You Don't Need A Shirt To Have A Button

 You know, I'm not perfect; no one is. As I like to say, "We are all perfectly imperfect!" But I do my best to put the highest vibration I can into the world. So I have a bit of heaviness in my heart today as I reflect on places during the past few days where I didn't meet up to my own expectation.

There were a couple of places where I took someone's reactions personally. The old button of "No matter what I do or how hard I try, it's not good enough..." got pushed and I went into my own reactions of feeling frustrated or even angry, small and unworthy. Right beneath that button is "... and something bad is going to happen." Then I feel hopeless and victimized. This is a very old emotional "knot" for me and I've worked hard to unweave the threads that keep it in place. Yet if there's one thing that can knock me off balance, that's the one. When this button gets pushed, I might as well be about 5 years old - a small, vulnerable child.

I "watched" myself slip into this pattern yet could not stop the emotions that arose, so I went fully into them. This is a trick I learned through my spiritual studies with the Austin Toltec Center. There's an emotional healing practice of going fully into the experience of emotions that arise rather then pushing against them or pushing them away. This allows the energy behind them to move through the body rather than being stored or getting stuck in the body.

This doesn't mean "go emote all over someone!" It means find some private space to release the emotional energy that arose in me. My emotions arise, exist and dissolve away again within me, not outside of me. They don't belong to anyone else; they belong to me. I am having the reaction; it's happening inside of me and has nothing to do with anyone else really, but that's an entirely different blog... It does have to do with my emotional wounding: my reactions show me where I still have healing and clean up to do within my own being.

When I stepped fully into my reaction, I found myself wanting to isolate myself. That's what I used to do as a child when I felt threatened; I'd go hide in a closet or up in a tree, away from everyone. Now, rather than hiding, I "take space" to feel into what's going on inside of me and figure out what's mine and what's the other person's responsibility. This time, once I connected with the button that got pushed, I was able to do something specific to release the emotional energy from my body (another trick from the Austin Toltec Center), shift out of the reaction and gently get on with my life.

Sometimes that process takes me a few minutes; sometimes several hours. This one, because it's such a deep-seated button for me, took several hours but by the next day, I was feeling more like myself again. The gift is that each time it happens I unweave a bit more of the knot that keeps this button in place, and each time the reaction gets smaller and the shifting gets easier. And now, sometimes I have no reaction at all.

I'm realizing on a much deeper level that walking through this A Year To Love means that I am learning to love myself more fully; then, I can truly love everyone else more fully too...