It’s my birthday! And I would like the share the best practices and philosophies that helped me become the most aligned and upleveled version of myself that I am today.
The thing is— we all have “stuff” and baggage. No one is immune. The tools we use to work on our stuff become the tools we use to gain a sense of deep fulfillment:
✨ Awareness. Often times the biggest barrier to being the best versions of ourselves is realizing there is something amiss in the first place. Awareness helps us cast light on things we take for granted, and it also allows us to be proactive rather than reactive to life. This is why meditation is so powerful, because it helps us train our minds to be aware rather than on autopilot.
✨ A method of rewiring beliefs. Once you have awareness, you’ll likely become cognizant of limiting beliefs you have. Having a rewiring-belief method in your toolbox is very beneficial for transmuting them. This would include things like tapping, hypnosis, timeline therapy, and other modalities.
✨ Trigger work. Triggers can be the greatest allies in healing, because they show us precisely where there is stuck energy. Trigger work is as profound as it is intensely uncomfortable. We naturally tend to avoid triggers because it is uncomfortable, but within the discomfort lies the transformation. The trick is to be mindful of nervous system limits and go slowly with the work. It’s okay to discern that it’s not the right time to delve into something, which is different from avoiding it entirely.
✨ Feel your feelings. Especially the sad, mad, and “bad” ones. Our emotions are the gateway to the multidimensional aspects of being a human. If we don’t take the time to feel our emotions, we cut off the range of our existence. We can fall into avoidance traps like overworking, substance abuse, internet scrolling, etc. Feeling emotions is what helps us move through them. And just like with trigger work, we can titrate our experience of emotions so it doesn’t overwhelm us.
✨ Somatic Awareness. Western and industrialized cultures are disassociated in general, and the majority of us live in our heads with no heart and/or gut awareness. When we tune into the heart brain and the gut brain (brain is literal: our heart and guts have neurons), we gain access to a wealth of knowledge. We become attuned to the difference between our survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and our thriving responses.
✨ Reclaim disowned parts of yourself. (aka shadow work) At the crux of a great many of wounds is conditional love. “See, we love and praise this part of you, but not that part of you.” So “that” part of you goes into hiding. You reject it, shame it, project it onto others, judge it fiercely when you see it on anyone else. (Protip: anything you feel judgement/disdain towards, is likely to be a shadow aspect of yourself.) You’re praised for being smart, so anything that seems “dumb” is shamed. You’re rewarded for working hard, so “laziness” is shunned. People always liked you because you’re skinny and pretty—or maybe people always shamed you for being fat–so anything that isn’t skinny and pretty becomes a thing to be dieted away and buried under layers of makeup.
We become dulled versions of ourselves the more that parts of ourselves go into hiding. The trick to undoing this spell of shame is to accept and unconditionally love all aspects of ourselves, no matter how socially unacceptable or grotesque they seem to us at first. In acceptance we find their inherent wisdom.
✨ Reparent yourself; do inner child work. Parents can have a difficult time in our society, where we don’t have villages to raise children. Our parents inherit ancestral trauma going back millennia in time (colonization, war, poverty, witch hunts, sexual violence, famine, religious domination, power-over/power-under) and pass it onto us. A lot of the times we didn’t get what we needed as children. So, we need to reparent ourselves and give ourselves what we needed then. It could range from feeling seen, safe, understood, accepted, special, loved unconditionally, etc.
✨ Use your voice. Take up space and override the conditioning to be nice and convenient and pleasant. Say what’s on your mind, stand up for your needs, make your feelings known. (This point is especially salient for femmes and anyone socialized femme).
✨ Make space for yourself. Cultivate enough space in your life that you can be in touch with yourself. Carve out the time if needed. If we are too busy and too preoccupied with other things, we can realize one day that we’ve lost who we are.
✨ Related to the above, is * cultivate a daily practice *. Make it an intention to feel good, or at least better than your baseline, regardless of the circumstances. Taking the time to tune yourself rather than being tuned by the environment gives you a greater sense of empowerment.
✨ Cultivate a sense of self-compassion rather than self-judgement. Blaming is such a prevalent thing in our society, and we turn the blame towards ourselves. “Why didn’t I know better?” If we don’t know why we do things that aren’t good for us, often it’s a subconscious mechanism at play. Cultivating a sense of curiosity rather than condemnation helps us to move towards self-compassion.
✨ Have an ally in your corner who can hold space for you and point out your blind spots. Others can point out what we can’t. And when they hold space for us, it makes it easier for us to look deeply at ourselves. I would not be where I am without friends, mentors, coaches, and therapists to help me along the way.
✨ Celebrate your wins! Doing this work isn’t easy. It’s important to take stock of your accomplishments and celebrate how far you’ve come. And it helps you have enough strength of morale to continue moving forward.
✨ Last but not least—bravery. Anyone who is out there doing the work, facing themselves, breaking patterns, taking two steps forward and one step backwards falling flat on their face, getting up anyways, looking their demons in the eye, getting lost in the hole–is brave.
I see and acknowledge you and am so proud of all of you.
❤️ Tasmia (thuss-me-ah),
Smia for short