Authors: Lori Deschene
Acting out gave me a sense of power I'd never had. Now I can see that it's something I call “false power”—a false sense of power that's followed by feeling bad or dissatisfied because it comes from a place of fear. Soon, I was back to sleeping pills and began alternating them with the stimulants, one countering the aftereffects of the other. I was addicted to both not moving
and
moving too fast.
Then one day it occurred to me that maybe there was another place to look for the joys that had eluded me all those years. Whereas my options before were limited to the world I saw myself to be trapped in, somewhere in the middle, between not moving and moving too fast, there was a whole world of magical possibilities. I spent years trying to find easy access into this other world. I dabbled in a variety of spiritual practices—meditation, energy healing, and slower movements—but lacked the patience to persist when a door wasn't opened immediately. Yoga was too slow, Pilates too brutal, meditation too boring. I judged everything harshly. Some things were too wacky; others were not wacky enough. It reflected my mind, which had been swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to the other, struggling to come to a balance. But I did not give up. Slowly, I was finding beauty.
I learned that the other side of pain and false power is authentic power. Paradoxically, the place where I was to find the joys that had been missing was the very place I'd been running from all my life. When I reconnected to the parts of me that I had lost, it felt like a coming-home. I learned that self-love is when we come home to
ourselves. That relationship which I had sought to destroy turned out to be the very thing that would save my life in the end.
What I realize now is that we can get so overwhelmed by our imperfections that we don't see any goodness in ourselves. In this way, we can destroy our relationship with ourselves, thinking we are flawed and beyond redemption. But it will only cut us off from the very source of joy, beauty, and love.
I see so many people addicted to substances and external relationships, believing that is where they can find joy and fulfillment. It will only feed into their deep inner insecurity and create more distance from themselves, the true source of joy. I see so many people either choosing to sleep through the everyday experience or run constantly from one place to the next, thinking they can escape their problem.
Freedom is found not by sleeping or running away, but by choosing to be awake and staying here long enough for the magic doors to open. The act of moving, mindfully, with an attitude of embracing life, will take you from feeling stuck with pain to healing it. Move slowly and you can taste the rich array of sensations. Move too quickly and you'll miss the gifts contained in the moment.
When you become vulnerable, feel emotions, and stay true to what you are feeling, you liberate yourself from pain. As you allow the sensations to be in your body, while gently breathing through it, you invite the natural force of change to renew you with its constant movement.
Through years of my own creation of movement therapy, I've cultivated a mindset of self-renewal. I am still discovering more and more goodness in me, and every discovery brings me even more joy. If you haven't found what you're looking for, try adjusting the pace with which you live your life and see if you can find that door to magical possibilities.
by Jennifer Chrisman
The most important thing in this world is to learn to give out love, and let it come in
.
—M
ORRIE
S
CHWARTZ
There is a Native American tale that tells of a young boy speaking with his grandmother. She tells the boy that she has the spirit of two wolves living and battling inside of her. One is vengeful and unkind, as he sees all the world as a threat; the other is loving, secure, and nurturing. The little boy asks his grandmother, “Which one will end up winning?” and the grandmother replies, “Whichever one I feed.”
We all have this pull inside of us. We can either nurture our fears and insecurities, or we can nurture our trust in love, kindness, and acceptance. This is not a new concept. There is an endless amount of information out there about connecting with your inner self and finding happiness from within—so much that it can feel overwhelming and even discouraging. If you're anything like me, you may find yourself still aching from a broken heart, or beating yourself up for the chocolate-chip cookie you just ate shortly after reading about finding forgiveness, gratitude, and self-love.
What I realized was missing in my quest for self-improvement—and what kept pulling me back to my old, familiar negative thinking—was faith. To make meaningful changes that allow us to release the grasp of our fears and limiting thoughts and beliefs, we have to be willing to believe in the positivity—
believe
that we deserve to stop beating ourselves up and looking for an external solution to “fix” us. It's not enough to just think it. We have to believe it.
The limiting beliefs of our fears are deep-rooted, so we need to meet them from our gut level. We need to really believe that it's okay to step out of our darkness and connect with our light instead.
Okay. So, how do we do that? We need to find evidence of that love around us. The world we see is a reflection of our inner experience. When we see love and light, we are connected to love and light inside of us. And conversely, when we see the inadequacies around us, we'll connect with that inside of ourselves.
Look around you. Where can you find evidence of the light in your life, the light within you? This concept was never more evident for me than when I had my son. Whenever my old, familiar, fearful thoughts creep up to tell me that I'm not good enough, that I don't have enough, or that everything is going to fall apart, then I think about him.
When I look at my son I'm able to clearly see the beauty and the purity of the human soul. He doesn't have to do anything to prove or earn his lovability; I certainly don't look at him and think, “Gee, if he lost a little weight, I'd love him more,” or “When he meets that
financial goal, that's when I'll love him.” These thoughts don't even cross my mind when I think of him, so why would it seem logical to say them to myself?
We all started out in the same place, with a full capacity for love and loving. We weren't born into this world with fears of failure or being emotionally walled off. Children know no limitations until we point them out to them.
There was once a time in your life when your dreams knew no limitations, when you were free to take risks, and even if you fell down, you were able to get back up. That light is still in you. It doesn't ever go away; fear just overshadows it. Fortunately, fear is a learned response that has built up over time, which means that we can unlearn it!
When we allow ourselves to realize that the fear isn't real, we get to make a different choice. We can choose to find the love instead—to feed the loving wolf. I know that when I look at my son and I see that loving energy, it is
my
loving energy reflecting back at me.
