Mayhem has eased its tight grip on my life since we last talked.
I am getting ahead of myself:
Hello, my beloved soul!
How does life treat you?
Oh, me?!
Ah, life just goes on and… well, mayhem has eased its tight grip on my life since we last talked. Not in the financial realm, as the majority of you probably had thought of, but in the internal struggle to maintain an external image. I have, since I jumped on the nothing but the true-truth train, been going through quite the transition. For a time there I thought I am delusional, after all, who could be able to genuinely stay this content and productive when the source of the capitalist system slowly dries out (yes, I am talking about money).
It turns out, I can.
Truly happy about that.
Not merely for the sake of my mental health and stability, but also because of what happens when we shut our system down with fear. Right, nothing productive and certainly nothing content. Indeed a cycle begins where one believes their life is about toend and due that, their whole system comes into full alarm mode, leading to the very ingenious incapability of doing anything, also called freeze or flight (admittedly, in my own personal story, rarely ever fight since my strength is reduced to a grand total of 158 cm with decreasing muscles as my body, starting at 35, chooses to slowly get rid of that unnecessary baggage).
I digress.
I know you love it.
Anyway.
Instead of freezing or fleeing, I hopped on the true-truth train and continuously stuck with my new daily routines in order to get this ship to turn around and set sail to dreamy islands where figures printed on paper that represent the value of something flow freely and without shortage down mesmerizing waterfalls. I am quite in love with the routine that I created, mainly because it centres around self-care and self-expression, and really nothing else. Every day of the week is dedicated to a different part of my creative process, all aiming to be monetised at some point. What is this, you say? Tell us more?
I hear you demand a short recap, so here goes:
Monday dedicated podcast episode production day.
Tuesday devoted to my first book.
Wednesday is called play and fun, aiming at refilling my creative tank with things like macramé, or other way of expressing myself or letting myself be inspired, or, believe it or not, even inspiring myself sometimes. Fo one, I aim to re-read ‘The Artist’s Way’, that I stopped reading when all hell broke loose in February 2024. Oh, it seems like a century ago!
Thursday is all about YouTube and video production.
Friday concerns all of my website as well as blogging (yes, again, there is no coincidence here with the publishing date of the I AM series here!)
Saturday I tend do community and course building, meaning I fine-tune my socials, all related informations and, if there is something to answer, I’ll answer comments or mails. And may I, just as a side note, proudly proclaim the existence of my patreon (if you want to know more and all about it, click the link and you will find out!) as well as the taking shape and form of my first online course launching in January of 2025!
Leaving Sunday for rest and regeneration. A good hike, a day without any other concern than simply do what I came here to do, exist and experience without time constraints.
Everyday I practice QiGong, semi every day Yoga and journaling is these days as integrated in my daily healthy habits as live-streaming just starting to become.
Why, you wonder?
Why live-streaming of all things?
Thank you for asking, that is the main topic today: conversations.
Admittedly, live-streaming is a rather one way direction of conversation, however it opens doors. Vulnerability and authenticity always do. And it is sort of a very modern way of journaling. Putting out into the world what occupies your inner world, all in the hopes of making sense of your own experience while someone else might be able to take something away for their journey too. A win-win, right?!
The kind of conversation I talk about here though is another level of exchange. I only discovered it during this last week and it blew my mind.Yet, let us wander back in time to have a bit of context of how communication changed for me over the course of my life so far.
We have the stage from birth to realising that this world is a cruel place, inhabited by cruel people who take pleasure from causing you pain and hurt, and you are alone and no one loves you and no one ever will. Well, if you did not, congratulations, I am very happy that you were saved from the abyss of mental, emotional and spiritual breakdowns. I did have this stage though, and I am grateful for it (although to be frank or Nadine, whichever you prefer, for the majority of my life I hated who I was because I wasn’t aware that I actually have no idea who I was, as I had become who I was expected to be, but then also not quite what my family wanted, and also in the end, as it turns out, not what I wanted either… but that is a discourse for another blog).
What I am trying to say in too many words is that no matter what I voiced, it was not liked at home or at school. And this continued right up to the age of fourteen when I had my first best friend- school eased into the normal drama of boys and cruel teachers then, but it was heaven and haven because I had a friend, and soon more. At home it got worse though. As a rule of thumb I’d say that from the first two decades of living I learned that I was bad at communication, worse at being a balanced and lovely person, could do nothing right, and would better be advised to stay hidden, maybe seen as that is unavoidable, but rather not heard. No one would understand me anyway. What I have to say has no worth, no sense and is the cause of disharmony and pain.
Then we have the stage making up a bit more than the last decade of my life where I discovered that, oh, all I have learned so far might have been toxic and, oh my, I should maybe let all of me shatter, pick up the pieces and assemble as needed, wished, reassemble and redefine, a bit of glue here and there and, who would have known I actually have a knack for talking and getting my message across?
And here we are, in the glorious age of livestreams where I am able to stream my stream of thought daily and enjoy being seen. Well, not really seen yet, but it will come. I want to be the conversation starter. I want to ask all the questions people do not want to hear as it enables growth and self-empowerment and more growth!
Because I know these questions hurt but they need to be asked, they make sense, and because that is what I came here to do. Point it where it hurts, so that you can experience the bliss of a trigger and grow from it.
Big words?
Yes, I am done playing it small.
(Although a rather small voice in my head is actually right now saying that if I will not ‘make’ it in a couple of months time then I might be playing it small again, if I wish to or not, but for now we will gladly ignore this little voice and talk about the important big stuff!).
I start the conversation by stating that this week I have learned the magic of conversation as being present within the active listening to your inner world.
What does that mean?
Let me give you a story that is aiming at making sense of what I say.
This last week I was attending a zoom meeting with other people, initiated by a woman that has the vision of enabling business owners to fully step into their brand by dis- , re- and uncovering all the layers that usually lie between the physical world of building a brand and the metaphysical (emotional, mental or spiritual) world of stepping into your power and bringing your unique gift, the very thing that makes your brand unique and be of service to the world, to light.
She is my new role model, she sets a standard I want to work toward!
Brilliant, right?!
In this meeting we talked about abundance and found out how abundance means so many different things to so many different people. Not so surprising. What came next was me being triggered into the core of the old wound:
You shall not be heard, nor will you ever be understood!
It was my turn to explore the topic and I stated, as was the situation, that I have the absolute freedom to dedicate each of my heart projects a day per week, due to no projects that are paid, I work on my own vision and having this total freedom of time and creativity is a new experience that blows my mind and how I am genuinely surprised how content I am. True, I do not have freedom of space or location because of my finances, still, I said, I cannot explain it but I feel abundant, whole, fulfilled. To my monologue another participant wanted to respond and what she said did confuse me, and a couple of others that voiced that confusion as well. She said she experienced a drop of energy just now about all this talk to be happy without money and, personally, she had been there and is strict about not wanting to invite any thought, energy or memory of that time back inot her life and focus on financial abundance without any of that talk about a no money flowing life can also be abundant.
What hurt me most was that she had experienced a drop in the frequency, in the vibration and energy I put out into that virtual room. Never since my recovery, and in truth not since my teens, had anyone outside of my family ever described me as someone who emanates low energy. In the last 8 years, certainly the last 5 years, all I every heard was how I raise the energy, how I am positive and how I am able to bring so much enthusiasm to people sharing my visions.
(Yes, we can talk about toxic positivity and the trap I too fell into, only another time, hit me up, you have my socials!).
I felt the air press out of my lungs, my breast contracting, no fresh air coming in, my eyes burning with tears that wanted to surface, my hands cold and sweaty, a knife in the back of my neck and the reverberating echoes of eons past, that I will never be understood and am unable to communicate clearly my meaning, suddenly manifested in this voice of a participant.
Yes, I held it together, I am a conditioned adult after all! But the sensation was too big and too intense to brush aside.
After the meeting I went for a walk, I couldn’t get out of the zoom fast enough.
Not even the other confused faces and answers eased my pain.
Then something magical happened.
The collected, combined effort of nearly 10 years of self development took a hold of me and I turned the whole ship around.
First, I sincerely allowed myself to experience the emotion. While growing up I never allowed myself the acknowledgement that I was entitled to having feelings, that they are valid and that how they describe my world is a sign of boundaries violated and need to be expressed. I let myself be hurt and sad then and there, to stop this vicious cycle of repeated old thought patterns that press me into a corset of imaginary societal expectations and family conditioning.
Pretty fast then, I was able to take a second step. And a rush of images and memories resurfaced of countless times where I had felt exactly as I had felt in that virtual room. That took about ten minutes as floods of pictures and snippets of situations took over and the tears welled and the pain was palpable throughout my upper body. I was still moving though, on my walk, in the woods, and I wasn’t going to care what people would think of me, I knew this was important.
