Our mind can be what holds us back, OR how we find freedom. Observing the stories gives us the opportunity to correct them, even when they have been there longer than we can remember.
Stories like:
“If people really see me, they’ll leave.”
“If I relax, something bad will happen.”
“If something goes wrong, it’s probably my fault.”
“I’m too much / not enough.”
“Anger will cost me love.”
“Staying small keeps me protected.”
“If I don’t manage everything, it will fall apart.”
It is important to know that not all memories are meant to be kept. When we experience trauma and can’t let them go, our body and mind work together to keep us guided by assumptions that there is only one truth. That becomes our story.
Those are adaptive stories, provided to a younger version of us based on the actions of others and events we navigated. It doesn’t matter how true or right we are about the experience we had.
Trauma doesn’t teach what actually happened, it teaches what to expect.
Then the body keeps enforcing those stories because we believe that is what we want. It isn’t until we seek the PEACE to PAUSE and consciously examine, (not just intellectually understand), them. Our thoughts tell us the story, but our body holds the memory’s emotions.
Where the emotion is trapped can be painful. The chest can hold our fear, our stomach can bubble ignored intuitions, headaches guarding old anger, muscles atrophied from anxiety, or even our throat and neck tired from keeping sadness.
It can be easy to hide from those pains, operating in “normal” for so long we won’t recognize the message, story, and information those emotions are trying to share.
We have to drop the story. It doesn’t matter if it is right or wrong, it is now causing us more pain than the trauma of that instance. Let the emotion flow, don’t hold that back. It wasn’t meant to be kept. It was meant to be experienced and grown through, NOT WITH you.
So today, NOW, imagine all your old or hidden stories falling to the ground. There is no need to remember each of them, just picture shaking them off like sticky snow. Scan your body top to bottom and bottom to top, MOVING parts as you do.
Unclench that jaw.
Drop your shoulders.
Breath in as deep as you can, and
then double breath one more, (like a child does when they find the end of a meltdown.)
It might take a few times, but your body will recognize the danger is over and will start the process of letting those emotions in your body drift off. If you cry, sob, need to scream LET IT HAPPEN! Your body needed that for far too long to ignore it now.
You are meant to let emotions pass through. They are crests (ups) and troughs (downs) on a vast ocean of shared experiences. We aren’t capable of being those waves when we are stuck. There are new and better stories waiting for you on the crests of the ocean.