psyche Archives - Julianne Harvey

In Books, Identity, Personal Growth, Spiritual Life

The Untethered Soul

Julianne HarveyMarch 8, 2016March 7, 2016Leave a comment

I just read The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer (thank you, Pam, for the recommendation!). The book blew my mind. As I turned each page, I felt something in my cells and molecules shift and rearrange. Reading it was a holy, beautiful experience.

Singer’s basic premise is this: we are not our psyche. We should be sitting in the seat of awareness; observing what happens, but not being personally involved with it. He talks about how energy is designed to move through us, but we block this healthy process by storing unpleasant emotions and they remain trapped inside of us. This keeps us living in the past, bound up inside by negative energy and fears.

He offers a better way: to feel emotions or notice thoughts as they come, but then relax your shoulders, breathe deep, and choose to let them pass through you. It’s just energy, and not personal to us (even if it may feel personal). This practice helps us learn to live in the present moment instead of remaining fixated on events from years ago or anxiety about what could go wrong in the future.

I’ve been practicing this and I’m utterly amazed at the difference in how present I feel in any given moment. Life is not meant to be taken so personally. Shit will continue to happen to us. Small and large energy shifts will occur in us, where we feel unsettled, afraid, joyful, optimistic or angry. We can notice these feelings and name them, but the key is to let them go so they don’t stay trapped inside of us.

The same is true with thoughts. Our racing, fevered minds can get us into all kinds of trouble, but we don’t have to engage with the rabbit-trail our thoughts want to lead us on. We can simply observe the thought, “Oh man, I forgot to pick up the dry-cleaning and where in the world did I put that receipt I need for my taxes and the car needs more windshield washer fluid…” and then choose to let it go.

We are much more than our minds or our emotions. We have a higher consciousness, and it can only help to free us if we move beyond the confines of our frenzied thoughts and hyper-sensitive feelings.

The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself has offered me a new set of skills to practice. Whenever I start to feel worried or disturbed by the incessant chatter in my brain, I can observe from my seat of awareness and then allow the energy to pass through me. I don’t want anxiety about the dry cleaners or taxes or windshield washer fluid trapped inside of me for the rest of my days. No thank you!

I’m looking for peace and beauty and inspiration, not a prison of drudgery to whatever stress my mind or emotions can dream up for me. Making a conscious effort to be aware of my thoughts and feelings has anchored me to the present moment in an entirely fresh and real way. I love it. I’m so grateful for this brilliant book and recommend it to anyone and everyone.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, Writing

I Am Enough

Julianne HarveyFebruary 23, 2016February 21, 2016Leave a comment

I made a list of things I wanted to let go of in 2016. At the top of the list was this: my deep-seated fear that I am not enough.

I had no idea when I wrote that how massive the reverberations would be in my psyche from the earthquake this would cause. We’re seven weeks in to this new year, and expressing a willingness to work on this hidden area of shame and being less-than has cratered my life.

The explosion is the worst. It blows all of your security and coping mechanisms apart. You are left with nothing safe or familiar. You feel naked, exposed, stupid, alienated. You think you cannot survive what just happened, but then something miraculous occurs: you do.

Getting at wounds that feel primal takes a herculean effort at courage. We want to scatter, like rats or cockroaches, as soon as the light touches the poorly-healed scar. Our deepest and darkest secrets reside in these places. The pain is staggering, fresh, overwhelming. The first instinct is to run; to put as much distance as possible between you and the hurt, to throw everyone else off the scent by summoning every trick in our arsenal to show that we are the opposite of our greatest fear.

But if we don’t run, something remarkable happens to us and in us. We stare it down. In my case, I saw that over the course of my life, I’ve developed healthier skills that helped me face the anguish I’d been running from.

Just because I felt less-than doesn’t mean I am less-than. I could prove, to myself, that I am more successful than I’ve been allowing myself to take credit for. While staring into this stinking abyss of not being good enough, I saw that I already had what I needed to be happy, fulfilled and optimistic. It was already there. Now the task was to claim it, to hold it in my hand, to cease striving for someone else to give it to me and simply be enough exactly as I am in this moment.

