Episode 21 The Power of Being Alone.....I'm Not As Important As I Think I Am...

Episode 21 

The Power of Being Alone..

I'm Not As Important As I Think I AM..

Now I Am Full Of Me...

Transcript

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Hello and a huge big Scottish welcome. Episode 21, Sleepless in Granada. I woke up at 6am this morning, full of energy. My furry girls groaned and went back to sleep. I'm sitting outside now with my mug of green tea and my world is very still. It's dawn. The sun has not quite risen yet. I'm waiting patiently. I love this time of morning and summer. The days are 15 hours long. I have learned that one of the most powerful things you can learn is how to be alone. I mean, actually alone. No noise, no people, no distractions. Just you and your darkest thoughts. Most people can't do it. Oh yeah, you say I'm independent and all that. But are you always out, always talking and planning the next adventure because deep down you're scared of silence, scared of what comes up when the noise dies down. Do you know how many people jump from plan to plan, country to country, person to person, just because they just can't face themselves? But here's the thing. My dad actually told this to my sister repeatedly. No matter where you run to or who you try to hide from, each morning when you wake up, it's always you that you see in the mirror. So if you can sit in a room with your own mind and not lose it, if you can spend time alone without having to numb yourself or run away, that's being in control and that's peace. It took me a long, long time to get here and it was sore, so very sore. But the end game, oh my God, it's so worth it. It's absolutely fine not to be liked by everyone. It's okay to be with yourself when there's no one else around. Self-control is your real power. Not sending that text, not saying what you really want to say, not trying to hurt someone just because they hurt you in the first place. Anyone can react. Anyone can make noise. Anyone can shout and scream. But holding your peace and choosing silence over ego, choosing control over chaos, now that's a totally different level of strength. I finally get it. It's me. I'm the huge problem. I skip into people's lives full of love and positivity, energy, loyalty, peace and joy. Something that they've never had before. I totally disrupt their comfort zone of chaos. They are uncomfortable and are not used to real. You see, these people are addicted to dysfunction. and that's why they behave weirdly towards me, but I'm okay with that. It's because my presence requires growth and they're not there yet. One of the hardest lessons I have ever learned is that I'm not as important as I think I am. I could be falling apart, barely holding it together, but you know what? Nothing stops. The world doesn't pause. time doesn't slow down life just keeps on going and going and going with or without me that's just the way it is it doesn't matter how loud or how heavy it gets inside your head the truth of it is you're you are one person one moment one tiny little speck I know it sounds really, really harsh, but it's strangely grounding at the same time. Because if the world won't stop for you, then maybe you'll stop expecting it to. So you breathe, you get up and you keep moving forward. How empty of me to be so full of you. This was a quote that I heard some time ago. And for the life of me, I can't remember where I heard it, but it stuck in my head. I became so conditioned that I felt as if I was nothing without him. I had to fill my emptiness with his validation. His problems, I was there for him. I made it my job to put a smile on his face. And that happiness I saw once in a while. used to fill me up and I somehow felt of value. I felt important. But now, now that I've healed, I'm full of myself. I'm content, at peace and happy with who I am. I no longer have that need to have someone or something fill that empty void within me. The reason we're attracted to people who are really bad for us or use and manipulate us, people who we know that we mean absolutely nothing to outside of what we have to offer them, it's because we feel so empty without them. But we are not just empty without them. We're empty with or without them in our existence, in our lives. That false fullness that we feel when we allow them to use and manipulate us, that's not a real feeling of fullness. It's It's a fake feeling. We are filling ourselves up, but our hearts and souls are never nourished. They're still starving. I never had that feeling of, I am accepted. I can be who I really am. I had to ask myself all the time, what is it that's stopping me? What is it that's stopping me from cutting him out of my life? That was my key to freedom. I became so aware of the toxicity that he constantly brought into my life. only treating me horribly. He depleted all my energy. The poison of pain took time to enter me. It took what seemed like an eternity to leave me. I thought I was weak, that there was something very wrong with me, because I couldn't instantly cut him off, even though I knew he was bad for me. Bit by bit, though, I learned to extract him from my life. I didn't get over it. I just got really good at