PSYCHOSOMATIC

Creating A New State of Being Through the Mind

Written by Mariah R.

Wanting to lead a healthier life but not having the knowledge, awareness, or skills to do so can feel a lot like being a ticking time bomb with no detonation. There’s been so many times where I had the desire to shift my life but I lacked the proper knowledge to do it. I found myself entangled within this web of emotions, thoughts, and ideas that hindered me from optimizing my gifts and talents. It's normal to become your biggest obstacle at times. I actually feel like this universal experience is important. To become your own worst enemy means to be on the path of becoming your greatest ally as well. We are multidimensional, we can be both depending on the resources we lean on to get us through our days. But in order to shift and recreate our reality we have to ask ourselves:

Is the way I think and conduct my life beneficial to my evolution?

To Understand, We First Must Identify.

The key to maximizing our potential is not through the doors of the nearest luxury car dealership, nor is it through the doors of Saks Fifth Ave. No, the key is through the doors of your mind. It is deeply ingrained in your subconsciousness, causing us to take actions that diverge from the path to our true success. When I was ready to expand my life I found myself at roadblocks. A lot of the time these roadblocks were dressed up as shame, insecurity, procrastination and guilt. That would blind me from seeing a way forward. I understood that to move forward meant I had to work through them. Not around them, not under them, not stepping over them. I had to deal with it and face myself. I went on a quest to understand what deeply ingrained experiences caused these normal emotions to build castles in my mind and live there. Again, it is normal to feel these emotions and let them pass, but to attach yourself to them or embody them is what causes problems for us.

One of my favorite quotes is by the late Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist, poet, and philosopher. He said “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

The only separation between who you are now and who you are at your most maximized potential is how efficient you are. It's your use of time, knowledge, awareness, talent, and skill. That's literally it! Once you are able to identify your patterns built by ingrained beliefs you can stop running into the same roadblocks and forge a new path for yourself. This new path will ultimately lead to the destiny you desire to arrive at. Our destinies are directly tethered to the everyday actions we take, and our daily actions are ruled by our thoughts, which are tethered to our emotions and the way we identify with them. If you’re someone like me who never saw great examples of emotional regulation and intelligence, then you can see how we run into problems here. Sometimes emotional intelligence looks like letting yourself feel an emotion for a while, but not letting the emotion swallow you whole. It can look like understanding feelings are flexible and bound to change, so it wouldn't be smart to allow emotion to infiltrate your thoughts and actions. What about those times where you're moving from a place of the subconscious? There are moments where we are being influenced by small idiosyncrasies, distinctive characteristics we all have, that we don't even realize are impeding our lives. In those moments we have to train ourselves to be acutely aware in order to catch them. If we want to restructure a healthier life, we have to alter our daily beliefs and actions. However, this process of alteration first starts within.

Internalized Behaviors: How We Seek to Control The Beast

A healthy mind equals a healthy life. A lot of our perceived setbacks are due to the way we think and feel about our reality. Without awareness, we begin to lead lives based upon the morals and values of others like our parents and guardians, or even society who has instilled their beliefs within us since we came into this world. The thing about it though, is that ingrained beliefs and emotions evolve into internalized behaviors, and these are the deterrents to maximizing our potential. For example, if you take someone who is raised by very religious parents and that person turns out to be attracted to the same sex, that person is then susceptible to feeling and acting out internalized shame. This is because a major part of who that person naturally is, goes against what they were nurtured to believe about people who are like them. So they may end up coping with their ingrained shame by totally isolating themselves from others, or their family, as an attempt to control how they’re being perceived. See? Internalized behaviors are developed when one struggles to cope with stress & emotions. They may develop in individuals who aren't taught how to properly regulate themselves. Unlike those with externalizing behaviors, they try to control their emotions from within. Like the example, most internalizing behaviors are rooted in shame, an emotion most connected with trauma and maltreatment in childhood. For a better point of view, here are some more examples of internalizing behaviors (keep in mind these behaviors range from mild to extreme):

-withdrawing from society (perpetuating loneliness through isolation)

-sleeping a lot and never feeling rested (escapism)

-willingly participating in risky activities that can harm oneself, even subconsciously, such as substance abuse, risky sex/promiscuity, etc.