Then, a shift happened. As I was accepting in those scenes, holding space for this fragment of myself that felt so triggered and never before heard, held and hugged, a sentence emerged from the dark below, also known as subconscious:
Wait a minute, you are the parent now!
And this epiphany popped up as though it was nothing, the impact it had was instantaneous. The tears subsided, a smile started to spread over my entire face, I felt so free and nurtured and … well, lovingly responsible for such a precious gem, even though, of course, said gem was me. This experience was so profound that words cannot do it justice. In an instant none of the physical indications of emotional and mental hurt were there anymore. I stood up straight, I felt light. The presence of this fragment of hurt was still there, but within I had built a connection. I was able to soothe, and promise to honour the pain, and at the same time was able to establish a trusted bond. I was the parent. I would see to it that no more pain would come, that it was safe.
Does it make sense?
I was blown away.
The person that I so badly wanted to point a finger at for causing me pain, had actually given me a gift. Life happens for us, not to us.
She had shown me not only where my flesh was still an open, infested wound that had not healed over yet, so to speak, and where I could step into self-responsibility and accountability to start treatment by first bringing awareness to it and then tending to it in the most gentle and kind way. She had also presented me with an even deeper insight.
By my first reaction, as a toddler would, unperturbed by what people could think and still blissfully unaware that all he or she is might be rejected by behaving in an unwanted way, I was bound to scream out and throw back all the energy I suddenly had found within my field, supposedly provoked by her painful remark. My logical brain then came to a conclusion.
Wouldn’t I do the very same thing that had been done to me time and time again, years and years, to her if I followed my first instinct of refusing to taking up what emerged within me and instead throwing it right back at her face?
If I was under the impression that her reaction was inadequate because what she described is wholly untrue and on top of that disrespectful, hurtful and causing me pain, wouldn’t I then discard her truth?
She felt a drop in energy, yes. That doesn’t mean that drop was caused by me though.
Merely my words made her notice something that triggered her, which led to her saying something that triggered me. And within this beautiful dance of mirroring each other, I had reacted as though she had sent a volleyball flying straight at my head, on purpose. However, she threw nothing, in reality, there was neither a match nor a ball. What had made contact with me were emotions I suppressed because of my specific point of view, my brand of upbringing, my flavour of belief systems and thought patterns. These feelings resurfaced while my brain was decoding the words that came from her through my ears, to be immediately interpreted by my emotional response, causing a physical sensation. My words had done the same thing to her, however, I had as little intended to throw a volleyball at her head, as I am sure she had intended to throw one on mine.
I saw it so clearly. So crystal clear. The beauty of it. The gift that opens up.
Imagine a world where instead of pointing fingers at others, we start pointing fingers at ourselves. At the spot on our body where we feel the sensation, name the emotion we experience and trace it back to when we first felt it in our lives and how it had, up until now, a tight grasp on us too. But not anymore. We see it, we accept it, we appreciate it for how it contributed to us being where we are now, and us being in a position where we can now take care of our own inner world, and with unconditional love re-integrate this part into our whole-ness.
Imagine this!
BOOM, mic drop - mind is blown, right?
So, what I witnessed was the magic of conversation. Where we are allowed to get triggered by something, but are mature and, more importantly, loving abundantly to hold the energy and space and the field to go within, talk about what we experience there, and integrate holistically. And this, my beloved souls, is the core of what I want to do. The essence of why I want to talk to people one on one. Again and again this week, I experienced variations of this same abundance of magic within open hearted, open minded, open souled conversation. I am starting a conversation. Because conversation is pure magic.
Isn’t it said that we are in this together, this thing, called life and Earth?
Isn’t it real that we do not need to like everyone, but we could start with those we know, like and love.
Isn't it true we would want to be both vessel and liquid for them. Be able to hold the space for integration for them but also be held in the space of integration by them.
Life happens for us, not to us.
Be kind to yourself, be kind to others.
Shine your light, maybe someone needs to be triggered by you :)
No, I mean it, maybe that is how we should view it from this point on forward: Maybe I needed to be triggered, what is it about? Maybe they needed to be triggered, can I assist for growth? It is an exchange of gifts, a dance of presence and awareness.
It's magic.
With all my heart, from my little corner of the world to yours,
All my love and light
Nadine
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