by wpengine | Jan 30, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality, Women
How do you love? And how are you loved?
As a woman, you are Love. And you need to be loved.
Whether you’re a mother or lover, daughter or priestess, love is what feeds and nourishes you. You need love like you need to inhale, and you need to give love like you need to exhale.
As a woman, you have a singular and unique capacity for love. For kindness, compassion, friendship, appreciation, and gratitude.
Your love as a woman has a very different vibration than that of a man.
Whether you love to camp so you can watch your favorite birds, take care of your little one, serve as a healing practitioner or in a soup kitchen, or simply smile at someone you pass on the street, you know that when you give you also receive. And when you receive, you also give.
Here are 8 ways to adorn yourself with love.
1. Be who you are
Get to know yourself. Authentically. It’s only when you know yourself that you can fully accept and love yourself, warts and all.
Finding real love is finding someone you loves you, not a persona you think you should present.
2. Love yourself first
Learning to love yourself is one of the most important ways to develop yourself. So often, women seek completion in another.
But first, become whole within yourself: be able to be alone, find nourishing contact with friends, and engage in work, art, and activities that fulfill and empower you.
Real love is loving yourself first till you are full and whole, so that you love from a place of fullness, rather than grasping.
3. Know the difference between taking care of, rescuing, enabling, and love
Scores of women come into therapy with quasi-love relationships. They think love is to take care of another at the cost of themselves, enable a spouse or a child, or give themselves away to another by sacrificing their growth and interests.
If you’re a giver, chances are your capacity for receptivity and giving is huge—take great care not to give it away at the cost of yourself! And if you’re a receiver, attune to the other to make sure you give in equal measure to what you receive.
Codependence, abandonment, and low self-worth often play out as “love”, and it’s easy to fault another when you don’t get what you long for. Know the difference. Then heal and develop yourself.
4. Heal your heart so you can fully give and receive
Being alive means inevitable 
heartbreak, grief, anger, jealousy, bitterness, and fear. But does it get in the way of your heart being fully open?
Perhaps you have walls around your heart? Spend time in nature and with animals to heal. Do what you love, whether it’s painting mandalas, swimming in the ocean, or planting dahlias. Be with people who laugh, know joy, and are heartfelt.
Perhaps you give too much away? So many women find it easier to give than to receive. Learn to take in a compliment, a close hug, a friend’s joy to see you, and your lover’s deep gaze. Inhale these lovings into your cells.
And work with a therapist or healer to clear any blocks you may be holding.
5. Open to love, whatever it looks like
It’s so essential that the energy of love flow through you, literally on a physical heart level. Love nourishes and lubricates you.
Whether you love your lhasa poodle, cooking a meal with friends, or quality time with your lover, bring love into your life. It doesn’t have to be an intimate relationship; activities, friends, pets, art, and nature can be wonderfully nourishing and satisfying.
6. If you want an intimate relationship…
You draw into your life what you believe. 
Your external reality is a mirror of how you feel about yourself, and what you believe.
What do you believe? Do you believe you’re lovable, worthy, that you can be seen, heard, and known on all your intimate levels? If not, do your inner work to clear, release, and transform your beliefs. Then watch what happens!
Call out and set your intention for the best relationship for yourself. The best relationships help you grow and transform. They are alchemical—they change you despite yourself, beyond all you know about yourself.
Allow yourself to be changed by love. But make sure it’s really love and not something else in its guise!
And sometimes, it’s more complex than working on yourself intensively. There are other factors at play here, grace and your soul purpose. You may be in a lifetime where your main work and lessons are not about intimate relationships, and your heart will love in other ways.
7. Practice love.
Practice love. Random acts of it. Here and there and everywhere. Litter your home and work and environment with them.
Practice deepening your love from conditional to unconditional, from judgment to empathy, from love to ecstasy and bliss.
This practice is so essential for yourself, for our species as Earth-dwellers, and beings in the Universe.
8. Find your inner Beloved
Sink deeply into yourself and what you love to know the Sacred, whether you call it God, Spirit, or the Divine Feminine.
