Key Idea #1 - Awareness

I was lucky enough to spend time tonight with a good friend, someone who I feel really gets me (and the feeling is mutual) so I feel like I can say anything. I offered to get out my cards so she could pull some if she wanted, and she did. It was her first time using oracle or tarot decks, and she asked me for my thoughts on them. And I told her what I like best about cards is they can help us with what I think is a key to growth and happiness and all that good stuff: Awareness.

Over the past couple of years as I've been on my path of healing, utilizing books, courses, therapy, energy work, plant medicines. and other resources, I have seen and experienced over and over again the way that Awareness unlocks the gates. We hobble together a way of being in the world from the time we enter it. What helps us feel safe? What feels good? What pokes our pain and how can we avoid that? Many (most?) of us don't have great templating from our parents, so too often our choices of what to do are more of a "Not that," than a "That works." So we develop a way of being in the world that is perhaps largely based on minimizing pain. We engage our brains with the task of helping us avoid pain, so it can chew on that pretty much constantly as by the time we reach adulthood, we tend to have a lot of things that we think could cause us pain. We have programmed ourselves to think, believe, and do certain things. But because it's part of our programming, we don't question it. Most of the time, we don't even notice it.

I was first introduced to the idea of cognitive distortions while reading the book Feeling Good by David Burns a few years ago. If you don't know what cognitive distortions are, you can google them or you can check out this overview. I learned about them and thought about how many of them I engage in on a daily basis. Shoulds. Global labeling. Catastrophizing. Blaming. Sheesh. The very idea that my thinking could be distorted was kind of a game changer on its own. Our society values the intellect pretty much above everything else, yet NO ONE had ever told me the pitfalls I should be watching out for. Well, thanks for nothing. So this was a very powerful lesson in the power of awareness. Once I knew what to look for, I could push back against these distortions and lessen their power. I hadn't known they were a problem because they were such a ubiquitous part of my internal landscape.

While working with my therapist, she coached me to notice where in my body my anxiety would show up. I'd never even thought to notice that before. When I found by observing and noticing that my anxiety usually shows up strongest in my throat, and it feels like both a blockage and a tightening simultaneously, and that I also tend to hold my breath when I'm especially anxious, that awareness unlocked a gate. I could now walk down the path of mindful engagement with my anxiety. I could look at it as a thing that was happening, as opposed to feeling like I was completely surrounded and helpless. If I noticed the throat closing or blockage sensations starting, now I could think, "Ah, yes, that's where my anxiety shows up. Oh man, yeah, I'm feeling pretty anxious. Also holding my breath. This is uncomfortable." Awareness of what was going on with my body when the anxiety was rampaging through my mind was the key to knowing that I could handle it. I started to notice when it would start up, and I also noticed when it would start to subside. And I could even utilize a tool like box breathing to calm my body which would then calm my mind. But without Awareness, there wasn't anything I could do. I would just continue to be a victim of anxiety whenever it showed.up.

When David and I started on Jennifer Finlayson-Fife's Strengthening Your Relationship course, one of the first things she covers is Losing Relational Strategies. It might seem counterintuitive. In a course on strengthening your relationship, we're starting out learning about the things that don't work? But it was exactly the right approach. She also talks about how most of us come by our losing strategies honestly, they were probably modeled for us growing up. Much marriage advice consists of things that you should do, but you can't layer that stuff on a bad foundation and have any real progress. Awareness of your go-to losing relational strategies allows you to open the gate to go down the pathway of trying something different. But without that awareness, you're stuck.

Even in spite of Americans' esteem of rugged individualism, I think many of us struggle to tap into our our own intuition and trust ourselves. We want something outside of us to tell us what to do. When I was a kid, I heard more than once, "Stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about." So repressing difficult emotions became second nature to me. Just pack that up and deal with it....never. (If only!) If this is our approach, anytime life isn't smooth and happy, we just get stuck. We feel bad, and we feel bad about feeling bad, but we don't have the words or the awareness to do anything about it. Tools like an emotional wheel or body scanning can start us down a path of engaging with our challenging emotions with curiosity rather than fear. And we can develop an expertise of recognizing and navigating how emotions show up for us. We can be our own authority.

So when we pull a card from an oracle or tarot deck, or a rune, or use numerology or consult your zodiac, or take a personality test (my favorite one) or use enneagrams, doing a crystal reading, we are trying to use a tool to help us have more awareness. The questions of what is going on with me, what can I not see that's getting in my way, how can I get unstuck; are all questions that can lead us to greater awareness, and any tools that can help with that are good tools. There is a lot of wisdom inside each of us. We just need to know how to open the gate.