Take a look around. Where do you see your loving reflection shining back at you? What inspires you? Where can you look for a reminder to stay connected to your belief that you deserve a life of love, and that the love and all possibilities are already inside of you? How can
you
stay present and aware of which wolf you are feeding?
by Alison Hummel
It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens
.
—P
EMA
C
H
Ö
DR
Ö
N
I love acceptance. Acts of surrender create forward momentum. If we all pause for a moment and observe what we are fighting, right here and right now—maybe depression, anxiety, weight gain, low self-image, or financial stress—we have an opportunity to accept. But that's just the start.
Recently I accepted something I never thought I would, and reframing the way I thought about it changed my life. I have moderate to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Having OCD is basically like believing everything that goes through your mind. Scary, right? Obsessive-compulsive people have intrusive and extremely terrifying thoughts—for example, that he may have been contaminated by something, which might lead him to spend hours washing. I have a base underlying all of my obsessions: that I will hurt people. It is my greatest fear.
I used to worry that I'd left the oven or iron on and that, in doing so, I may have burned the house down, which would ruin my
husband's life and kill our cat. So I'd return home multiple times per day to check these appliances and also send my husband home to check. I also had massive rituals around shutting appliances off.
Obsessive-compulsives create rituals to lower the anxiety, which makes OCD a real time suck. I'd check to make sure I didn't leave the iron on, do everything evenly on both sides of my body so I felt “balanced,” retrace events that happened in my life to make absolutely certain I hadn't harmed anyone accidentally, and search the Internet excessively for answers. These rituals literally took up hours of my day.
I discovered that I had OCD one afternoon when I was trying to figure out how you know something for certain. Try googling that. The first thing that popped up for my search query was about obsessive-compulsive disorder. I felt immediate relief. I leveraged my OCD to my advantage and feverishly searched the best treatment for this disorder. I discovered exposure response prevention (ERP). It's apparently the only game in town for this type of disorder, and luckily for me, Philadelphia houses one of the best treatment facilities in the world for OCD.
Once I completed the ERP, my OCD immediately went into remission. I was a diligent student, due mostly to how limited my life had become because of my anxiety. Because I didn't want to hurt anyone, I had no friends (I didn't want to hurt their feelings), my relationship with my husband suffered (I didn't want to hurt him), I spent hours on rituals to ensure that I hadn't hurt anyone, and I had lost about ten pounds in two and a half weeks when I hit my wall.
After the treatment, my anxiety lifted. I felt like a member of society for the first time in my life. But after about six months of freedom, something funny happened: I decided I didn't like having OCD anymore. I wanted that label off my back. But really, I didn't like the upkeep of remission.
Anxiety sucks, and ERP proposes that you habituate to the anxiety by just sitting with it. No deep breathing. No chemicals to relax the mind. Just straight-up anxiety. Anxiety naturally wears off. It's not possible for the human body to remain in an anxious state forever. And the human body is so amazing that we don't need to do anything to make it go away. But in order to get through the anxiety you must experience it. I didn't want to do that. I liked having my little rituals to deal with life.
So I un-accepted my limitation, just like that. The mind is a beautiful mechanism, really. I still find it so incredible that changing one's mind can have such wild repercussions. I decided to listen to my brain once again—to take the bait. I began fearing that I was a horrible employee, so I checked my email around the clock. I began believing that I was a bad wife and daughter, so the rituals around that came back with a vengeance. I began returning home to check on the iron. Basically, most of the symptoms and rituals were back in full play and I had to go in for treatment again. In that second round, I made a resolution to myself that I will always accept that I have OCD. And it will most likely never go away.
I still cringed at the thought of having OCD. Let's face it, nobody wants to answer a series of questions from a shrink and then actually fit the profile of some well-known mental illness. But a mentor helped me see things differently. She suggested I look at my OCD as “cute” or “quirky.”
“Cute?!” I yelped. You might have thought the woman suggested I run through Rittenhouse Square stark naked. I was appalled! But in that instant, something shifted. Her suggestion to look at a flaw as quirky was revolutionary. A good perspective. A new perspective. I began to refer to my OCD as one of my cute and quirky little additions to my personality. A nifty little surprise to the totality of my being. Something changed.
Now, my OCD is fully in remission, with no medications. This means I don't suffer severe anxiety at all anymore. I don't ritualize. I don't waste hours of my day checking on things. And most importantly, I rarely pay any attention to the thoughts that float through my beautifully complex brain.
Acceptance doesn't have to mean surrendering to bad news. In fact, accepting the bad part of anything can only take you so far. What if you began to look for the silver lining and accept that part? Let's say you struggle with depression. Studies show that people with depression may, and probably will, experience depression many times during their lives. So just getting out of the woods once is good, but it may come back again.
I think a lot of the time people get through something and say, “I will never go through that again.” And when a smidge of depression creeps in, the person may try to run from it, and they begin to fear it, and they may try to “shake it off.” This is a really negative way to deal with something. What if you said instead, “Oh, here we go. I see you. You are back. I can handle this.”
Instead of running, welcome it back with open arms. It sort of deflates the whole thing. It's like a
whomp, whomp
. . . . When depression, anxiety, or whatever it is shows up again, can you see it as an old friend who needs a little TLC? Can you acknowledge that because of this struggle, you are able to experience many emotions that many other people cannot? Can you find the hidden benefits in your cross to bear?
I have this belief that people who have struggled with extreme lows can experience a deeper sense of joy than most people because they have known the depths of despair. Aron Ralston amputated his own arm in a hiking accident. He said he viewed the experience as a part of his life's purpose, part of his soul moving forward. Suddenly, accepting my OCD seems trivial (but still cute).