Meditate and pray to connect with this inner wellspring, drink deeply, and you will find you are nourished from within by a never ending fount of the most beautiful Divine Love—deeply healing, holding, sweet, powerful, and magical.
If you are not one with the Beloved,
Seek!
And if you are in union,
Rejoice!
—Rumi
In what other ways do you love? I’d love to hear from you.
[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Sexuality, Power, and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog ]
by wpengine | Jan 18, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality, Women
How do you wear your woman power?
Do you tuck it away like a secret? Do you swing it around like a baseball bat? Or do you carry it deep, strong, and full within you like a lioness regally surveys her landscape?
You’ve grown up with stories of power. Myths. Fairytales. Ones your mother told you. Ways she carried her own.
Your power is linked to these stories. And of course, to your mother.
Perhaps you’re a Sleeping Beauty, waiting for your charming prince to ride up, awaken, and lead you to your queendom. Or a Little Red Riding Hood, the ultimate good girl who gives her power away, doing just as her mother and the wolf tell her to. Or as the Indian Sita whose power was duty and self-sacrifice and obeying her husband’s word. Or even as Snow White’s evil stepmother, whose power and creativity are so twisted like gnarly roots that she can’t bear to see them blossom in another woman.
The beliefs and models you grew up with shape who you are and believe a woman can be.
To come into your own power, you need to revisit these myths. Debunk all that needs to be debunked. And create your own myth.
Your power, your mother
You may be like your mother, excelling at what she did, whether it’s making the best lasagna, running your tailoring business, or photographing lions in Africa. You feel her sure and present guidance as you take what she gave you to new heights.
Or you may have torn out 
the back door as fast as you could to be anyone but her. If she baked lasagna, you sprint to become a Wall Street powerhouse. If she ran the snappiest tailoring business in town, you settle into a camp chair to paint sunsets.
Is there more to your power than what you’ve received from her or run from?
Masculine power
So often, women assume that being powerful is to be like a man. There are thousands of unhappy women in the corporate world. If you’re one of them, that may not be where your power lies.
You need to find your own power, not follow what society says is powerful. Whatever speaks to you, whether it’s sculpting, teaching, or piloting, is where your power lives.
A whole woman’s power
A whole woman owns her own authority. It comes from within. It’s not handed down. Even if she’s an heiress, she must learn to be a fair queen.
A whole woman searches far and deep within her to grow into her full power. Her quest is like climbing a rock face with crags and crevices. Foot hold by hand hold, she must discover her strength, her resilience, her voice, her talents, her unique who-she-is-ness. She waters and fertilizes herself. She finds others to help her grow and bloom. When finally, she stands tall and straight flowering and fruiting in the clear wild air—free, powerful, and true.
Here are ten ways to adorn yourself with your power.
1. Get in touch with your instincts
Your instincts and drives hold the keys to your power. What do you love? What makes your body sing? Get to know and live from your “wild, instinctual self” as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says in Women Who Run With the Wolves. Follow your instincts’ energy to lead you out of unhealthy relationships and situations towards your joy and strength.
2. Commune with your power animals
Do shamanic work to meet your power animals. Shadow aspects of yourself, they will approach and guide you for they hold some energy or power you need to reclaim. In your everyday life, have pictures of them around you. Commune with them. Embody and dance with them, letting their energy inhabit your cells.
3. Become intimate with your shadow
Your shadow holds all the 
luscious juices that you may have needed to keep down, keep out, keep away from others’ and your own eyes. Often, the very aspects of power you despise run the show and keep you from fully owning your power.
Get into therapy. Have your dreams analyzed. Do your inner work.
4. Rewrite your myths
The stories you heard as a child and how your mother and grandmother live trap you in a box of what a woman is and can be.
What are your myths? Ferret out what’s true and what’s illusion, like the little boy who said out loud, “But …but the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!”
Then rewrite your own …who do you imagine a woman can be? You can be?
5. Individuate
Become conscious of what you’re unconscious of, personally and collectively. When you individuate (a term coined by Carl Jung), you heal, transform, and become whole as you reclaim and integrate all the parts of yourself. And you become your own person, beyond your family’s and the collective’s identity.
