How do these three words pertain to personal growth and a woman’s healing journey?
Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day and, as the name suggests, we all should pause on that day and reflect on what we are grateful for. Not just reflect, but to truly feel the gratitude in our deepest core.
Well, I didn’t get to that place. I tried really hard, because I know that the vibration of gratitude is one of the highest, and therefore one of the most healing ones there are. But something deeper was going on, something very primal, which thrusted me into helplessness, and my brain into flight-or-fight mode.
Kind of like PMS meets Wedding day.
Just like when you know you should be feeling really happy, but instead you’re feeling incredibly low.
Hormones are a powerful thing, and once they are circulating in your body, it’s as if you yourself are out of control.
Men don’t understand.
I know you do.
Even with all the meditation and breathing methods and techniques I have accumulated throughout my life, I couldn’t master those damn hormones and emotions at 3 AM.
They kept me up all night, rolling from one side to the other, having no choice but to listen to the raging voices in my head, tearing apart everything I don’t like about my life, everything that’s going wrong, everything that’s wrong with me. I finally got to the old litany of ”Maybe it would be better to just not exist because this state is just to awful to be in.” I am a mom for Christ’s sake, I am a healing facilitator, I have to have it together!
It was quite the opposite of Thanksgiving.
In the middle of all of this I realized that once again I had given away my power. I had given away my power to Circumstance and out of my own hand.
I started hearing a small voice saying: ”What does your heart want? What does your heart want?” But the noise in my head was still too loud.
I tried harder and harder to get to my heart, to hear its whispers, and finally I did: “All I want is peace.”
“All I want is peace.”
In that moment I remembered.
I started making choices that felt like peace. I smelled the rose on my nightstand and listened to my daughter’s breath right beside me.
Hearing my own heartbeat, I finally could feel the raging hormones calming down.
I was tired. It was 6 am by now, and children were already getting up to play.
But I fell into sleep.
I started resting into my own peace. Grateful at last.
Grateful for the opportunity to, yet again, strengthen the muscle of my own empowerment.
What did I learn that night?
It taught me that, even if something holds us tight in its grip, like a thought pattern, a wound, our pain, a feeling of desperation, despite our feeling of helplessness we always have a choice, if we remember to connect to our own heart.
I realized again that whenever we feel split and in conflict, it is not what’s going on outside, it is the war between our mind and heart.
Our natural tendency is to listen to the mind, because it has the louder voice.
But the freedom lies in listening to our own heart, and following its gentle advice.