Staying with yourself sounds simple.
It isn't.
I remember once talking about this during one of my live sessions and someone commented,
It's the hardest thing to do.
And I agree.
Especially if you learn very early in life that leaving yourself was part of how you survived.
And for much of my life,
I abandoned myself without even realizing I was doing it.
I lived in my head.
I disconnected from my feelings.
I overrode what my body was telling me.
And for years,
I tried to heal through understanding.
I read the books.
I did the cognitive work.
I learned about my patterns.
And all of that did give me insight.
But insight alone didn't complete what was still unfinished inside me.
And then for a time,
I even used spirituality in the same way.
I thought that if I could just think more positively and be more present and rise above what I was feeling,
I would finally be free.
But underneath it all,
The same wounds were still there.
And eventually,
After years and years of suffering,
I reached a point of surrender.
And I remember thinking.
I have to heal this.
Not intellectually.
I felt it in my body.
I couldn't keep living the same way.
And that suffering became a doorway.
And not because suffering is required for healing,
But because for me,
It made the old way impossible to continue.
And from there,
Something began to change.
Slowly and repeatedly.
I began staying with myself.
At first,
That looked like forcing myself to sit through guided meditations when I was struggling.
And later,
After I found Insight Timer,
I would sometimes join live meditations for four or five,
Six times a day.
And then came energy healing.
And that changed something for me because it gave me another way to pay attention to what was actually happening inside my body and my energy field.
The subtle movement,
The sensations and the shifts.
It pulled me out of my mind and into direct experience.
And day after day,
I kept coming back.
I stayed with the practice.
I stayed with my body.
And gradually I learned to stay with my own feelings.
Not perfectly,
And not every moment of the every day,
But repeatedly.
And looking back,
I believe that repetition mattered.
Because so many of our survival patterns are actually built through repetition.
Repeated fear,
Repeated chaos,
Repeated disconnection,
Repeated self-abandonment.
And slowly,
I began introducing a different kind of repetition.
The repeated experience of returning to myself.
Every time I ground it.
Every time I brought my awareness back into my body.
Every time I allowed a feeling to be there without immediately pushing it away.
I was teaching my nervous system something new.
I was building capacity and the capacity to remain connected to myself when something difficult arose.
And eventually,
When all triggers began to surface,
I didn't always know at first that I was being triggered.
I just kept staying.
And little by little,
What had been hidden began to reveal itself.
Old feelings,
Old emotions,
Old pain,
And emotional responses that had begun in childhood,
But never had the opportunity to finish.
And this is where staying became something more than simply noticing what I was feeling.
I had to begin accepting what was there.
As it was.
If fear arose,
I let the fear be there.
If humiliation arose,
I let myself acknowledge that I was feeling humiliated.
If grief came.
I let myself grieve.
I stopped trying to tell myself that I shouldn't feel what I was feeling.
I stopped trying to make the feeling more spiritual,
More positive,
Or more acceptable.
I began allowing the feelings my younger self couldn't safely feel at the time to finally arise.
And I stayed with them.
For me,
Sometimes staying meant naming what I was feeling.
Sometimes it was journaling.
Sometimes simply feeling where something was moving in my body.
Sometimes there were tears and sometimes deep,
Deep crying.
And sometimes staying meant recognizing that I had felt enough for that moment.
And allowing myself to step back.
Because staying with yourself doesn't mean forcing yourself deeper into pain.
It doesn't mean overwhelming your nervous system.
And it doesn't have to look the same for everyone.
Sometimes we can touch something painful and then naturally move toward a memory or a feeling or something that reminds us of safety.
And when we're ready,
We may come back again.
That's how some of my deepest healing unfolded.
A little at a time.
And one of the deepest wounds I eventually completed didn't happen in one experience.
I had to meet it four different times.
And looking back,
I can see the wisdom in that.
My system wasn't asking me to feel everything all at once.
It was allowing me to meet what I could and to integrate and build more capacity.
And then return when there was more I was able to hold.
And that eventually allowed me to feel and complete emotional responses that had been frozen for decades.
I didn't heal my core wound of abandonment by constantly thinking about abandonment.
In many ways,
I began healing it by no longer abandoning myself.
By staying.
Again and again.
Long enough for my inner child and my system to began trusting that I wasn't going anywhere.
So what does staying with yourself actually look like?
There isn't one answer.
It may be noticing what you're feeling and then going one step further.
Allowing it.
Accepting that this is what you're feeling right now.
Becoming curious about where you feel it in your body.
Giving yourself permission to cry if tears come.
Writing about what is arising.
Grounding yourself when you need to.
Reaching for support when you need it.
And knowing when enough is enough for today.
The practice isn't to force yourself to heal.
It's to keep returning to yourself.
Gently.
Repeatedly.
And to let what is ready to arise,
Arise.
Because healing isn't measured by how much pain you can endure.
It's measured by how safely you can stay present with what you're feeling.
And sometimes the deepest healing begins when leaving yourself no longer feels like the only option.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
I'll see you next time.
