Finding Flow and Fulfillment Through Unpredictable or Inconvenient Experiences
Do you sometimes find your emotions or energies inconvenient? Or do you wish you could always expect a desirable energy, mood or experience each and every day?
For me, in the past I’ve enjoyed knowing what to expect…….even in the small things like the weather.
The daily weather here on the Hawaiian islands is unpredictable, changing and often dramatic and it definitely took some getting used to in moving here.
Now this more flowing weather pattern is actually something I’ve come to love and I’ve learned to embody these same kind of patterns within myself which has allowed me to lean into my feminine essence and experience more aliveness.
Let me explain this further for you….
Just last week, there was a particular day where I was noticing these unpredictable weather patterns….
I started my day walking on the beach where I live. It was clear, still, sunny and I had an amazing ocean swim, floating on my back, feeling expansive and held by the gentle ocean and staring at the blue sky above.
Then after being back in the house for just a few hours, I returned to the beach to walk my dog and it had become windy, the surf had picked up and ominous dark clouds were forming all around.
And later still, as I sat inside working there was a short, gentle sprinkle outside and then the clouds parted, the birds sang and there was a beautiful rainbow out my window.
Finally that evening came a heavy downpour followed by a damp, still, quiet night.
All this in one day, all completely unpredictable. And it is like this more often than not.
On this day, I also noticed my energies and emotions changing throughout the day as well and it got me thinking about how my relationship to my feeling, feminine, flowing side has evolved right along with my relationship to this Hawaiian weather and I’ve grown to honor and lovingly welcome each.
For many of us, our own “internal weather” can feel inconvenient. An unpredictable dark cloud of energy, raging winds of emotions or storms of undesirable feelings are usually not something we look forward to and welcome with open arms.
So we set our desires and place expectations on our life, our days and our experiences to always be clear and sunny with a light, cool breeze (or whatever your ideal weather is!).
And often, when our life doesn't live up to these expectations and we experience these heavier, darker emotions and energies, we struggle to go with the flow and we will resist, repress, disconnect or seek to change ourselves or these experiences.
However, in Feminine Embodiment we learn that what we don’t feel and express, we store in the body. The muscles, tissues, bones and cells of our bodies remember all of the incomplete and suppressed experiences that we have rejected or tried to make different.
And like all feelings and emotions when we are unwilling to feel it, then we are unable to free it from our system.
When we hold tightly to expectations and desire rigid predictability in our energies and emotions whatever arrives outside of our acceptable bandwidth often become frozen in the body, instead of being able to flow through the body which is it’s natural state.
Put another way…..
When we fight our own unpredictable, changing weather patterns we dam up our natural flow. This keeps us stuck in the more predictable but less satisfying layers of experience like armor, numbness and frustration.
Living from these layers keeps us living in the status quo, cut off from our expression and from the true aliveness and magic that life has to offer us.
So how do we welcome our more fluid, flowing, unpredictable emotions, sensations and energies? How do we learn to ride out and perhaps even find pleasure in the changing weather?
Personally, I have to get my mind onboard first….
So I remind myself that I believe the point to life is not to live some predictable, cookie cutter experience but it is to feel alive, to feel the intensity of life bubbling up through us in wild and different ways and to saturate ourselves with the textures of living. This changes my expectations and I begin to recognize that each nuanced experience is a gift, whether painful or pleasurable, and is here to be welcomed and experienced.
For me, this remembering greatly supports the process but it doesn’t mean every single experience I have is always easy to let in. In reality, some may be far from easy.
So practically speaking, one of the very first steps is to find safety, internally and externally. This might look like a place in your body that feels safe or an environment, sharing with another person or working with a coach or therapist. Finding safety will allow you to fully feel and embrace what is arising and do so at a pace that feels safe in your body.
Then it’s a matter of getting very curious. Just like when we want to learn something and get better at it we have to follow our sense of curiosity and explore what is here. Notice what you are feeling, where you are feeling it, what kind of thoughts or stories go with it and if there is a certain time of day or time of month particular thoughts and sensations bubble up.
By becoming curious and sensitive to what is here you can learn to somatically release what specifically is draining you and allow what is fueling you to grow and take up more space in your body. This allows for the completion of suppressed or rejected feelings in our bodies and brings your energy back to flow.
This sensitivity, somatic release and expansion are skills that we can build and ones that I will be teaching in depth in my new program Reclaim Your Joy.
Often when we can embrace ourselves in this way, we come to realize that a lack of feeling fully alive and fulfilled has been a lack of intimacy within ourselves and in loving our full, fluid, flowing, unpredictable internal experiences.
From here, we can know that our energies and emotions are not inconveniences, they are each wise messengers, and we let go of deluded expectations of experience and welcome and trust what is right here right now, no matter what the weather is.