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The Day She Snapped

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And what we can do to prevent further meltdowns

Sometimes, it’s the kindest people who experience the harshest meltdowns.

A dear friend of mine is the mother of a teen obsessed with musical theater. For the past decade, despite working full time and having one other kid to raise, her son has participated in community theater that requires my friend to drive far and wide all over New York, often late at night. 

A Window View

The other day, I was on the phone with my friend when her son came into the car from another rehearsal. Here’s how the dialogue went:

Teen: I’m hungry. 

Friend: (handing him string cheese) Here you go.

Teen: No, I want McDonald’s.

Friend: You can get that tomorrow after your PSAT test.

Teen: What the f$%&! No, I’m not taking that. I don’t even need it. I have plans with my girlfriend tomorrow.

Let’s just say, I got off that phone as quickly as possible.

The Backstory

My friend is a single mom. Everything has been on her. As her son was growing, there were several small occasions when her son spoke down to her and my friend placated or ignored the disrespectful behavior.

My friend’s empathy for her son eclipsed her judgement.

For years, my friend would say:

“He doesn’t have a father. I feel so bad for him. I want him to know how loved he is and how much he matters.”

Creating a Monster

Just prior to her son entering the car, my friend confided:

“I snapped the other day. I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve created a monster.”

All those years of yes-ing her son in an effort to make him feel like he mattered, prevented him from learning respect and appreciating another person’s perspective — in this case, his own mother.

The Snap

We humans tend to snap when there’s been a buildup of tension and frustration. We snap after a long time of undisclosed and/or unaddressed unhappiness or resentment.

Like a zit that’s just come to a head, the snap is a manifestation of pent up emotion that needs to come out.

My friend snapped after her son told her he was going to be changing high schools because it had a better musical theater program. 

There was no discussion; in his 15-year-old-mind, changing high schools was going to happen.

Friend: I will look into the high school program.

Teen: I already know I want to do it. There’s nothing to look into. This is my life, not yours.

On and on this dialogue went until my friend, inevitably snapped:

“You know what? You are a child, a minor. Do you not understand that? You know what, just forget it. You’re going to do what you want anyway. Just do it; just do it! GO — what are you waiting for?! I don’t care anymore. Just do whatever the hell you want.”

And the teen’s response:

“It’s okay. I don’t have to do it.”

The Aftermath of a Snap

My friend felt such guilt for snapping at her son.

“You should have seen the look on his face. He looked so scared of me. I feel awful about it.”

And yet, a day later, her son was cursing up a storm in front of her, sometimes at her. There was no:

  • Thank you for picking me up from theater rehersals.

or

  • Thank you for bringing me a snack.

The Thing About Snaps

Snaps don’t address the core issue (in this case: lacking respect for a parent).

Snaps are nothing more than the surface of an emotional iceberg. 

It’s no wonder her teen returned to dictating what would and wouldn’t happen regarding the PSAT and McDonald’s. The roles in their relationship were never addressed in my friend’s snapping.

Love isn’t a Doormat

Whether married or raising kids solo, parenting is not easy. But loving our kids does not mean letting them run the show. 

We wouldn’t give a kindergartner the key to our car. Yet when we placate our children with blind consent, contorting ourselves to please them, we are effectively putting them in the driver’s seat.

There’s Still Time

I don’t know what transpired between my friend and her son after I hung up the other day. I can only hope she:

  • didn’t get him McDonald’s
  • insisted he take the PSAT
  • is going to look into the new high school and not blindly consent

As long as her son is under her roof and a minor, there’s still time for the roles to alter.

Of course, its’ easy for me to see what’s happening: I’m not in the situation. I’m a mere observer. But I can relate to those moments when a need to demonstrate love to my children eclipsed my better judgement. 

Self-compassion

My friend is trying her best. We are all just trying our best in this life. The word compassion means: to suffer with and take action. 

Self-compassion is looking within, exploring the why behind our respective snaps and doing something about it. Sometimes that means saying no to your kid, even if that no will illicit a temper tantrum.

Better a temper tantrum from our kid now than a giant snap from us later.

Walking on Eggshells?

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When we tiptoe around someone to please them, we hurt ourselves much more in the process.

Intimidations. Threats. Manipulating facts. These are some of the tactics an abuser uses to maintain their control.

I know because I’m on the receiving end of it right now. Have been for over 7 years. It’s only getting worse.

Abusers are often the Sirens found in mythology: they woo their victims until they don’t know what hit them.

I think of a victim of abuse as a lobster in a pot, the heat slowly getting turned up, until they are boiled alive.

If you recognize the pattern I’m about to share with you, I strongly advise you to do whatever you can to get out of that simmering pot.

The Early Years

The love-bombing commences. The romance. The remembering of small details, the overflowing with thoughtfulness. The feeling that you are starring in your own Hallmark movie.

You’ve just entered the pot. The water is warm. It feels so damn good.

Sure, every once in a while the abuser will say something that gives you pause. But you are so in love with this person by now, you rationalize the pause away. You make excuses for some minor controlling behaviors.

The Middle Years

Welcome to life inside the pot that is now starting to feel very steamy.

Still, your Abuser is so good to you. Well, except when they’re not.

As the water starts to simmer, you find yourself feeling a little uncomfortable.

Because you’ve been in the relationship for a fair amount of time at this point, you’ve lost your way. Up is down and down is up.

Being in an abusive relationship is living like Alice down the rabbit hole. Nothing makes sense.

What’s worse, you don’t trust yourself any more. You’ve lost your inner compass, your sense of what’s wrong and right.

Besides, it’s not that hot in the pot. There are even days when it still feels good. So long as you don’t upset the Abuser who put you in the pot in the first place.

Abusers and Eggshells

Eggshells are delicate and can easily break. Abusers are the eggshells. Once we are past the love-bombing phase, it becomes the victim’s unspoken job to ensure they don’t hurt their “delicate” partner.

Well-worn phrases by Abusers are steeped in manipulation and guilt:

  • If you hadn’t done __________, I wouldn’t be in such a bad mood.
  • You are so naive. There’s no way you can do/handle ____________.
  • I treat you like a child because you act like one.

You may be told what clothing you can and cannot wear. What foods you can and cannot eat. You may have a curfew, even though you are an adult.

Again, guilt is a weapon to keep the victim in place:

“I only do this because I care about you, and it’s my job to protect you.”

Freedom’s Price

When I finally realized I was a lobster boiling in that pot, I did everything I could to get out of the relationship.

Abusers don’t like to lose. Especially ones without the capacity for self-reflection.

It’s years since I left my abuser. Years since I had to walk on eggshells in his presence.

Unfortunately, the attacks are still coming. When you have deep pockets and are an abuser, there are creative ways to continue bullying someone.

The price of freedom doesn’t guarantee the end of attacks.

But it sure beats losing your life to a boiling pot.

Freedom Over Eggshells

Looking back, I don’t recognize the woman I was with the Abuser. She was constantly walking on eggshells to please the Abuser.

Walking on Eggshells:

  • never satisfies the abuser
  • only hurts the victim of abuse more

Better to walk on those damn eggshells and be true to yourself.

When you realize that the abuser WANTS their victim to be fearful, guilt-ridden, on-edge, and gaslit, you start to wake up your inner compass.

So crack some eggs, walk with your head held high, embrace your beautiful self.

No, we can’t control what an abuser will do, but we are now free to live life on our terms.

Letting Our Kids Fail

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And the invaluable gifts that arrive when we do

Sometimes, the best parenting involves letting go.

One of my kids is struggling. Struggling to make a decision. Afraid to make the wrong one.

The decision will effect the rest of his life. No one else’s. Not mine. Not his father’s. His life.

Fortunately, the decision is not life threatening.

“What do I do?” he asks me.

Finding Your Voice

We humans learn best through action. Sure, we can preach about what matters, the lessons we’ve learned from life, but ultimately, none of it sticks and penetrates the heart and mind like experiencing it (whatever “it” is) for ourselves.

We find our voice, our inner compass through trial and error.

My son wants me to tell him what to do, to take the stress over making a decision off of his shoulders.

But removing the burden of responsibility and choice from his psyche would thwart his growth in the long run.

The Gift of Biting Your Tongue

Do I have a strong opinion? Absolutely. And when he asks for this, I share it with him. But to advise him is to remove an opportunity for his self-awareness; to shove my opinion as fact upon him is to deprive him of self-discovery.

Much better for me to bite my tongue until I taste blood than navigate and discern the world for my teen.

So instead, I listen.

Cultivating Autonomy

My son struggled with the “what if” of his decision. I listened as he played out each scenario.

I listened.

By the time he was finished, he looked like a balloon that had lost all of its air.

“We can’t control the actions of others or life’s outcomes. We can only control our choices, moment by moment.”

Needless to say, he didn’t like my answer.

Yet, he did make a decision. From my vantage point, the decision is based in fear and steeped in a need for survival.

But it is not my place as a parent of a teenager to tell him what to do. Again, the decision he is making affects him alone and is not life threatening.

Regardless of his decision and my opinion of it, he has taken a closer step in his autonomy. 

There are already consequences of his choice out of fear. It is downright painful to watch. 

But when a toddler falls and cries, we kiss the boo-boo and remind them they can just “get back up.”

When there’s salt in my son’s wound, I comfort him, reminding him that he did the best he could based on what he thought at that time.

Humans are self-correcting creatures. When we allow our kids to self-correct, making adjustments based on new information, independence is fostered.

Cultivating Confidence

The consequences of my son’s decision is offering opportunities for him to make new decisions. Those decisions are continuing to be fear-based.

“I’m in survival mode,” he says.

Okay then. He’s doing what he thinks he has to do. I remind him there’s always another way. 

(Again: No one is in danger, nothing is life threatening and the consequences of his actions affect him alone.)

I can see the self-proclaimed “survival mode” in the tightness of his jaw, the rolling of his eyes if I even hint at broaching the subject. Translation: I know what I’m doing here.

There’s a confidence brimming inside of my son now. He knows he’s supported — simultaneously knowing I’m not in favor of his decision yet respect his choice.

Cultivating Trust

When we surrender to what we can’t control, (i.e. another’s decision), a bridge of trust is built:

  • The trust you foster for your child is returned to you.
  • The trust your child feels from you bolsters inner trust in themselves.

Caveats

I am not promoting trusting your teen to take illegal drugs until they “figure it out” nor am I suggesting a child decide on whether or not to treat a life-threatening condition.

Giving our children a chance to explore what works and doesn’t — while under our guidance — offers them the gift of self-awareness. 

Encouraging autonomy when the stakes are small, allowing them space to “fail” will offer first-hand experience in getting back up on their figurative (or literal) feet.

Behind the Curtain:

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Life Backstage Tells a Different Story

The front row has nothing on the real drama backstage.

The other day I was venting to my sister about pressing financial matters.

“I guess I’ll just be working well into my 70’s.”

“You could be like those older ladies I see at Macy’s. They are at least that age and so adorable working there.”

My sister’s tone was genuine, making the delivery of her words sting that much more.

“Great idea! That’s always what I wanted to do late in life.” My voice dripped with sarcasm.

“I think it would be fun.” 

Now the gloves were off. Like a water hose finally unplugged, I unleashed my anger her way.

“Fun? How can you say that? Why the hell would I want to work at some meaningless job in retail out of necessity in my 70’s?!”

Behind the Curtain of Anger

My sister hadn’t done anything wrong. The anger I unfairly threw her way stemmed from a genuine fear of which her words had, inadvertently, fanned the flames.

Fear is the backstage entity often cloaked in anger. When we aren’t in alignment with ourselves, the slightest comment or action of another can be perceived as salt on a wound.

My sister had genuinely tried to comfort me. She, of course, could only do this from her own vantage point:

“I’d love to have a job like that someday. My career involves so much responsibility. I can’t imagine not working even after I retire, so doing something in retail part time would be fun.”

Wearing Someone Else’s Shoes Hurts

When we look for comfort from someone else, we need to remember that they:

  • only possess their own vantage point
  • are not responsible for the other person’s inner alignment

My sister can hear that I’m experiencing a fiscal crisis, but that is not the same as experiencing it. Likewise, I can hear my sister express her potential enjoyment at working in retail later in life, but I can’t make myself share this sentiment.

Asking someone to feel what you are feeling is like shoving your shoe onto someone else’s foot: it’s not going to fit and can be downright painful.

It’s important to know what you are asking for from that person in the first place. My sister was only sharing her thoughts on the idea of working in her 70’s.

 But I had never been clear about where I was standing: blazing, unfiltered fear.

Say Where You Are

I hadn’t acknowledged the intense fear and instead danced in front of the figurative curtain with haughty anger.

My attitude had been a defiant “Can you believe this bullshit?” but inside, behind the curtain, I was peeing in my pants.

How could we expect anyone to be there for us emotionally if we don’t tell them where we are emotionally?

Spend Time Backstage

After touring the backstage area of my psyche, I got real with the fear. 

When we spend time in the discomfort of fear, acknowledging its presence, and facing it head on, the fear itself dissipates. 

The fiscal situation is still there, but my spiritual awareness of the bigger picture has kicked in, and with it, I know that my health is the most invaluable gift there is and not worth sacrificing to the external (and temporary) reality.

Backstage is where fear likes to lurk; it is a stealthy entity, hiding behind anger. But when we face our fear head-on, peeling back the curtain to the what-ifs that plague our psyches, light pours in, leaving no room for fear to hide.

When Lightning Strikes

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Sometimes it takes a strike of lightning to wake us up.

Last month, lightning struck Washington DC. Four people went under a tree for shelter. Only one survived.

Sole Survivor

Amber Escudero-Kontostathis is twenty-eight and the sole survivor of the Lafayette Square lightning strike. When the summer storm began, Amber and three others went for cover under a tree just north of the White House.

  • Six bolts of lightening struck down where the four were waiting out the storm. Six bolts of lightning within 30 seconds.
  • High school sweethearts, James Mueller (76) and Donna Mueller (75) died from the lightening under that tree.
  • Brooks Lambertson (29) died shortly after from injuries caused by the lightening.
  • Amber Escudero-Kontostathis went 10 minutes without oxygen to her brain and without a heartbeat at all.

Life After Lightening Strikes

Amber lives with the physical sensation of surviving a lightning strike on her body:

Her nerves are misfiring. Her foot will sometimes feel like it is bare in snow. On the worst days, she feels like there are “10,000 grains of salt moving through each pore” of her feet. Source: The New York Times

There is the spiritual component of survival for Anna who frequently awakens to a “feeling similar to a dream of falling, except the thing that jolts her is a glowing ball of light the size of a playground ball speeding toward her face.”

When Amber Escudero-Kontostathis, 28, drifts into a light sleep, she is frequently awakened by a feeling similar to a dream of falling, except the thing that jolts her is a glowing ball of light the size of a playground ball speeding toward her face.

And of course, Anna struggles with the mental anguish that comes from the miracle of surviving something that something that kills approximately 43 people a year.

Amber died on her birthday and was brought back — twice.

“I am not really comfortable being the one,[who survived]but it’s the hand I was dealt, and I am grateful for it, and I am going to make sure I do not let those three people down. I carry them with me in thought and in action every day.”-Amber Escudero-Kontostathis — NY TIMES

Amber’s Lesson for All of Us

Shortly after the August 4th deadly lightening strike, I was picking my son up from school. Thunder crackled and boomed around us as he got in the car, and bolts of lightening kept us company on the drive home.

We drove by a teenaged boy sitting with an umbrella. There were cars behind us. I couldn’t stop. He was sitting under a tree.

“That boy needs to get somewhere inside.” I said.

“Why? He’s protected from the tree,” my son said.

And there it was: a different kind of lightening, for sure. But striking (for me) all the same. I’d assumed my son knew that trees were a fantastic conductor of electricity. After all, he is in his second year of high school and taking rigorous STEM courses. Of course he would know that a tree was the worst place to go for shelter during a thunderstorm.

The Danger of Assumptions

Amber, James, Donna, and Brooks all assumed — like my son that heading under a tree during a thunderstorm brought protection.

It made me wonder: what other things do I assume my son knows?

My son now knows that heading under a tree during a lightening storm is the worst place to go. We talked about the roots of the tree offering a fast conductor for an electrical storm. 

Indoors are the safest places. Cars are safe as well. It’s the metal doors and roof that protect us — not the rubber tires.

The odds of getting struck by lightning in the U.S. in any year is 1 in 700,000. It’s far from common. And maybe that’s why my son made the same assumption Amber, James, Donna, and Brooks did. Maybe that’s why I assumed my son knew how to stay safe during a lightning storm.

Regardless, it makes me wonder: 

  • What other assumptions do I walk around with? 
  • What lessons do I want to impart to my son instead of assuming he already knows them?
  • What assumptions do I walk around with that need to be addressed?

A heartfelt prayer of peace to the August 4th victims of the Washington D.C. lightening strike — both here and on the Other Side.

Are You Easy?

/ Sheri / 2 Comments
Calling all self-proclaimed “people pleasers!” Peace is a direct manifestation of living in alignment with your intuition.

I was twenty-five and had just found my husband dead.

Someone had recommended a therapist for me. I called and the receptionist answered.

“Is this an emergency?”

“Uh, no, no, it’s not an emergency.”

We scheduled a first appointment to see the therapist a good week later.

What We Think Matters

Back then, my inner dialogue went something like this:

I don’t want to make waves. I want to be easy, not a burden for others. This therapist obviously has a lot of patients to see if she can’t see me, a new patient, in the next 24 hours. I’m in terrible pain right now, but I am not bleeding, not on death’s door. I do not have the right to call my situation an emergency, since I’m still alive and breathing on my own. So, I will sit with the pain, shock, and fear I do not know how to process until it is a better time for this recommended therapist to meet with me.

The Balm of Self-Compassion

Writing this now, I want to hug that young woman I was, look her in the eyes and grab her firmly by her hunched shoulders. I write with tears in my eyes, yearning for that young adult to honor her experience and the feelings that were emerging, to explore the pain instead of holding it in her body like a grenade until it was convenient for a therapist to see her.

The Allure of Being Easy

There are many levels and forms of “being easy” for others.

We contort ourselves under the false notion that doing so will help us somehow belong, experience love, and feel worthy. 

The desire to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance is normal; after all, we are social creatures, spiritually wired to connect and even flourish through connection. The problem arrives when we subjugate our own needs to please others.

When our sense of self is inextricably tied to the approval of others, we lose our inner compass. 

We starve ourselves, either physically or spiritually, to feed what we believe others want.

The Most Important Question

The late playwright, George Bernard Shaw is famous for his pithy line:

“Youth is wasted on the young.”

I argue that it doesn’t need to be. You don’t need to be a twenty-five-year-old widow to discover the lesson that you can stop being easy, NOW — regardless of your number of years on Earth.

So, what can we do to help dissipate the often, knee-jerk reaction some of us have to please others at the expense of ourselves?

We can check-in with ourselves. We can cultivate a habit of asking ourselves a simple but profound question: What do I think?

If I could go back to that young adult who had just found her dead husband, I would ask her: What do you think?

She would say:

I am fucking scared! I am broken and lost. I don’t know how one minute, I was sleeping next to my husband, his warm hand on my stomach and now he is dead. I need a therapist NOW; this IS an emergency. My heart, mind, and soul cannot comprehend what just happened. I need someone to process what feels impossible to process NOW.

Easy is Overrated

Easy is overrated. Easy is the Corset of Life: it might look easy and effortless on the outside, but inside, we are slowly losing oxygen. 

Easy doesn’t avoid growth; it just postpones growth.

 The longer we are easy, ignoring what’s under the hood of our psyches, the greater the spiritual repair fee. But make no mistake, there’s a price for Easy.

The Impossibility of Pleasing Others

We will never please everyone, no matter how much we bend over backwards. There’s a comfort in knowing that when we start to please ourselves first, honoring our birthright gut, life actually gets easier.

Got Anxiety? (It’s Not You)

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The heart-racing-sweaty-brow unpleasant-sensations are byproducts that aren’t you!

There’s this organ that can wreak havoc on our body and spirit — if we permit it. It’s a clever organ with the best of good intentions, like a toddler who decides to surprise their parents with a “homemade breakfast.” You know that kitchen is going to look like a disaster area when that two-year old is finished making your special meal.

So, what’s this organ that behaves like a toddler? The brain.

The brain does everything to protect you if it senses the slightest danger. Sometimes, as in the case of a fire or a robbery, it does exactly what it’s meant to do, acting quickly on our behalf — no different than that thoughtful toddler who brings home a necklace for you out of Fruit-loops’ cereal. Beautiful intention and outcome align.

But sometimes, our well-meaning brain works against us, offering up a mess of what-if scenarios we don’t need. Anxiety creeps in, all of the cortisol activity from our fight-or-flight manifesting in anything from panic attacks to irrational fears.

When anxiety takes the driver’s seat, we can’t seem to steer our way out of fear. Reason seems miles away.

What can we do when anxiety is driving our lives?

