CONFLICT.’
Since I trained with Dr. Eve Agee in Transformation Life Coaching in 2023 I have been using her Meditations and Visualisations to go into my old beliefs and inherited values - again and again - to get to the root of them; those pesky little seeds that were planted long ago. In Meditation, I can understand why I put them in place - little me trying to make sense of the grown-up world. Using different techniques to release them with grace, I have one by one dismantled my old constructs and created much more helpful beliefs. I have knocked the ‘Suffering in Silence’ belief out of the park … And each time now I need to speak up for myself, I take a deep breath and open my mouth… and the words just come out, slowly, carefully but with integrity. It feel so good. It feels so new.
I know who I am becoming, and the lessons from my old journals are showing me my progress from writing about the issues, to understanding and detaching from them. In 2009 I wrote “For every habit or pattern we repeat, there is a need within us. Every need corresponds to a belief we have. We have to find out what the need / belief is, untangle the ball of string and slowly unravel the knots.” But it wasn’t until I knew the Meditation techniques to do this work, that I was actually able to fully set myself free of the past.
This has been so transformational for me, that I have developed my own style of coaching, but with a yogic twist, using the Chakras as the roadmap. If you have old patterns, habits and blocks that you would like to shift, but don’t know how, have a read about my Life Coaching here:
