self-compassion

Embracing Freedom in Your 50s: A Journey of Self-Discovery

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Something magical happens for women around the 50’s. Maybe it has something to do with the deluge of hormonal changes finally receding. Perhaps it’s the decades of life lessons filled with enough contrast to cause a blind person to see. It could be the loss we’ve accumulated in our psyches and experienced in our bodies.

Maybe it’s all of the above.

Regardless, whether it’s the tightness in your back each morning or the awareness that you are inching ever closer to the once-upon-a-time-retirement age, new generations arriving faster than Lucille Ball’s conveyer-filled chocolates, you wake up to the realization that you have a very important choice to make: to live with fear or freedom.

Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance struggle to wrap chocolate candies on a conveyer belt. (Credit: YouTube)

Your Pain — Only Part of the Story

Ever notice how when you have a slight cold or just feel meh and you head to work or an event that you feel you “can’t get out of?”

Typically, you feel better after attending whatever said public outing is. I believe this stems from what we are focused on: interacting with others, taking action and/or completing tasks.

The same concept of physical pain can be applied to our emotions. There’s a tendency for us to contract when we experience something negative. Our heart constricts. It’s no wonder we often say we feel “heartache” or that our “heart is breaking.”

But what we resist, persists. And the 50th decade of life has shown me it’s time to remove the already-falling-apart armor of the ego. Beneath the pain is the truth of who we are: unique, precious, divine, and wise because of those hard-won lessons.

The 50’s is a time of Michelangelo. 

YOU are the angel. Your life has brought pain and suffering, joy and ease — all of it to expose the gorgeous essence of who you were ALL ALONG.

AZ Quotes on Goodreads

Pain is but a teacher. It reminds us to pay attention. It guides us towards what matters: our authentic, imperfectly perfect selves.

The Real Story of You

I’m so thankful that I didn’t grow up with social media. Days were spent outdoors, playing hopscotch and roasting marshmallows with others. Community meant eye contact — sans a screen. On line meant you were literally on a line in a store. 

The convenience of technology is WONDERFUL. How lucky are those of us in our 40’s on up. We were given a sacred space to experience life more slowly, more digestibly. What a gift for us.

To arrive at this more than half century mark on Earth means that you’ve both witnessed and experienced humanity’s kindness and cruelty. 

What happens from this point forward is up to each of us. It always was, but age arrives with an awareness that we are all connected. That separation was always an illusion. 

Fear contracts and exacerbates pain of all kinds.

Freedom is a deep inhale. It looks within for peace and guidance. It honors experience, as just that: a moment of life living you, without attachment. It acknowledges pain but doesn’t identify with it.

Freedom means choice. Sure, the big choices like where to live and how to spend your days. 

But it also means, perhaps more importantly, the freedom to choose the smallest of things that make the biggest impact in a life: the freedom to choose how you relate to this world, to others, to challenges.

Life in the fifties has brought the gift of no longer looking over my figurative shoulder. I know I’m enough. And this knowing is reflected, again and again in the choices I make that are internally guided. Motivation is internally-driven. Self-expression reigns of utmost importance. And self-worth is derived steadily, wonderfully, from within.

If you want to know the story you are telling about yourself, tune into your inner dialogue. How are you speaking to yourself? With kindness or criticism? With blame or accountability? With honesty or rationalization?

The Earth School offers ample opportunities to reflect back to us where we are vibrationally. Self-compassion and self-worth are foundational to reflecting back a freedom-filled, authentic, and rewarding experience.

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Embracing Change: Transforming Toxic Relationships

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Knowing the keys to the kingdom are a “level up” sign. (Image created using AI on CANVA)

I recently returned from visiting with a close family member who suffers from frequent physical ailments. The pains themselves alter throughout her body but one constant remains: the shroud of negativity she carries. 

For years, we shared a co-dependent dance. She would complain, and I would morph myself to please her. It was a manifested tango of low self-esteem, each of us playing our roles beautifully: her the perpetual victim and me, the quasi-therapist who could “save” her.

It took many rounds in this particular Earth School classroom to understand I was a participant in the toxic tango.

But on this visit, I watched without reacting. I listened to her cries that she didn’t want to live anymore, her verbal attacks on everything from the weather to drivers on the road. I allowed myself to feel all the emotions that arrive when dwelling with someone who is negativity personified and manipulates to get what they want. 

My body reacted to what I observed with an upset stomach. Our vagus nerve — the longest cranial nerve — runs from our brain to our large intestine. This nerve literally means “wandering” in Latin and plays an important role in involuntary sensory and motor functions — including our digestion. I couldn’t “stomach” the negativity of this loved one.

And yet, I was able to observe it all:

🧘‍♂️ the negativity

🧘‍♂️the upset stomach

I chose to take deep breaths and go for long walks when possible. I chose to find the humor. I chose to look at this spirit having a physical experience. And here’s what I saw:

A woman who is in pain with her knee because she literally can’t move forward in life. She is too steeped in the illusion of darkness to find the light that is her and always there. I saw the child inside the woman, no different than a toddler trying to sneak in an extra cookie, playing a game to get love. I watched her manipulate behavior and words to garner attention.

I realized that I can choose to love her without the need for her to change.🤯

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change

Part of the reason there is often great family tension during the holidays is the old, familiar patterns that resurface. Unaddressed — sometimes unknown — triggers surface across dinner tables.

That which hurts is the wound that is unhealed. Leveling up is about growing aware of our wounds, understanding its origins, and choosing to love anyway.

“When you can find joy in the midst of the scariest times, you know you’ve leveled up.” Brenda Grate

Loving this person who identified with a false sense of self, I leveled up. Loving myself and finding joy in the midst of her pain, I leveled up. Loving her essence, the little girl with unaddressed wounds, I leveled up.

We think of leveling up in terms of gaming or a career move. It’s a term we associate with improving or growing. This world is a matrix, a classroom for our souls to experience life as a human.

Each time we choose to see light in the midst of darkness, we are leveling up.

“No romance, amount of money, credential, or achievement can give you the sense of certainty your own joy can provide. When you practice having fun along the way, the Universe supports you.”-Gabrielle Bernstein

The keys to the joy we seek is inside of each of us. We can’t make someone else happy by making ourselves miserable. When we can find inner peace and joy from within, we are free from emotional vampires. And we can also choose to love those Downer Debbies.

Even letting the Universe know that you are willing to see a negative person or situation in a new way and surrendering this desire to the Universe is a leveling up step.

Heaven or hell is a state of mind. It is not dependent on people or places, financial or health circumstances.

Find your Heaven on Earth now by being the change you want to see in others.

XI Peak Meditation

The Keys to the Kingdom

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Happiness isn’t a verb; it’s a state of mind.

Remember that famous line Dorothy was told to repeat in The Wizard of Oz?:

There’s no place like home.

Dorothy wasn’t hankering for Kansas. She missed home: Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. She hungered for the love and ease that home represented.

Finding Our Way Home

When we are tired or angry, it’s hard to find our way home. The road can get bumpy and long. It’s easy to lose our way.

Home is a kingdom that resides in our heart.

It’s easy to find our home when we are well-rested and fed. When the road is smooth and predictable, home a key just waiting for you to unlock and open the door.

The challenge arrives when we are starving, confused, distraught, depressed or brimming with anger. Then, home feels like a mirage in an emotional desert.

Fortunately, there are four keys that will open the door to the Kingdom inside all of us.

Key #1: Acknowledge What Is

Whether it’s a flat tire or the death of a loved one, you are suddenly faced with bad news. Observe the news. Watch it. Don’t hide behind busy-ness or booze. Allow yourself to fully note what is right in front of you.

The pain of acknowledging what is now prevents the pain from festering later.

Unaddressed pain or problems only grow, making the road to Home that much longer.

Key #2: Accept What Is

Your cat has cancer or you just got fired. Whatever the problem or source of pain, you’ve already acknowledged what’s occurred. Now it’s time to accept it.

Accepting something painful means allowing ourselves to feel whatever emotions come up and through us.

Like acknowledging the negative situation, when we allow the less-than-pleasant emotions to go through us, we are that much closer to Home.

Acceptance over something negative or unwanted, acceptance over the myriad of unpleasant emotions we experience breeds self-compassion — a signpost on the road to Home that you are getting closer.

Key #3: Angle the Headlights Home

If you’re driving on a dirt road at night, you’ll need headlights on to help you find your way home.

Do you focus your headlights on the side of the road? Of course not. You do that, and you’ll likely get into an accident. It’ll be a long time before you make your way home then!

Appreciation is the headlight Home.

Whatever we focus on grows. Ever notice if you feel a little “off” or under-the-weather, if you head into work or get busy doing something you enjoy, you start to feel better? Why is that?

We are spirits having a physical experience, so what we focus our energy on manifests an outcome.

There is a momentum of energy that builds upon itself when we focus on appreciation. Well, the same is true for focusing on the negative, but why would we want to do that?

Right now, think of three things you could appreciate right now. Here’s my three:

  • My children’s health.
  • My ability to type the words you are reading.
  • My ability to hear the sound of a fan whirring softly above me

Already, my mind is lit up like those headlights on a dirt road at night. I’m literally lit up with other things I feel appreciation for.

How do you feel now?

Appreciation fosters only more appreciation.

Appreciation brings us Home.

Key #4: The Spiritual Chiropractor

I see a chiropractor once a month for maintenance. But there was a time when it wasn’t just keeping my spine aligned. Like my life, my spine was all over the place.

The physical is often a manifestation of what is occurring emotionally.

The body keeps score. It’s difficult to open the key to our inner Home if we are in need of some spiritual WD-4.

We creatures of flesh and blood often forget that we are spiritual beings experiencing this temporary physical dimension. 

But the body often “acts up” as whispers to remind us that we have traveled down the wrong path.

So what is the “spiritual chiropractor?” that can bring us Home even faster? 

Alignment. Alignment with your Highest Self. Alignment is:

  • that inner voice that tells you not to get in the elevator alone with a stranger that makes you feel uneasy. 
  • that inner knowing that the manuscript you are working on is meant to be written. 
  • trusting you are right where you need to be, however it looks to the outside world
  • going within for clarity

A Different Kind of Road Trip

This is not AAA. There is no fee for your Triptik to the Kingdom. All travelers are welcome to choose this road.

  • Acknowledgment
  • Acceptance
  • Appreciation
  • Alignment

The road Home that Dorothy hungered for did not require her clicking those shiny red shoes.

The road Home arrives when you understand the Keys to the Kingdom are always in you.

They Myth of Empathy: What It Is and Isn’t

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The notion that empathy can deplete our mental resources or hurt us is an unarticulated myth.We can appreciate someone else’s suffering without the need to experience it.

A good friend has a car accident. Your uncle has dementia. A sibling has breast cancer. In each of these situations, as in any challenging time in the lives of loved ones, our heart has the opportunity to open and experience compassion.

But sometimes, we humans confuse Compassion’s powerful sibling, Empathy, for a virus that’s potentially contagious. 

So, we close up, emotionally distancing ourselves from whatever turmoil a loved one is experiencing, not because we don’t care, but because we are afraid to care too much.

Empathy Fear in Action

Years ago, a friend of mine saw I was struggling with a family issue. When I articulated what was going on, she told me the following:

“You know I love you, but I can’t be around you while you are going through this. It’s too hard for me. Once it’s over, let’s get together.”

Despite knowing me for years, my friend equated “being there for me” with somehow catching the challenges I was facing.

What Empathy is Not

Empathy is not something that requires physical, emotional, or spiritual stamina. It doesn’t ask us to drain our health, bank account, or time. Empathy doesn’t infringe or demand. It isn’t a cosmic paramecium, feeding off of us to help another.

What Empathy Is

The prefix EM means to put into or bring to a certain state. The root word PATHY means feeling or suffering. To have empathy to imagine what another feels in a given situation. We are imagining the Other’s experience, but we are not in the situation itself. Empathy is the emotional lubricant that allows humanity to connect. By putting ourselves in another’s shoes, we stimulate Compassion.

Empathy in Action

My friend’s fear of empathy ironically prevented her from experiencing it. When someone loses a loved one, when there’s a difficult divorce, when a family member is robbed — the greatest thing we can do for that person is be present. The sufferer does not expect their friend to BE in pain, only to acknowledge that it’s there.

Empathy is a silent or verbal acknowledgement to let the sufferer know they are not alone. It can manifest in anything from a homemade pie to a text, letting them know you’re thinking of them.

The Myth of Empathy

There’s this unspoken fear that demonstrating empathy, allowing ourselves to “go there” for someone in pain, is going to break us. 

But the opposite is true: when we open our hearts to someone else’s pain, our heart gets stronger, not weaker. Our ability to put ourselves in another’s figurative shoes makes us more powerful, not less.

A Surprising Benefit to Empathy

When we lean into empathy for another’s suffering, we strengthen self-compassion for ourselves. By welcoming the unwelcome in others, we grow more understanding and forgiving of our own imperfections and challenges.

Earning Vulnerability

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Excavating and exploring the painful parts of ourselves with self-compassion is needed before we offer our vulnerability to another.

It was a second date. The first one involved coffee and the kind of conversation typical of strangers: What kind of work do you do? Only child or one of many? Cat or dog lover? Do you prefer beaches or mountains? But *Mike, recently divorced with two girls under the age of 10, felt the questions lacking. He hadn’t wanted his twelve-year marriage to end yet felt lonelier in the marriage than on his own. He felt an urgency to get past the seemingly trivial “get to know you” questions and delve into “the stuff” of intimate relationships.

“I was low-hanging fruit. This was my first date out of the divorce gate.”

So, on this date, hungry for affection and connection, Mike didn’t waste any time on the second date. Before their appetizers arrived, he told her…well everything but the kitchen sink: his low testosterone level, the frequent verbal put downs he experienced from his ex in their marriage, his belief that his ex-wife treated their daughters like pawns to “get at him.” 

“I thought our date went well. I gave her a respectful kiss on the cheek and a hug. But she’s not returning any of my texts, and her phone goes right to voicemail when I call.”

Poor Mike. 

“I don’t understand. I thought women like it when a man is vulnerable. Did I scare her off? Am I supposed to act like some Alpha male? What do women want?”

There’s a famous quote by the late and great author, Dr. Wayne Dyer:

“You do not attract what you want. You attract what you are.”

Vulnerability has two sides: the willingness to look within and the willingness to be seen or known by another. Both involve risk. To look within, to possess the courage to self-reflect and look unflinchingly at our beliefs opens us up to potential emotional pain. Getting “real” with ourselves is no journey for the faint-hearted. 

Mike knows the surface facts of his recent past. He’s:

  • A recently divorced father of two young girls
  • He was married for 12 years.
  • The divorce was not mutual.

The remainder of his story is highly subjective and requires Mike to excavate the cracks in his (currently) unsteady foundation. For example: Was Mike’s ex abusive or is that a story Mike tells himself? If Mike’s wife was abusive, what brought him to experience an abusive relationship, and why was he against divorcing someone who abused him?

 Before Mike can experience vulnerability with another potential romantic partner, he needs to be vulnerable with himself. When we look under the figurative hood of our own life, when we are willing to see the parts of ourselves that aren’t so shiny, something changes from the inside out: we discover our self-worth, we remember that we matter and can distinguish between wanting a romantic partner and clinging to someone just to have a someone. When we explore the slings and arrows of our past with a willingness to see it in the broad daylight of self-reflection and compassion, we aren’t so quick to be vulnerable with others. After our soul’s journey into the wilderness of vulnerability (thank you, Brene Brown:-) our perspective has altered: a potential romantic partner needs to earn our vulnerability. Vulnerability is no longer a by-product of low self-esteem; vulnerability is now an invaluable gift to share with the right person on YOUR timeline.

   *Mike, in his desperation for affection and loneliness, attracted what he was: the absence of a potential partner and a greater sense of loneliness. This pattern of women leaving him is likely to continue, so long as he continues to perceive himself as “low-hanging fruit.” 

    Vulnerability is both a gift and a wound. When we are willing to go within and explore our wounds with an open and compassionate heart, we receive the greatest gift: self-love.

*Name has been altered to protect the privacy of the individual.

The Dish that Calms…Everyone

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There IS something we can do to tame our frayed nerves RIGHT NOW. It’s free and lowers inflammation and our flight or fight stress hormones.

If the world were a person, it would need to see a therapist…PRONTO! Between COVID-19 and its ever-growing variants, politics on everything from abortion rights to gun laws, climate change—you name it, the discussions are more heated than a tea kettle screaming with boiled water. Throw in the omnipresent specter of social media and economic uncertainty, humanity is at an exhausting, precipitous crossroads.

It’s not surprising that the global effect of so much uncertainty over a sustained amount of time causes tempers to flare and spiritual bank accounts to feel depleted. On an individual level, anxiety and depression emerges, and mistrust of “Others” grow (whether it’s the person in line at the post office or the governor of one’s state). 

While it was before my time, the polio vaccine protected millions of American children in 1955. According to historians, back then many Americans deeply respected science.

“After World War II, you had antibiotics rolling off the production line for the first time. People believed infectious disease was [being] conquered. And then this amazing vaccine is announced. People couldn’t get it fast enough.”- David M. Oshinksy, medical historian at NYU and author of Polio: An American Story

Compare the absolute faith of Americans in 1955 regarding the polio vaccine and science in general to Americans fractured, ambivalent feelings toward the COVID vaccines available and recommended by both WHO and the CDC.

Where’s that therapist for humanity when you need one?

There IS something we can do to tame our frayed nerves right now. It’s free and lowers inflammation and our flight or fight stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline).

What is this simple, free, and highly beneficial thing that helps each of us and those around us?

Kindness. Yes, giving someone (even a stranger) a genuine compliment or speaking compassionately to yourself reduces inflammation and boosts our emotional wellbeing.

“Many scientific journals suggest that there is a strong link between compassion and the vagus nerve, which regulates the heart and controls inflammation.” -Gabrielle Bernstein- Miracles Now

The vagus is the longest nerve in the human body and makes up our sensory and motor fibers. When we demonstrate an act of kindness to ourselves and others, we are literally helping to regulate our heart.  According to Dr. Fredrickson and Dr. Kok, “people with a higher vagal tone have better overall heart health, lower levels of inflammation, stronger social bonds, and tend to exhibit better emotion regulation.” Psychology Today

So if you want to start feeling good, turn off the news and start appreciating the good you see—in yourself and others. Serve up kindness to those around you, offer a generous dish of self-compassion and watch its miraculous effect grow.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/03/988756973/cant-help-falling-in-love-with-a-vaccine-how-polio-campaign-beat-vaccine-hesitan

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201705/kindness-towards-oneself-and-others-tones-your-vagus-nerve