Here are three powerful tools to put YOU back into the driver’s seat and dispel anxiety:

1. Depersonalize anxiety: When your well-meaning toddler made you breakfast, they left several cracked and sticky eggshells all over the kitchen floor, syrup spilling at the edge of the counter, and caked flour stuck on the fridge door. The room is amess! But do you get mad at that toddler? Of course not.

Your well-meaning brain is only doing what it knows how to do. You can give that overworking-well-intentioned organ a heartfelt thank you and not take the mess of thoughts they create personally.

2. Objectify anxiety: We tend to see anxiety as a part of us, but it is nothing more than emotion passing through us. When the weather is stormy with skies the color of slate, we don’t say “Oh no, I must have done something terrible.” We know that the state of weather is not a reflection of us.

Our anxiety is no different from the weather. Anxiety is an emotion that is no different than any other emotion. When we see it as something separate from us, passing through us, we remember that we are whole and happen to experience this particular emotion that is not us.

3. Welcome anxiety: I know, I know, it sounds counterintuitive, but it works! When we lean into the very thing we fear, the fear dissipates. We are no longer fighting what feels like an uphill battle. Our brains want to fight something to help us; when we surrender to those unpleasant feelings, they ironically, pass through us that much faster.

As the late French philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said:

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Anxiety, like everything else in life, is moving through you. Anxiety is an experience created by our active, well-meaning brains. But we are not our brains. We are spiritual beings. When we observe without attaching, we can enjoy the ride even more.

The Most Important Bank Account

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The most important bank account has nothing to do with your 401K.

            It’s not the number of stocks or annuities in your retirement portfolio, nor the percent of interest accruing in your money market account. It isn’t the bonus received or expected from work or the amount of dollars in your checking and savings.

            The most important bank account isn’t measured in cryptocurrency, gold, or one’s investment in semi-conductors. Those values, like everything else fiscally measured, will rise and fall. Just peruse renowned investor’s Ray Dalio’s recent books, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail to discover the cyclical nature of economic abundance and poverty.

            After our most basic needs are met—thank you Maslow (air, water, food, shelter, sleep), our spiritual bank accounts require our attention.

            Only we humans possess an affinity to avoid pain and discomfort. We flee from hurt, instead of looking at it directly. We hide behind schedules or alcohol, or addiction to numb our pain.

            Avoiding the pain, denying what we are feeling creates two potential outcomes over time:

  1. Mountain-out-of-a-molehill behavior 
  2. Illness in the body and mind

Author and speaker, Brene Brown (Atlas of the Heart), refers to this tendency to be triggered over something seemingly insignificant as “chandeliering.” 

We see this triggered behavior all over the world and in our own backyards: 

-the “Karen” ready to attack someone for having a different opinion

-the road rage against a total stranger on the highway

-the friend who starts cursing up a storm when their iPad won’t charge

In all of these examples, the anger lashing out is not about what appears to be the source of their anger. The anger is a symptom of an inner pain that is going unaddressed.

The anger is misplaced, unexamined pain and a symptom of a depleted spiritual bank account.

Then there is the manifestation of pain in our body:

-the back pain that worsens in traffic

-the chest pain that “comes out of nowhere”

-the panic attacks 

-the frequent malaise

Brene Brown refers to our tendency to swallow our pain, pushing it down, so it can’t see the light of day as “stockpiling.” These are the folks who say everything is fine, like a spiritual Unikitty (Lego movie) when things are feeling far from fine.

If we are in denial like a super-charged positive Unikitty, ignoring our wounds, they will fester. And if we aren’t “chandeliering,” we are likely to “stockpile” our negative emotion until they show up in our bodies.

It’s human nature to avoid pain and seek pleasure. But there’s a real danger in denial, in running from our negative emotion or swallowing it and swimming like a duck through life—graceful on the surface but fighting for our lives below.

Unexamined and untended to pain that remains hidden will fester, affecting either others (when we lash out) or our own bodies negatively.

When we take time to look our wounds directly in the eye, something wonderful happens: the wound itself begins to heal.

Our spiritual bank accounts fill when we honor our journey and respect the emotions we experience along the way. Emotions, like the weather, change; it’s only when we deny their existence or demand that certain ones stay that our bank account falters.

What Wealth Feels Like

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Wealth is more a state of mind than a bank statement.

            I drove a Range Rover—the high end with all of the bells and whistles. I lived in a Mediterranean style “home” just shy of 6,000 square feet. I had a second home—a 3- bedroom condo off the water with a balcony. Financially, I wanted for nothing. My net worth put me in the top 5% of the world’s wealthiest.