It all had to fall to shit before I could see it clearly. I had to risk losing everything and everyone to see how much I already had. This one has been a muddy, long slog. No one else was responsible for my own sense of worth. This was on me. I had to feel the sting of the shame and the fear in order to stare it down and come out safely on the other side. And damn, was it a solitary and terrifying journey, but the other side is as wide open as the prairies.

I’m free in this new landscape. I own my choices, my value, my soul, my fresh belief that I am enough and always have been. But worrying about what came before is a fool’s errand and I’m done being foolish. I can only move on from here and live out of this place of truth and beauty, where forgiveness finally exists for myself as much as for anyone else.

It will be less lonely now, for I can choose whom to invite into this new reality – the one where I am enough, simply because I breathe, and not because I’m terrified to show you just how hard I’m working to prove my worth to you. Those days are gone and it all looks so different now.

Our inside reality determines how we experience everything. I’m not setting my value now in a hypothetical sense. This is finally real, part of my daily experience, and I’m not handing this gift to anyone now. It’s mine, I own it, and I’m going to treat it much better from this point forward.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Relationships

Brick Wall

Julianne HarveyNovember 3, 2015October 30, 2015Leave a comment

Do you ever find yourself going along your merry way, fairly happy and peaceful, when suddenly BAM! a brick wall comes out of nowhere and smacks you in the face?

I could do without this. I’m doing my daily soul work: holding important relationship boundaries, looking inside to see where I might be veering off course or doing too much for others, checking in with my feelings, handling the mundane busywork of living. And then, that brick wall. It could be an email, a piece of unexpected news, a distracted spouse, a schedule that doesn’t allow for rest or reflection, a word or a look that is easily misinterpreted.

Emotional brick walls are land mines – you never know when they are going to trigger an explosion. When my reaction is ten times bigger than the situation calls for, I know I’ve stepped on some unhealed wound from childhood. The further back it goes, the deeper its hold on our psyche.

The pain is similar to what you would get if you ran full-tilt into a brick wall or if a bomb exploded under you. It causes panic and fear and chaos. The crappy part is that no one can see this. Only you. And most of the scabs that get torn from our childhood hurts involve our biggest questions around identity and value. We feel internal agony, and pretty soon we are asking, “Am I good enough? Do I matter at all?”

When I was a kid, I walked on eggshells, all day and all night. Under these broken eggs were many undetonated land mines. Most of this had nothing to do with me – it was my parents’ garbage, brought in from their damaged childhoods and given to me as a legacy. But I didn’t know that then. My coping mechanism was to disappear into other people. When an issue came up, I took responsibility for it and fixed it, even if I wasn’t even involved in it.

This destructive habit of caretaking has plagued me for my whole existence. Deciding to shed it was both the best and worst thing I’ve ever done. The best because it finally meant I could look after myself. It gave me options; the choice to let another person manage their own life instead of me doing it for them. But it was the worst because it stripped me of everything I hung my value on. It hollowed me out. If I wasn’t fixing everyone else’s problems, what in the world was I good for? I was nothing, no one, utterly useless without this stressful busy work of bleeding into everyone else’s pain.

I have better skills now. But every so often, that brick wall materializes and I am terrified of all those unexploded land mines. Am I really enough, just as I am, or do I have to hustle harder to prove I deserve a spot at the table? This endless longing to be loved for who I am and not for what I can do ties me up in knots every damn time.

It boils down to this: does unconditional love really win or am I searching for more gold stars for my behaviour chart? I must feel the pain of everything I cannot control, absorb the sadness of the losses I have sustained, and then bravely decide to get back on my feet and keep going. There are no shortcuts in soul work. We have to keep walking, even when it’s dark and scary and we are all alone, and hope that soon we’ll be on the other side and can finally understand the lesson we were meant to learn.