-physical self harm

-”punishing” yourself for perceived/actual failure

-withholding fun and joy from oneself

-controlling one's eating patterns

-insulting yourself

-blaming yourself for relationship conflicts and endings

The list could go on and on! If you’ve found yourself reflected within this list of behaviors I want you to know that you shouldn't feel ashamed of it. We should never be ashamed of the way we are attempting to control and cope with the complexities of life. These are just indicators of where we lack the proper tools to move in a more loving, compassionate, and healthier way with ourselves. This is the beginning of getting to sit in the driver's seat of your own life! Once our behaviors start to contradict everything we desire to obtain, (Ex: you want to be physically healthier but you eat out and lay down all day) it shows us that we are being driven by the morale of someone or something else. These beliefs have laid dormant within us for so long we may have convinced ourselves that this is truly how we perceive ourselves, but that couldn't be further from the truth.We do not come into this world naturally being unloving and not believing in ourselves and capabilities. We are nurtured to be that way. To reach the pinnacle of our lives we must untangle ourselves from the thread of the beliefs of generations before us. This is a beautifully delicate process I like to call The Unraveling.

The Unraveling Process

I remember a couple years ago I set out on a quest to be a plant mom for the first time. It was self proclaimed that I had a bad green thumb, but the honest truth is I just never tried. I knew I wanted a flower plant, I wanted something more than just greenery - something lively. At the time I was working at the Home Depot Garden Center where I came across the Peace Lily flower and we chose each other right then and there. (I ended up naming her Amelia so for the sake of the story I’ll call her that.) Now when I first brought Amelia home she had a bunch of beautiful green leaves and one tiny white flower bulb emerging from the top. After doing a little research on how to take care of her I began following suit to see how many more white flowers could bloom from this one plant. By the second week she was beautiful and in full bloom, but although she was full and healthy - I noticed a startling pattern. Every time a new bud began to bloom, the older flower started to wither away. This perplexed me because I was yearning to see a bunch of beautiful white flowers sprout all at once. Why weren’t they? I was doing everything right! I’d come home to leaves sitting in a puddle under one fresh new flower bloom. I was confused, so I decided to do further research and learned that peace lilies do that to help sustain themselves. As the old petals fall away, the nutrients can redirect themselves to the freshly emerging buds. It's the life cycle of the peace lily in her healthiest state. All of us are Amelia’s. We are constantly evolving in certain areas while in others we’re laying old things to rest. Of course sustaining multiple avenues of newness is more feasible for us than it was for my plant baby, but it is still important for us to learn our growth cycles and how we operate on an individual level to be able to handle ourselves with the utmost care throughout our rebirths. In the process of unraveling, we are constantly cutting out old beliefs and mindsets as we shift into new ways of being. We may notice that certain things we were taught are no longer applicable to the world we live in now. Although our guardians may have meant well in the ways they tried to teach us, some of their ingrained beliefs and behaviors are more of a hindrance than an advantage. Luckily for us, we can choose healthier options. When we face situations that trigger internal shame or internalized behaviors, we have to begin with the root. The voice in which that shame/fear is speaking. We must begin asking ourselves “Whose voice is that?” “When did I begin thinking that about myself?” when we face a harsh inner critic. As you lean into the truth of these statements and perspectives, you’ll see them start to crumble on top of the faulty foundations you built them on. This process is one that seems ongoing to me, it was also the most difficult to me because I was forced to hold myself accountable for placing people's words on pedestals in my mind. It made me realize how unfair it is to place someone somewhere they never asked to be, and then tear them down for only being themselves. People are human. Your mother, your father, your sister were not born to be those things exclusively. They were just born to be human. The quicker I embodied that truth I was able to forgive those who capped my human experience with their limiting beliefs. The test is to not harp over the voices you find behind your limiting perspectives and mindsets. You just have to return those beliefs back to who they belong to. This is where you uproot and get all the gunk out of your mind. Understand that those who were in charge of you could only teach what they knew. We live in a day and age where we have so much information at the tips of our fingers, which is one of the biggest tools we can use to lead an efficient life. This process is one that shouldn’t be rushed, nor is it linear. You may find yourself uprooting your lack of confidence, but still having seeds of fear planted. That’s okay! As you uproot your outdated beliefs and behaviors, you can begin replacing them with more beneficial options.

