Welcome to Excel in the Rising.
I'm Anna Majel,
Somatic experiencing therapist for PTSD and trauma recovery and the founder of Somatic Trauma Recovery Center.
For all the offerings,
Programs,
Books,
Please check the links below in the show notes.
Let's begin.
Who is influencing your choices?
Who is shaping what you want to do or avoid outside in the world?
Who influences the books you want to read?
The way you decorate your home?
How you dress?
How you wear your makeup?
The hobbies you allow yourself to enjoy or the music you listen to?
And the interests you dismiss and don't want to be part of?
Who shapes what you show innate enthusiasm for?
Your innate drive?
Your innate being?
And what you not care about?
Who influences how you express your sexuality?
Your silliness?
Your movement?
Your dance?
How freely you cry?
How openly you feel?
And who has placed you into a mold of how to be and how not to be so subtly that you may not even realize this is not your true presence,
Not who you would be if you were left alone with yourself,
With your own being,
With your own identity?
These are big inquiries,
Necessary inquiries.
Observe and ask between you and you.
Am I already caged by someone else's influence?
By unspoken expectations?
By inherited rules about what is acceptable,
Respectable,
Desirable,
Or shameful by them?
And how much of my life I'm living inside someone else's mold,
Someone else's identity,
Someone else's comfort,
Someone else's idea of who I should be?
Without ever stopping to ask,
What do I want?
What do I need?
What is my preference?
What speaks to my soul?
To my nature?
To my sensitivity?
To my temper?
To my history?
To my culture?
To my ethnicity?
To my biology?
Where am I in my life?
So these are foundational inquiries.
These are must-haves as we navigate our lives,
And they must be practiced.
Not just thought about,
But embodied.
Embodied,
Being in greed in your system,
Until they become a natural way of orienting yourself into the world.
So as you know,
I'm a somatic experiencing therapist for PTSD and trauma recovery.
The work we do with our clients is bottom-up.
Their nervous system needs completely,
Not only a nervous system,
Your body,
Your biology,
Your muscles,
Your bones,
Your fluid system,
Need to feel that felt sense.
First,
Before your mind,
It becomes your second skin.
Inquiring,
Assessing,
And feeling,
Feeling and noticing those cues of your own truth,
Of your own identity.
And then from that place,
You're orienting yourself into the world.
You're influencing your space from your own source of your being,
From your own well of your own identity.
And part of this inquiry is to ask yourself something even more specific.
What goes so often hand-to-hand when you're influenced by others?
Why do I feel the need to hide when I do certain things?
And there is nothing shameful about those things.
Why do I feel like I must protect parts of myself when I'm doing certain things,
From being seen?
An inquiry here is,
Am I shamed into secrecy?
And I'm not doing anything wrong,
But it feels like it's wrong.
Am I shamed into secrecy?
Is my identity shamed into my secrecy?
Many women are,
But particularly under patriarchal,
System.
Many men who are more sensible,
They are shamed into secrecy.
And this can be so simple as hiding the Romans books you read,
The tarot cards you own.
Because tarot cards are not data-driven.
You might hide the stories you write,
The songs you sing,
When no one is watching,
All the outfits tucked in the back of your closet,
Or desires you feel you want to do something,
By it's not appropriate,
By that someone.
And displace us in hiding aspects of ourselves without even knowing why.
And only knowing that being fully visible,
Feels unsafe.
So ask yourself very directly,
Am I shamed into secrecy for being who I am?
Is my identity being pushed into hiding?
And by whom?
Name them,
Them,
Name them.
And they are not some abstract horses,
They are people.
You know the first name and the last name.
Communities,
Cultures,
Relationships,
Name them.
And then tell the truth,
First to yourself,
And then possible to them.
Name who you are,
Name your identity,
Name your boundaries.
And if you're mocked,
Dismissed,
Shamed,
Ridiculed,
Then boundaries are not even optional,
They are required.
And if those boundaries you are setting up are repeatedly violated,
If you're again mocked,
It may be time to say a necessary goodbye.
Because no good friend,
No good partner,
No healthy soul will ever demand that you hide who you are.
All what makes you,
You.
All your books,
All your songs,
All your outfits,
All that identity of you.
And that is your assessment tool when choosing relationships.
And just as you clean your home,
Recycling what no longer serves,
Discarding what has become toxic,
Filled with mold,
You also must clean your relational space.
And we are not learned to do that.
We are learned to stick in relational space,
Which became so outdated and outgrown and toxic.
We are learned to do this.