            I was miserable.

            According to Merriam-Webster, the first two definitions of wealth pertain to abundance in value, resources, and supply.

            So why was I miserable?

Despite having the “value, resources, and supply” in fiscal abundance, I was living an impoverished life in other aspects. A friend recently referred to my life before as “a canary trapped in a gilded cage.”

The abundance of dollars in the bank is neither good nor bad. It is our relationship with our “value, resources, and supply,” that determines a genuine sense of wealth. After all, there are those with millions in the bank who use money to control and manipulate others or who hide behind the “stuff” that money can buy yet remain miserable.

I didn’t begin to experience wealth until I left my figurative gilded cage.  True wealth is not measured by dollar signs; true wealth is the feeling of ease and pleasure.

Think of the late billionaire, Jean Paul Getty (portrayed by the late Christopher Plummer in the film, All the Money in The World) whose 16-year-old grandson, John Paul Getty III was kidnapped and held for ransom. The wealthy grandfather refused to pay ransom to rescue his grandson, and in the end, the grandfather dies alone in a 72-room mansion, alone with his German shepherds.

Wealth is more a state of mind than a bank statement. 

Since I flew out of my figurative bird cage, my bank account looks very different. I paid a fiscal price for my spiritual wealth, and I would do it all over again.

Wealth is knowing time and choices are yours. 

Think about those days when, for whatever reason, you hadn’t eaten all day. Maybe you were stuck on a delayed flight; maybe it was a religious fast—regardless, how amazing did that first bite of food taste? The feeling, the sheer pleasure experienced in abundantly enjoying that morsel was an experience of wealth.

Regardless of the number in your bank account now, you always have the option to choose wealth, to experience a sense of abundance and ease.

Ease, freedom, fun—this is what we all want to experience.

I wish each of you dear readers, great wealth.

What They Don’t Tell You About Childbirth

/ Sheri / Leave a comment
Doctors and well-meaning friends inform about the not-so-fun effects of childbirth, yet somehow leave this one out…

Postpartum depression. Weight gain. Tender breasts. There’s a whole gamut of physical and psychological changes a woman experiences upon giving birth. One area I see unrepresented: back issues.

A woman’s pelvic bones shift to prepare for the growing fetus. That alone is 9 months’ work of alignment changes! Ever wonder why women often experience urinary incontinence post childbirth? It’s often due to the misalignment of those pelvic bones during the perinatal period.

Pain is another effect of that pelvic misalignment; since our bodies are like a Rue Goldberg machine, an off-kilter pelvis can easily throw our spine out of whack. 

Growing up, I remember childbearing women complain about their swollen ankles (edema), larger shoe sizes, and even their hair falling out post birth. 

By the time I was pregnant with my first child, I thought I knew all there was to know about the underbelly of pregnancy and childbirth: everything from the fluctuating hormones to the fluctuating weight; the heartburn to the headaches; the breast tenderness to the clogged nipples.

I attended the birthing classes, took the requisite prenatal vitamins, and heeded my obstetrician’s advice.

But no one warned me of the bigger picture that was whispering to me each day from the start of my pregnancy: back pain.

“I have back pain,” I told my doctor. I was a few months into my first pregnancy.

“Yes, that’s to be expected.” He suggested going for walks and moving a tennis ball on my lower back.

Some days in the pregnancy, the back pain was so bad, I only found relief on all fours.

Our pain may start out as a whisper, but if you don’t heed its warning, it will only grow louder.

Fast forward, that oldest child is almost 19 years old today. The whispers that began when he was in utero are now loud and clear: an MRI revealed I have a herniated disc and 3 bone spurs.  The pain in my lower back had screamed loud enough for me to cancel a work meeting last minute, my back spasming like labor pains.

Immobile, I listened to what my body had been trying to tell me all along. The back had literally been tapping me to get some TLC for decades.

I want better for you.

Whether you are reading this as an expectant mom or someone suffering with the whispers of back pain, I share with you what I wish someone had told me: pregnancy alters our pelvic and spinal structure. If you are experiencing pain now that comes and goes, please don’t ignore it or push past it like I did. Your body is trying to help you NOW. The earlier you address the pain, the more mobility you will experience in the future.

A happy body is one that is heeded.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6799872/