6. Be completely true to yourself
Shed everything that isn’t authentic for you, everything you needed to layer on to keep you safe or loved or approved of. Layer by layer, strip away what’s false to go deeper towards your truth, your talents, your joy. Where you’re utterly yourself. Singing your truth. Strong in your walk. Holding your head high.
7. Wield your powers
Your powers are 
your gifts and talents. Your power is in them. Whether you’re a mother, corporate dynamo, animal communicator or an artist, your power lies in your powers. Nourish them and bloom.
8. Know your life purpose
Your power lives almost entirely in your life purpose. Once you realize what you are to do in this life, your soul power flows into and fuels you from within.
Until you get clear, your life can feel like you’re simply moving furniture around.
9. Be relational
Feminine power is relational. Your power is in relationships—with people, nature, and beings. You flourish when you relate with others. Power is not a commodity or being better than. Share, not hoard, your power and encourage others to have it. If you’re in a position of power, be a queen who rules with fairness and love.
This is not to say that you give at a cost to yourself.
10. Discern and flow
Different people and situations require different amounts of power. You don’t need a baseball bat when a feather will do, and vice versa. Being discerning and fluid with your power is moving through the world like an elephant, powerful yet gentle, subtle, and nuanced.
Now, go forth and be powerful!
In what other ways do you adorn yourself with power? I’d love to hear from you here.
[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Sexuality, Love , and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog series. ]
[ Images: Dan Colcer, Alfred Weidinger; Ed Schipul ]
by wpengine | Jan 3, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality
Your body is an instrument of love and desire. Of passion.
Your sexuality is what makes you most feminine, most woman.
Becoming a whole woman is to discover and own your temptress and seductress, your skilled lover, even your sacred prostitute. Your love goddess…are you Aphrodite or Venus, Rati or Kali?
Becoming a whole woman is discovering and playing with the full range of your sexuality.
Find your unique sexuality
Your way is your way. Different from any other woman’s.
You may be comfortable in your naked skin or prefer to cover up. You may thoroughly enjoy your body and sex. Or feel fear, pain, or numbness. You may relish flirting, foreplay, and sexual intimacy. Or you may have a mix of feelings, both enjoying and struggling with it.
Sexuality is incredible. Yet it can also be incredibly complex.
You inherit so many judgments and prejudices that your original sexual innocence is often lost. And abuse, assault, commercialization, and religion stifle free flowing sexuality, casting a net over its wild and free and open nature.
Women’s sexuality has been oppressed and often under assault for centuries. And still is. You may need to work to become a whole woman and return to original playful innocence.
Here are some ways to do that.
12 ways to adorn yourself sexually
1. Presence
Your presence is, perhaps, the most important aspect of your sexuality—it’s an aphrodisiac. How present are you to your sensations and emotions, to yourself and your partner? The more in the moment and present you are, the more you experience your sexuality’s heat, light, and love.
2. Desire
Attune to and enter the experience 
of desiring and being desired as much as you are able. Flow with the river as far as you can go. If you’re in a long-term relationship where the fire of newness ebbs, learn how to continue desiring your partner—essential to keeping intimacy fresh and alive.
3. Take responsibility for your sexuality and passion
Know your turn-ons and turn-offs, safety and edges, pleasure and boredom, whether self-pleasuring or with a partner. Be open to change and evolve as the tides of your life and partners shift.
4. Become intimate with your own unique eroticism
Know your needs and edges. What do you need to feel safe and move through the different stages of lovemaking. What pleasures and satisfies you? And what are your edges? Your erotic growth and capacity is often around your edges—work them. And if you can, with your partner.
5. Become a sex goddess
Develop your skill and subtlety just as you would any art or science. Inform yourself. Give yourself a travel guide to the world of sex, whether it’s about techniques, the Kama Sutra, erogenous zones, or the range of sexual possibilities that intrigue you. Explore sacred sexuality. Take a workshop.
6. Conscious breath
Your breath is a portal to your senses and sensuality. It carries you into your experience. Discover and experiment with it. When intense feelings and sensations arise, learn to use your breath to ride their waves as well as to surf you more into pleasure.