disassociating. Survival mode isn't the same as healing. Your body still remembers. Insight isn't healing. You can know every trauma response in the book and still not feel safe in your own body. You've got to feel it, not just name it. Avoiding emotions didn't mean that I'd mastered them. It simply meant that my system hadn't felt safe enough to let them in. Being self-aware isn't the same as being self-compassionate. You can understand why you react this way, but are you gentle with yourself about this reaction? Healing. You can't fix a body problem by thinking about it. You have to come back into your body. It's not about intellectualising it. Sometimes it's not even about understanding it. It's about creating the space to feel it. So if you're constantly avoiding discomfort, if you're constantly chasing feeling better, if you don't want to feel that icky and sticky discomfort, the body will always find a way to discharge that energy and it's sometimes through the skin and auto- immune condition or through pain. We all need to feel the emotional pain that's driving the physical pain. When I was with my monster, I had eczema And I always felt icky and had headaches and just felt tired and listless. And since I've been on my own and before I had met him, I never had a day's illness in my life and I've never, touch wood, had a day's illness since I've been on my own. It's incredible, isn't it? We all need to learn to get out of our heads and into our bodies. We need to learn and understand that our body has a way of moving things that our minds just can't comprehend. We need to learn to sit with our pain. Where are you feeling it? And breath work, this resets your nervous system. Learn to listen to the internal signals. No matter what anyone tells you, at the end of the day, your body knows itself. You just need to get quiet enough to hear it. Give it enough space to tell you. This disembodiment isn't because we really don't know what we need. We depend on other people to tell us. I am my own greatest tailor. I trust in myself, I listen to myself, and I give myself space. This wasn't always the case, and I used to think it was a lot of gobbledygook. Everything I speak about in my podcast is my own lived life experiences. I am in no way an expert. I'm just sharing my healing journey from the invisible little mouse to the warrior woman survivor that I am today. Before I learned to regulate my nervous system, my thoughts about myself were not to be trusted. I would spiral over something really small and I would repeat the same harsh thoughts over and over again. Making one mistake would make me a total failure. It would consume my thoughts. If this is you, you aren't alone. It happened to me all the time. The freeze response that happened to me began in childhood. If I made the tiniest mistake, my tiny inner voice would immediately go, you're stupid. What's wrong with you? Why do you always do this thing? I wasn't consciously trying to be perfect. I just had this inner feeling, my inner voice, that told me to stop messing up. That feeling is shame. That voice in my head was trapped in my dysregulated nervous system. And an instant freeze response from childhood, I often felt my child was chaotic and at times unsafe. As children, we know we can't run or fight. Our bodies do the only thing, which is to freeze. It's a survival response. It's safer for the child to think, I'm bad, rather than blame the parents. We learn as kids not to make mistakes because if we do, we get shamed, punished, yelled at, cast out and labelled. The body starts associating making mistakes or being wrong with danger. I swam in this ocean of uncertainty for decades. One of the reasons I'm a good speller is because of the daily ritual in school that I absolutely hated. Every morning at nine o'clock, we were all lined up in class along the wall and we had to remain there if we got the words that we were asked to spell wrong. You can imagine the shame felt by the kids who were not good at spelling. I often get into huge trouble trying to mouth the answers to my fellow classmates. It was embarrassing, it was shameful and it was so fucking stressful and I was only seven or eight and at that age we shouldn't have to endure such things. I put myself under such pressure to always be correct and yet we learn these things from an early, early age. When our body feels safe, our thoughts will naturally soften. I became more compassionate and more curious about the inner child in me. I became less cruel to her and less critical about myself. It's great when you make a mistake and can move forward without spiraling into self-doubt and self-criticism. Always pause before believing the thoughts in your head because they might not be telling you the truth. You may just need to experience more safety in your I wish I knew this 50 years or more ago the dwelling shadow of this thing I call life and the cold dark prison of reference experience. The reason we believe something is because of our reference experience. No one loves me, so what is my reference experience to that? We don't have a reference for something we are trying to create. We have to create it internally. The mind has a very difficult time differentiating