Step By Step… I’m Becoming the Me I was Always Meant to Be.
Something has become abundantly clear to me recently. It’s the kind of thing that is obvious and I already knew, but didn’t necessarily embody. In order to get better, we have to consciously choose it. Hypothetical situation: I run the same course every day for a month and don’t get a second faster at it. This leaves me feeling confused and frustrated. Why can I doing this every day if I am not seeing any progress?
Result: I didn’t choose to do anything to consciously improve. I didn’t push myself. I didn’t do muscle training. I didn’t practice sprints. I did show up, but I didn’t show up to the best of my ability every day and make decisions to support my overall goal.
This result can come from many places. Maybe I didn’t set a clear goal to improve in the first place. Maybe I didn’t understand the steps it would take to actually get better and faster. Maybe I thought all I needed to do was show up and everything else would fall into place. Maybe I didn’t take time to educate myself on the process.
The more I learn, the more I need to implement. If I don’t make the choice to implement as I am learning, I will not make the progress I want to be making. The key here is I WANT to be making progress. Progress means change, and when we are in a trauma response like freeze, fawn, fight or flight, we may fight this change. Four years of therapy, and the time when I felt fully capable of embracing change was when I went through nervous system training in 2020. Therapy is an amazing tool, and it isn’t always the right tool. Therapy got me to a place where I understood myself and accepted myself. This laid the groundwork for me to be able to seek out other modalities, like nervous system training, and have them actually work. When I used to hear people say “Start where you are,” I didn’t understand. I would think to myself, “How else would I start?” Seems obvious, again, right? But what it really means is start based on what you need now. If you need validation, nothing else will really work until you get the validation you need.
When it comes to boundaries, exercise, nervous system regulating, trauma work, etc, showing up is a great place to start. Showing up in my life as a person working on boundaries and regulating my nervous system upset people in my life. Some people may feel like they don’t know me anymore, or even like they never knew me. I don’t see that as the case. I see it as people knowing me at every stage of my healing, and I am grateful for each of them. It doesn’t mean I don’t understand that they are entitled to their view on this, and I don’t think they are wrong. I think we have very different views on this, and sometimes those views mean we won’t be in each others lives anymore.
I recently participated in a boundaries master class taught by the wonderful Abby Vernon. I spent so much time working on my fight or flight responses, that I wasn’t paying enough attention to my FAWN response (aka people pleasing response). I know I have been doing a lot of work on defining my values and boundaries with myself and holding true to them around others over the last two years, and her class helped me see that I was stuck between resistance and chaos when it came to my transformation. She defines the cycle of transformation as Normal —> Change —> Resistance —> Chaos —> Integration. I believe that I have finally ended my toxic cycle with resistance and chaos and am finally integrating the changes in my life I have needed. Chaos in my life looked like allowing people to disrespect me and my boundaries, disregarding my needs and prioritizing the needs of others, and prioritizing inconsistency in my life instead of consistency. I am making the conscious decision daily to no longer tolerate or prioritize these things, and I am no longer abandoning myself to make others feels safe or comfortable.
I am on Day 10 of the Mindful60 program created by my dear friend Marissa Woodman, and it teamed up with Day 4 of my nervous system training has been a great source of support for my implementation stage. The idea of Mindful60 is to do everything mindfully each day. If you have read my other blog posts, you know that it is insanely important for my healing to do everything mindfully. I am on month 8-9 of no alcohol and no caffeine, and month 5 of 90% gluten, dairy and soy free. I say 90% because it does sneak in every here and there. I don’t beat myself up about it, but my stomach will (haha). One of the significant changes over the last two weeks has been re-introducing frequencies in my day. I listen to 30 minutes of frequency music (more like a sound bath), and also do FSR’s to support my thyroid (I am having thyroid surgery on June 13th to remove the left node). When it comes to frequencies and subliminal, it is so very important to be super cautions of what you expose yourself to. These have a direct line to your subconscious, and our subconscious controls up to 95% of our decisions. There are subliminals out there that have negative messages planted in them that could hinder your progress and you wouldn’t even know it. So again, please be very wary. I like doing this program because I know I can trust the source and what I allow in to my subconscious is very carefully created. If you do look for things out there, be sure to stay at 432hz or above. 432hz is connected to the root chakra, and is Earth tones. It is important to increase frequencies slllooowwwllyyyy. If you feel a little off listening to 432hz, you will feel completely thrown off by 800hz.
Stay true to your needs, implement what you learn as you learn it, and you will find yourself surrounded by the people that are ready and willing to meet those needs and support your journey.