7. Cultivate pleasure
You have vast capacities for pleasure. For ecstasy and bliss. Your body, as an instrument, can play and be played in an endless variety of ways. Enjoy your practice!
8. Seek out professional help if you’ve been sexually abused
Get therapy. Find a sexual healer. It’s easy to minimize abuse since so much secrecy, shame, and guilt often accompany it. It’s critical that you not be alone with this but get help.
You’re not alone. 1 out of every 6 American women, and 1 in 4 internationally, have been victims of abuse. Almost half the women who enter therapy want to work on their sexuality.
9. Work through your emotional triggers and constrictions
Perhaps you’ve inherited guilt about pleasure. Or have emotional ties to a parent which you need to cut. Or inherited ideas from your family, culture, or religion about how a woman needs to behave or be sexually. What’s true for you beyond what you’ve been handed down? Get beyond ideas and ideology into the warm experience and wisdom of your body. Again, get help for these often bury deeply in your psyche.
10. Communicate and attune
If you’re with a partner(s), express what you appreciate, want more of, or how to be touched differently. Likewise, encourage and welcome feedback from your partner(s). How attuned and connected are you with your partner?
11. Expand your sexuality to your other chakras
Choose whether you want to include 
more levels to your sexuality, such as ground, power, heart, expression and play, intuition, and Spirit. How much can you open to feeling on all levels? The more aligned with other chakras, the richer and fuller is your experience.
12. Dance with the masculine and feminine
Explore these powerful polarities, and play with receiving and asserting, with giving and taking. You have both energies in you and can dance fluidly between and with them.
In what other ways do you adorn yourself sexually? I’d love to hear more about it here.
[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Power, Love, and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog series. ]
by wpengine | Dec 21, 2013 | Healing, Spirituality, Women
Do you love your body? Or hate it?
Do you feel beautiful? Or are you your worst critic?
Is your body a battleground? Or your home?
So many women war with their bodies. Hate their bodies. Shame their bodies. And are afraid to inhabit it. So many struggle with dissociation, addiction, eating disorders, and sexual inhibitions, abuse, and dysfunctions.
Your emotional life reveals itself in your body. Maybe you have to drink to have sex. Or eat a side salad when you’re out with your girlfriends then come home to gorge on ice-cream. Or dissociate when you’re intimate. Maybe you don’t let your partner see you naked. Maybe you don’t like to see yourself naked.
The previous post talked about seven adornments to become a whole woman. In this post, see if you find something to become more whole in your body.
The four horsemen
There are four structures that keep your body from being whole.
Most religions have damaged women’s self-image and body-image. They split the sacred from the earthly, so condemn Nature and women’s bodies—houses of the soul—to eternal sin. Is a leopard prowling on an African prairie sinful? How can an animal’s body desires be natural and beautiful but not those of a woman?
Patriarchy also splits by perceiving women and the feminine to be inferior, less than, and less valuable than men. How did someone decide that? How did women’s power get stripped away? In every culture, women are subjugated and wounded physically and emotionally.
Media’s commercialization of women defines beauty as external, youthful, and asks you to measure up to an outer image—to the one that sells. In a world with thousands of species of flowers, is there only one feminine model of beauty—that of models on magazine covers?
Each of these three—religion, patriarchy, and media—serve someone else, not you as a woman!
Finally, your own beliefs, self-limitations, and internalizations are your worst handicaps. Are these blinding messages true for you today or can you embody your own authentic ones? For you can shift the trapped past for yourself, and in so doing, transform the circle of women.
Your body sacred
Your body is a work of art.
It is sacred, as your soul’s house and temple.
In Tantra, India’s feminine spirituality, the Earth, the trees and rivers, animals and plants are all sacred. So too, is your body.
Your body lives, pulsates, and breathes. Your life-force, Shakti, is sacred. So too, are you and your body.
As a woman, you are the Goddess. You have, create, and nourish life. Every part of your body—from your arms to your belly to your thighs, your yoni to your breasts, your third eye to your toes—is sacred.
