Reflection: Start seeing your life in layers

Chapters in life don’t disappear all at once. They return in layers.

In this reflection, we speak about grief, identity, awareness, emotional patterns, and what happens when we suppress the parts of ourselves that are trying to be seen.

Because healing is not about becoming perfect.
It’s about learning how to listen when life asks us to grow.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Nellegna Stadius podcast. Here we will explore fear, patterns, and what is meant to lead yourself through life. So an onion has layers, and at its center it has a core. It has a green core and from that core it grows new onions. The green sprouts is the part that keeps growing. And we work the same emotionally because life is not one single version of you. It's layers of experiences, protection, grief, conditionings, how you identify yourself, fears, the healing and also the understanding of who you are. And every layer asks something from you. So what is it that happens when a layer appears? Let's say you lose someone you love. It can be a family member, it can be a friend, or it can be a loved one. And at first you feel shock, you feel that you miss them. You think about the unfinished conversations that you never had, and old memories appears. And when the grief comes, you have a choice. That layer wants to show you something. Because the second layer can become suppression. I cry later. I need to stay strong for myself or for my other family members. Or not now, I take it later, or next to my colleagues at my workplace. But the body will remembers what the mind avoids. Because it can lead to tension in the body, anxiety, depression, numbness and physical symptoms. Even emotional exhaustion can appear. Because grief revisits you in layers. It can be that song that comes on that you always listen to with each other. A place, a smell that maybe smells familiar to what they did. So when you're at this layer of grief, it can become a feeling, a sensation of that you need to release something. And every time a new layer wants to come up, you have a choice. Because the goal is not to heal and never feel sad again, or to stay strong for someone else. You need to learn how to let those emotions move through you instead of becoming trapped inside you. Because the grief will continue to visit you, but it will no longer control the direction that you're going in. You don't identify with grief. You are not grief. It becomes a part of you. So when a new layer comes up, it's about what does that layer want to tell you? And then that choice comes. Either you choose to allow that new layer of grief. Because the closer you come to the core on the center of you, you will have the sensation that it becomes harder and harder. But when you release that tension from the body, you come one step closer to your core. Because when you don't allow yourself to feel the feelings that are coming up in your body, you will suppress them. You will have them laying on top of each other, all of a sudden you made a gigantic onion that will be even harder to peel. Because at the end, do you want to go around having this grief or anxiety or physical symptoms? The same thing is with identity. You can peel layers of yourself if you allow that to happen. Old ways of being can get resurfaced. And it tells you what are you gonna do with it? Are you gonna continue keeping it like a layer or are you gonna use that layer in order to grow? Because the same thing is with identity. These layers are information. They want you to either consider something new about yourself. They want you to stop, they want you to feel emotions, or even get mirrored in a present of another human being that you either haven't looked on yet, or they're mirroring something that you like about yourself. And that's gonna trigger you coming into a new relationship or starting a new friendship that will expose your wounds that you haven't worked with. Every layer either gets integrated or suppressed. The choice is always yours. Because you can outgrow environments. You can have friends for ten plus years and they are lovely and it may work. But if you don't grow in the same pace and the same direction, it can become attention in the body. It can feel like this doesn't give me anymore. You feel tired being around them, and you just go with it to have that Saturday night at a party just because that's what you're supposed to do. But that part of you is speaking to you. It wants to tell you that you need to look at something here. Because what you surround yourself around is gonna be a reflection of who you are as a person. And for that layer to be integrated, it may be that you need to let go of those friendships. And the goal of these layers is not to build perfection. It's about learning as you grow. Because the goal is to come closer to your own center. Some layers can take weeks, some layers can take years, and some of them will revisit you again and again, even if you thought they were gone. And instead of seeing that as a problem, you get rewarded to see it as an opportunity like yes, I can change. I can actually do something different now than I did yesterday. And it's not easy, it will involve pain. It will not always be pretty. Because when you leave something that's been familiar to you all your life, that creates a false safety, and that's all your system has known. Every time you choose awareness, you move closer to your inner core. And awareness is good, but you can also stay aware for many years. You notice your own patterns and how you move, and you can get irritated about it. That annoyance of yourself is information. But awareness is not the same as actually taking actions to change the current reality.