We can’t begin to heal ourselves if we don’t know how to identify and move through our pain.
I had a pretty good childhood but there was still a fair amount of anxiety, fear, blame, and impatience thrown around.
There are small events and big events in life which leave us with psycho-emotional wounds to carry around. Often we have no idea these wounds are there because they only come to the surface when they’re triggered.
I feel these wounds are a guaranteed part of life, unfortunately understanding and healing them is a different story.
As a kid I wasn’t given the tools for healing and unless I went looking for them I wouldn’t have any idea it was even possible to understand and heal my wounds.
This is a passionate episode. I share my thoughts and detail why I’ve dedicated my life to the discovery of tools both known and unknown.
Highlights and Takeaways
- We are all carrying some form of emotional or psychological pain. It’s inherent to being a human being.
- As a kid I wasn’t aware that there were things I could heal inside me.
- Writing and meditation are two powerful tools for healing.
- Writing makes it easier to understand our mental-emotional state.
- The body and mind naturally begin to clear when we take time to just be.
- I’m dedicated to discovering and sharing the most powerful tools.
- When we are feeling good about ourselves we can create beautiful things together.
- We haven’t yet seen what we are capable of when we are working together in an environment of encouragement and support for each other.
Show Notes
We Hurt Each Other and We Don’t Even Know Why [01:01]
- I had a good childhood but still there was anxiety and unhappiness, fear and insecurity in my family.
- No one wants to feel hurt, no one wants to hurt someone else and yet we do it all the time.
- We haven’t been show in childhood how to identify our feelings and how to deal with them. That’s why they come out in angry or frustrated outbursts.
- This causes trauma. Trauma, small or big, builds up over time.
I Thought I Had Healed All the Things [03:57]
- I’ve dedicated a large part of my life to understanding my feelings: like why I react with fear in certain situations. I thought I knew what was going on.
- I’m still suffering from not accepting myself fully as I am right now. It’s affecting the way I share, it’s affecting my creativity and it’s affecting my relationships.
- I thought I had healed all the things because I was experiencing so much ease with partners and friends. But I’ve been reminded that I still have healing to do.
The healing process comes in waves.
- Something will trigger our psycho-emotional wounds and they come to the surface where we can begin to look at them. I’ve chosen to always look at these wounds so I can begin to heal them instead of push them down and repress them.
- We can always repress these wounds but there comes a point where the space we are storing all of our ‘stuff’ becomes full. Once this space is full they come to the surface and we can’t do anything except pay attention to them because they begin to greatly affect our everyday experience.
We Need to Know How to Heal Before We Can Heal [08:05]
- I am dealing with emotional wounds which affect my life but I haven’t been aware of the tools to heal these wounds. I know that I need to heal my emotional wounds but I don’t know how to do it.
- If these wounds are affecting my life but I don’t know how to heal them – then I need to go searching for the tools first.
- I think it’s possible to teach our kids emotional intelligence and how to heal their own wounds. But before we can educate our kids we first need to discover what these tools are.
Powerful Tools I’ve Shared Already [10:04]
- Writing as a way of becoming clear on your mental-emotional state. It can be difficult to keep track of your thoughts and feelings using only self-reflection. Writing is a much more accessible way to do that and is a valuable tool for the healing process.
- Meditation is another huge tool. Many of the most successful people have some form of mindfulness practice.
- I’ve noticed with a regular meditation practice I feel more grounded and things which would ordinarily upset me no longer affect me.
- I feel meditation provides more space in my head and body to absorb what is going on.
- Imagine a messy kitchen: it’s full of dirty dishes, there’s salt and pepper on the table, the trash is full – and we’re trying to cook something in this kitchen. But it’s already so full that we can hardly move around and things are getting in our way.
- Meditation is simply focusing on something for a period of time. That’s all it is.
- When we meditate there is a natural emptying of this cluttered space. Everything gets put away in the right place.
- After everything is put away we begin to get in touch with deeper parts of ourselves. We come into a space where our creativity can flow more freely and our compassion and tolerance is much greater – for ourselves and others. We simply have more space to play with.
- I’ve experienced both a regular meditation practice and a not-so-regular-meditation practice. When I’ve stopped meditating, a few days go by and I can feel the clutter build up again and I have less space; everything begins to feel harder – I can’t think as clearly and I can sense a subtle pressure building.
- When we take the time to just be, the body and mind naturally begin to clear.
- All of the different techniques of meditation are just tools for coming into this natural state of being. There is nothing you have to do to get there.
- Meditation is a tool I feel would be useful to the development of any human being in the world. The side-effects are zero and the benefits are incredible.
- We will hurt each other emotionally and psychologically – that’s just a natural part of developing as a human – but with an awareness of these tools it makes the healing work so much more immediate for us.
The Quest I’m On [18:52]
- I am passionate about discovering the most effective tools for us to heal.
- I care about myself and other people tremendously.
I’m putting my heart and soul into this project because I can’t not care about people.
- I love seeing people working together and collaborating, feeling good about themselves and each other. That is a beautiful thing.
- I don’t think we realise how beneficial our co-creations will be when we’re working in a team where everyone is feeling good, healthy and happy. Where we go home and there’s a happy healthy family that knows how to work through issues together because they’ve been exposed to these tools from a very young age.
- That environment give rise to such a high level of creativity and quality in interpersonal relationships.
- I don’t think we realise how that would actually feel; to come home and to feel completely accepted by yourself and your family. A family where every member knows how to rest in themselves without predominantly relying on others to make them feel good.
- Those hard days are still going to happen, we can’t predict or control life. But imagine coming home to a family where each member is ready to listen and offer support to each other with love and acceptance.
Mentioned in This Episode
- The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast)
- How Writing Can Help Us Live More Harmoniously (article)