between what is actually happening physically and what it is seeing in our mind's eye. When you are giving the mind a reference experience visualising first, you're giving the brain the context to be able to recognise it in the external world. Most people don't even realise they have experienced trauma. Reality is most people have experienced some kind of trauma in their lives. We need to take a fresh look at trauma. First of all, what is trauma? Distress without resolve happens in all demographics across all social classes to humans of any age, race, class, religion or sex. Trauma changes the course of our lives. It alters our entire perception of the world, the choices we make and the things we do. Trauma changes the way we think, the way we feel, changes the way our physical bodies operate. The symptoms of trauma can manifest as anything from changes in your personality to dysfunctional behaviour patterns in relationships to difficulty in regulating anger and other emotions to a general feeling of emotional numbness to physical disease and other illnesses, low self-esteem to self-harm to chronic pain, mental illness, simply having this lingering feeling of a general unsatisfactory or painful life and so, so much more. If you've suppressed a memory and don't have conscious awareness of it, the only aspect you have of this memory left are the triggers, the emotional aspect of memories which comes up in random scenarios when you are triggered. We need to expand our minds and start thinking about memories as more than just the visual aspect of memories. When we think of a memory, we want the visual part and that's how the mind makes sense of it. There's a visual part of a memory, there's an audio part of a memory, there's a smell, an emotional part and a feeling part. So all of these five constitute one memory and all that I'm getting is the emotional part. It's still accessing the memory. We get frustrated because we can't get the visual aspect. Trauma. Don't ever tell someone, just get over it. If that certain someone was physically broken after suffering life-changing injuries in a car crash, you would never be so cruel as to say, just get over it. We completely understand cruelty on a physical level, but do we understand cruelty on an emotional level? I think we need to start changing our mindsets the body is being told all day every day by our thoughts we are thinking and the way that we are feeling our physical body is not a separate machine most people who are suffering and struggling from a physical ailment have no idea that there is a mental and emotional root to every physical ailment healing happens in layers today this might be the day that you're ready to shed that layer and next week or tomorrow I know. This is what happens. The healing process is natural, right? I don't need to focus on my hurt shoulder in order for it to get better. My emotional healing and the healing of my consciousness are the same. The layer that is ready to heal will just come up, deal with whatever arises. We can heal that. The outside mirrors the inside. And now a piece of writing by the actress Meryl Streep. Let things fall apart. Stop exhausting yourself trying to hold them together. Not everything is meant to last forever. And forcing what is already breaking will only drain you. Sometimes the best thing you can do is let go. Let people be upset. Let them misunderstand you. Let them criticise and judge. Their opinions are reflections of their own perceptions, not a measure of your worth. You do not need to explain yourself to those who are committed to misunderstanding you. You're not responsible for how others choose to see you or how they react to your truth. Stop feeding the unknown. Stop asking, where will I go? What will I do? As if the universe has not already carved a path for you. Loss can sometimes feel unbearable, but sometimes it's simply clearing the way for something better. What is meant to leave will leave no matter how desperately you try to hold on to it. What is meant to stay will find a way no matter how uncertain things seem. Life always finds a balance in itself, even when we can't see how. There's a rhythm to life, a natural order of endings and beginnings. When we resist the flow, we create suffering. We cling to what is breaking, fearing that nothing good will ever replace it but this is an illusion the universe is abundant constantly unfolding new opportunities new love and new purpose the only thing keeping you from it is your attachment to what no longer belongs to you and never never for a second believe that the best is behind you Life does not stop offering beauty just because you have endured hardship. The good has not run out. There is still more joy to be experienced, more love to receive, more peace to be found. But you must be willing to make room for it. So ask yourself, what am I holding on to that is holding me back? And when you find the answer, trust yourself enough to let it go. Something better is already on the way. And don't I just know it. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sleepless in Granada. I would absolutely love to hear from you. Email me at sleeplessingranada at yahoo.com. Next episode to follow soon.