The Road to A New You.

“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

How beautiful is a fresh bed of soil, ready to be cultivated into a garden? Throughout my unraveling I found myself at this point many times in different areas. However, I’d have to say this year is where I truly found myself aware and at a completely clean slate. I had gotten to a point where I dissected all the stories I’d tell myself about myself, and how I enacted those stories out into the world. I sat with myself solemnly and pondered over if these truly resonated with who I am. Whenever I’d run into a “this isn’t me.” or “this point of view isn’t mine.” It gave me a sense of freedom to create my life from that point forward. For example, I grew up being told that the world is evil and that I can’t trust anybody. This was so deeply embedded into my brain that I started to view life through the lens of someone who had gotten taken advantage of by the world over and over again. But that wasn’t my story, it was someone else’s. And though there’s some truth that not everyone can be trusted and that there are some evil people in the world, that logic isn’t applicable to everyone. There’s also some beautiful people in this world, and amazing things I’m meant to experience that are directly correlated to the people I choose to connect with. I wouldn’t know that had I not dissected this perspective and sent it back to its origins. I teach this heavily in my mindset coaching, how we can create life as we go by returning what doesn’t belong to us. A lot of us walk around so heavy and weighed down by the projections of others. We have someone else chauffeuring our lives. I teach one how to get in the driver's seat of their own life and make a left even when someone is screaming at them to go right! In order to utilize our gifts to be the GPS of our lives, we have to generate a deep and intimate relationship with ourselves. We have to tune into our own inner voice and put it on 100 volume. Let it be louder than all the projections, perceptions, and voices of others. In my opinion, the biggest lie in this life is that we do not choose our fate. I wholeheartedly believe that we choose our path, and whatever path we choose is connected to a certain destiny. It is time for us to stop allowing our lives to be unconsciously willed by people who are living rent free in our minds. We have the power to will our lives into submission of what we want it to be. When you tune out all the voices of your mom, your grandmother, your dad, your cousin, your friends, who are you? How are you speaking to yourself then? That’s who you are.

Our internal wisdom is so much larger than the voices of others. So when I speak on tuning into your own inner voice, it's way beyond something mental. Your inner voice is infiltrated throughout your whole body, so when it's speaking to you it's not just through an encouraging thought. It's in the feeling you get in your gut, the visions and pictures you get in your head when you hear certain sounds and smell certain scents. It even speaks to you through the aches and pains in your body. Upper back pain? Your inner voice is speaking to the grief and sadness you carry in your body, as the upper back is linked to the heart space. Knee pains? Your inner voice is speaking to your unwillingness to trust your own path and a need to be more flexible. We are all psychosomatic beings, meaning our mind and bodies work as one system. We have come to limit intelligence only to the mind, but when you develop that intimate relationship with yourself you'll see how much wisdom you truly hold. This will diminish the voices & projections of others because you'll see just how small their thoughts weigh compared to the weight of your thoughts, feelings, and corporal senses.

Strengthening the Inner Voice

The only thing stopping you, is you. It's like that saying where they speak on how a ship can't sink unless it allows water in it. Now you have the awareness, knowledge, and tools to filter what is allowed into your “ship”. I say all of this not to imply that the opinions and thoughts of others are beneath you or unimportant, but they are not the foundation to which you should build your life. They should be complementary to the foundation you’ve already built. Now that we have gone through the signs of being led by others, how to uproot their thoughts and replace them with your own, and how to tune into your own internal wisdom we just need to continue honing in on strengthening the most important voice of all: your own.

Key Indicators to Strengthen Your Inner Voice:

-Acting on your ideas, and allowing them to be sustained by your energy alone. (keep them to yourself until they're executed!)

-Following your first instinct and seeing where it leads you.

-Noting the moments you begin talking yourself out of things or into things.

-Listening to your body. Pay attention to how certain foods make you feel, and where you may be dealing with recurring aches and pains that are not due to an injury.

Implementing these methods became the beginning of my beautiful relationship with myself. Ironically, they helped me to see others through the same lens that I see myself and give them more compassion and empathy for wherever they are on their journeys. Once I was awakened to the magnitude of my inner voice, it shifted my whole perspective of life. I hope with the application of this research, that shift can occur for you too.

As always,

Rÿah