In one beautiful Tantric ritual, a woman reveres her body by touching its fifty sacred sites while chanting a mantra to each one.
Your body whole
A whole woman is at peace 
with her body. She takes care of, nourishes, and adorns it. She finds it beautiful and cherishes it. She enjoys and plays in it. She accepts it for what it is. As she ages, she seeks its endless mystery and change. She discovers and opens into increasing portals of sensation, pleasure, and beauty within her.
A whole woman feels beautiful outside and inside.
It is the time of the Divine Feminine, in which you are being called to embody the fullness of your femininity and womanhood.
♥ Will you question primitive and tribal beliefs that keep you small, in fear, shame, or guilt?
♥ Will you unify and integrate what is split and divided in you to become whole?
♥ Will you emerge into your full radiance, power, and heart?
How to become whole
To be whole in your body, you must first know how you feel about it, towards it. Are you warring against it or are you one with it? You need to heal—to bring peace to your body and nervous system. You need to reclaim and give life to what is repressed.
Second, you must discover and know your body. Feel it. Enter into it. And travel its sensory roadways as far as you can go.
1. Heal and reclaim your body
- Be aware of your internalized messages. What were you told by your mother, your grandmother, your culture? Are these messages true for you or do you want to create new truths of your own?
- Heal your battles against your body. Whether repression, shame, trauma, religious or cultural beliefs, rout out what’s false, ease what you struggle with, and reconnect with your body’s truth, beauty, and wisdom.
- Listen to your body. What is it saying and yearning for?
- Learn to appreciate, care for, and love your body. Substitute negative self-talk with positive self-care, appreciation, and enjoyment.
- Tune into and connect with your life force. What makes your body come alive? Is it yoga, sunning yourself on your deck, or dance? Give your body more of what it loves.
- Cultivate your sensory awareness. Feel into and inside your sensations, instincts, and drives. Your five senses are incredibly powerful and subtle.
- Do your inner work. It takes effort to free yourself from the web of your past but is so worth it. Try therapy, body work, dance, or sand play to shift a scrappy legacy into a living legend.
2. Fully embody your body
You have vast capacities for pleasure, bliss, and ecstasy—for much more than you currently experience.
- Listen to, discover, and trust your instincts and drives. This is your body’s truth and wisdom. Follow it. Let it guide you as you navigate your life.
- Open to life energy and vitality. So many women constrict their bodies and don’t allow the full play and stream of Shakti, the life force. This causes stress and disease. When you open and allow life energy to flow, like when you breathe deeply, exercise, and eat nourishing food, you increase your capacity and creativity.
- Open more to your senses and pleasure. You’ll be surprised how much pleasure you can feel and how much more there is to feel. Pleasure is good for you—for your health, vibration, and aliveness. Your five senses—sight, heaing, touch, taste, and smell—are portals for ecstasy, light, and information.
- Evolve your sensory awareness. Know your body. Feel it. Enter into it. And travel its sensory roadways as far as you can go. This doesn’t need to be sexual—you can sit by a lake or a flower or on a sidewalk in New York and experience what Wilhelm Reich called orgone energy and Tantra calls cosmic sensuality.
In what other ways do you become more whole in your body? I’d love for you to share them here.
[ Click here for the Introduction, Sexuality, Power, Love, and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog series. ]
[Images: Christian Schloe; Alex Bramwell]
by wpengine | Dec 7, 2013 | Divine Feminine, Healing, Spirituality, Women
How can you become a whole woman? The whole you. The beautiful you. The sexy you. The sacred you.
You know how to adorn your body—you do it every day. You decorate your body with your favorite clothes, earrings and rings, fragrances, textures, and colors. You dress, slum, wear makeup or not depending on your mood, whether you’re at a meeting, having a bad hair day, working out, doing laundry, or out on the town.
You know how to adorn your outside. You may do it to look and feel attractive, appealing, and sexy. To attract others. Which is fabulous.
But there’s more to being beautiful, radiant, and sensual. A truly beautiful woman is just as beautiful on the inside.