And it's time to unlearn outdated patterns,
What we were taught by our parents and grandparents.
It's not the same as before.
Thankfully,
We are evolving.
And some connections,
They do grow mold when they require you to shrink,
To hide,
Or betray yourself in order to belong.
And an adult who is doing that,
Not the minors or situations where we need to hide and shrink in order to survive.
That's different.
So when you say necessary goodbyes,
When that happens,
You close the chapter with dignity,
And you don't stay out of loyalty to harm.
Out of loyalty to nostalgia.
Out of loyalty what once was,
But to what it is repeatedly.
Not accident,
But repeatedly.
And you say goodbye,
Not with cruelty,
But with clarity,
With dignity,
With kindness.
And here's the truth.
There are so many good people around us,
Good souls.
Good souls welcome all of you.
I bet you do the same.
And other people,
They may not share your tastes.
They may not live as you live.
They can have complete different interests,
Different rhythm,
But you will never have to hide who you are around them.
They will not influence you into becoming someone you are not.
You will not feel judged.
You will not read the silence in between two of you as you need to be cautious.
It will not be silence of you being cautious,
Or as you need to hide some secret.
With those kind people,
Your soul tribe,
Your soul brother and sisters,
Your soul family,
You will not be shunned into the secrecy for being who you are.
And what I want to name here is that most people are not living from choice.
They are living from conditioning.
And this way of living,
I'm not talking about overt control,
What we see in the tyranny,
What we see in authoritarian regimes.
So this is a different episode.
Here,
I'm naming invisible influence.
Two different things.
Overt control.
This is invisible influence.
And I'm not talking about positive influence.
This is not about positive influence.
Your adult responsibility and responsibility on your healing journey,
On your spiritual journey,
Is to always examine your preferences,
Your interests and expression,
And to ask yourself,
Is this right now shaped by my family expectations,
By patriarchal norms,
Cultural rules,
Or fear of shame of rejection?
So in a way,
We want to teach ourselves to recognize where your choice ends and when your compliance begins.
And there is a big difference between being influenced and being present.
Influence molds behavior through fear,
Shame,
Unspoken rules.
So it has this quality of you moving into secrecy.
And then we have presence,
Which arises when choices align with your body.
With your identity.
With your truth.
And this is about you reclaiming authority of your own life,
Your own inner authority.
And by influence,
By this type of influence,
So not positive influence,
Main difference in positive influence and negative influence for you is you learn to hide in negative influence,
Which is not speaking to your identity.
So there is this secrecy where you need to hide your interests that bring joy,
Your creative expression,
Sexuality and desire,
Your spiritual curiosity.
And not because what you are doing and what you want to do is wrong,
But because this is shamed into hiding.
And if you feel the need to hide something harmless about yourself,
It is likely because someone else taught you that this specific thing and you being fully seen was unsafe.
So somatic work and emotional inquiry would be what do I hide?
How my body feels in the presence of this person when I want to express something and why?
And this is very important because now more than ever,
Especially our kids,
Look for the young kids and young adults,
They're so shamed by external validation,
Social media trends.
Many are disconnected from their own wants and needs and preferences.
So midlife crisis is now basically in 20s when there is so much pressure from outside,
Influence from outside,
And their young people lose the sense of their own presence and identity.
They don't know who they are.
And things are piling up and piling up.
There are so many of them in their 20s,
They're in the constant state of panic attacks because there is no place to land to.
There is no place of your own identity,
Of your own expression because of influence from outside.
Learning here would be recognize self-betrayal because in a way this is a self-betrayal,
Not conscious,
This is very subtle.
This is very,
Very subtle.
And something very simple is what you can use as your metric of,
Oh,
This is okay for me or not.
If you cannot be fully yourself somewhere and with someone,
That place is simply not aligned with your well-being.
It simply is not.
And feeling as you need to do things in a secrecy,
As you're shamed into secrecy,
Is often the marker of misplaced influence.
And your identity,
Your authenticity,
Requires discernment,
Not approval,
Because you want to live your life from your presence,
Not permission.
And good soul,
Good human being,
Will welcome all your being,
All your expression.
Even those expressions,
Lifestyles,
Is not same as theirs,
Is not same as theirs,
But you will never feel as you're doing something wrong and in secrecy.
So as we close today,
Take a moment,
Pause,
Write down all what's coming up for you.
Re-listen,
Ask yourself all those inquiries,
Fundamental inquiries.
And as always,
Be gentle with yourself.
I'm Anumael,
This is Excel in Rising,
And until next time,
Much care,
Much care.