Becoming whole is adorning all of you—body and heart, psyche and soul.
So how do you adorn your femininity? See if you find something that helps you be beautiful from within and become a whole woman in this eight-part blog series.
Shringar, the art of adornment
In India, shringar is women’s art of 
adornment. When a woman does her shringar, she enjoys and celebrates making herself as beautiful as she can be. With sixteen ways to decorate, reveal, and beautify herself from nose ring to bindi, henna to perfume, attire to armband to anklet, shringar is an art for each woman to explore and revel in her femininity, sensuality, and mystery.
Shringar is how a woman adores herself. It’s an act of self-love.
When you adorn yourself as a woman, you adorn Shakti, the Goddess, in you. Just as goddesses in temples are bathed and scented and dressed and garlanded, so too, when you adorn yourself, you sanctify yourself.
You may be trendy or comfort-seeking; wear chunky jewelry or delicate sparkles; be lavish or subtly feminine. Your outer decoration reveals how you feel about yourself, your inner life, and your femininity.
♥ How do you adorn yourself? And with what?
♥ What in you do you adore? And not?
♥ How whole do you feel as a woman?
How do other women do it?
We women are always looking to other women to mirror, reflect, and inspire our femininity.
You check out another woman’s clothes, the cut of her jacket, her shoes. How she walks and holds herself. Her sensuality, her self-esteem. How true is she to herself? Will she support you or does she only look out for herself? Does she abandon herself or is she in her feline power?
You compare yourself. You may be judgmental, even catty.
You look to learn. Is she a model for you?
Maybe you feel less than. Jealous. Neutral. Or inspired.
You always know when a woman plays herself down or lives from her fullest femininity. You know, the radiant, magnificent, compassionate, and powerful women. The ones lit up from within. Women who are completely themselves. And believe in themselves. Unabashedly and unapologetically so.
Your journey as a woman
We’re all on the same collective journey—digging ourselves out from the same old patriarchal hole.
Maybe you think that, as a woman, you’re supposed to be quiet, small, modest, and chaste. Take care of others. Sacrifice or give yourself away. That you’re supposed be the woman your mother or father or culture or spouse want you to be.
Maybe you were raised in a masculine model, where you found power by emulating a man. Self-reliant, competitive, and oh-so-individually tough. So strong that no one can ever hurt you. That to be powerful you have to out-man men.
In your journey to become a whole woman, you sift through family, cultural, and social messages of what it means to be a woman. You sort through your fears and insecurities, your defenses and apprehensions. You get to know your strengths, your vulnerabilities.
Every morning you look in the mirror, creating and uncreating and recreating your womanhood.
There isn’t one way to be a woman. But there’s only one way to be truly uniquely femininely you.
And that’s your way.
It’s a process to become a whole woman
It’s a process to stop seeking approval, 
being the good daughter, and taking care of others. It’s a process to soften a hard masculine way of being, to become tender, soft, and warm. It’s a process to open your broken heart to love again. And another to set boundaries.
It’s a process to own being fully sexual and gorgeous. Fabulous. Creative. Powerful. Wise.
It takes inner work. Therapy. Digging into the deep, dark stuff of who you are.
But you want to be seen. You want to be known. You want to be heard and felt.
You want to find your power. Your voice. Your unique mystery.
You want to desire and be desired. Love and be loved. Utterly.
You want to soar.
Somewhere along your own feminine journey, you discover you can only be yourself. That you can’t kowtow to anyone or make them kowtow to you. That, to be a whole woman is to be completely beautifully powerfully you.
Truly.
It’s then, when you shake your mane and swing your hips, feel passion and power in your belly, your full-throated voice, your loving beating heart, your sexual magnetism, and playful creativity that you know you’re a live woman. A live wire. Fully alive.
In body. Mind. Heart. And Soul.
The seven adornments
Over the next few weeks, this eight-part blog series adorns your femininity not with precious stones, but with the jewels of your chakras.
Pristine and powerful, these seven energy centers are aspects of femininity, which when alive and balanced, integrate to make you a whole woman:
♥ Body
♥ Sexuality
♥ Power
♥ Heart
♥ Voice + Creativity
♥ Intuition
♥ Connection to Spirit and your own Divine Femininity
Stay tuned to travel with me on the chakra caravan to whole womanhood.
And meanwhile, adorn yourself!
by wpengine | Aug 31, 2013 | Healing
What are you unconscious of?
And why would you want to know?
So much of you—your wounding, relationship dynamics, and patterns—gets played out on the canvas of your life. You may wish some aspects of yourself were different or wrestle with inner conflicts, but just can’t figure out or change them with your mind or will.
You may feel that something—you just don’t know what—is in the way of what you want from your life.
You may have a sense, a knowing, that you’re so much more. Maybe you even glimpse great capacities within yourself but don’t know how to connect with or realize them.
If you sense this, you’re right. There is more to you than what you’re aware of.
Your unconscious is submerged
If you were an iceberg, your unconscious would be 90 percent of it—the submerged part. That’s a lot. Which means, you’re conscious of 10 percent. Which is very little.
It’s hard to imagine, given all that we know about ourselves, we only know such a small fraction of who we are. It’s humbling.
But there it is.
Psychotherapy calls it the unconscious; hypnotherapy calls it the subconscious. Terminology aside, it’s the part of you of which your conscious mind is unaware.
So what’s in your unconscious?
Also called your shadow, your unconscious is an ecosystem of emotions, instincts, and desires which are too painful and too overwhelming to feel. So they’re disowned, denied, and repressed. They’re often negative, like hate, anger and rage, despair, existential angst, revenge, grief, and lovely murderous fantasies.
Your unconscious (or shadow) also holds your inner, unrealized potentials. You have a vast storehouse of incredible capacities, gifts, and resources which you can tap into.
1. Your wounding.
You have inevitable wounding growing up as a child. Inevitable misattunements from your parents or caregivers. Events and situations that were too painful. Childhood memories. Trauma. Infant and pre-natal experiences which got locked in your psyche and body when you were wordless.
a. Your defenses.
These are ways in which you learned to cover over, not feel, not know because it was too dangerous, too threatening, too much. Too ______ (you fill in the blank).
Defenses are brilliant ways of being you developed as a child to stay safe, survive, get and keep the love available to you. But these ways aren’t necessarily true as an adult and in the world beyond your family.
If you went into your head to avoid difficult emotions, you probably intellectualize. If you had trauma, you may dissociate. Or you may use humor as a way to defend against what you really feel.
Even if you had an almost perfect childhood, you still have defenses. Your psyche is a gargantuan, complex ecosystem with rivers of intense emotions which you, as a tiny infant, simply could not be with. (It’s a lot, even for an aware adult!)
b. Your attachment patterns.
These are ways you connect to and relate with people, usually formed in response to your parenting environment.
For instance, if your mother, even though she loved you, didn’t physically hold you enough or emotionally attune to you in the way you needed as an infant or child, you might have anxiety and feelings of abandonment in your relationships.
c. Beliefs.
Beliefs are the railroad tracks of your experience. They’re the shape you form as a child in response to your caretakers and environment. Filters of your experience, beliefs are the grooves in your brain which lock you into perceiving yourself, others, and the world in a certain way.
Some examples are:
“I’m not good enough”
“I need to do and be perfect to be loved”
“I’m lovable”
“The world’s a safe, exciting place”
d. Past lives.
If you’re prepared to travel that far back, your subconscious also records your past lives. It’s a repository of your experiences beyond our time and space dimension.
2. Your hidden potentials.
This is the good part. This is all that you can be but don’t know yet. Haven’t stepped into yet.
Who you would be if you don’t have your current limiting beliefs?
For instance, if you believe you’re unlovable, it would be really hard to receive love and care even when they’re available. On the other hand, when you know you’re loved you receive affection with ease and receptivity.
Also, your unconscious is a treasure chest of your unclaimed talents, power, gifts, creativity, capacities, inner guides and resources, psychic and spiritual abilities. And your Higher Self.
Your unconscious has access to potentials even beyond what we currently know as a human race.
There’s latent magic lying in wait for you there.
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