I’m taking a break today from sharing my top ten series. While I’m so excited to share that series and all the huge changes I’ve made in my life this year, doing absolutely anything in a sequential, pre-determined manner just kills my creativity.
I commit to these things in my head, and then the day comes to do the writing, and I’m like, “But what if I want to write about something else?” Can anyone else relate? I find it boring, boring, boring.
Today, I finally wanted to finish editing the fifth post in the series titled “Oops. I accidentally didn’t exercise for ten years.” It’s already written, and it’s excellent content. But whatever. I have something more exciting to share.
These past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing twelve months of my Awareness Journal. The Awareness Journal is a guided, daily journaling practice that I created just over a year ago after thinking about it for 18 months. I wanted a practice to help me recognise my patterns and create deep change in how I think, feel and go through life.
My Awareness Journal. My anchor.
I can’t find the words to describe how powerful it has been for me to commit to ONE daily practice and make space for it. I’ve learned so much about discipline, taking small steps and momentum through the last twelve months of practice.
I’ve also had many realisations about myself that continue to pile up. Through my reviewing, I’m taking notes whenever I see an “ah-ha” moment in my practice, and I’ve already accumulated about 300 huge, life-shattering realisations about myself and how I operate. (This is just in the nine months I’ve already processed.)
These range from anything as basic as noticing I sleep less around the full moon and generally have at least one night of insomnia to recognising that when I wake up in the morning, I almost always have one of four thoughts – they barely deviate.
For those that are interested, they are: 1) I’m so tired. I don’t have any energy. 2) What time is it, and what do I have to DO today? 3) Poor me, this thing happened, and I’m a victim of my circumstances and 4) Oh no. I did something wrong yesterday that I shouldn’t do, and now I feel bad.
None are empowering. None are true. None determine how my day goes anymore. They’ve completely lost their power over me.
But I digress. I also noticed that when I started the practice, I experienced negative emotions 75% of the time. When that figure dropped to 53% in the second month, I was hoping to see the trajectory continue. It was my wish that, eventually, I would just fail to experience negative emotions – I’m talking fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, grief, guilt, shame, etc.
However, that’s not what the ‘data’ showed. Instead, I have recapped nine months of practice and still note that I’m experiencing negative emotions on 47% of days.
It’s been so interesting doing the ‘pattern tracking’ of the last twelve months of practice.
Upon realising this, I had a moment of thinking, “Well, if this isn’t going to FIX my emotional state, then what’s the point of it.”
That’s my inner critic at work – that unhelpful voice in my head, also known as my thoughts or ego.
When I sat with that thought, I recognised it for what it was – not fact – and explored the results of my practice deeper.
My nervous system has dramatically improved since starting the practice. From being in dysregulated nervous system states (Fight or Flight/ Freeze) 89% of the time, I’m now only dysregulated around 20% of the time. Through my Awareness and changed habits, I have gone from full-on adrenal fatigue to peace. I cannot stress enough what this change has meant to me.
Being in fight or flight or even Freeze isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The body’s nervous system exists for a reason. It is autonomous, meaning it operates without our conscious Awareness, and it is designed to protect us from threats. Yay! I hope my nervous system is in excellent working order if I ever need to run from a would-be assaulter.
There’s an argument that our nervous systems were never designed to live with the amount of content, stimulus and perceived threat that our current lifestyle provides, and that is entirely valid and a different email entirely.
But what I want to share here is that the nervous system is rarely the problem. The problem is the MEANING we attach to the feeling.
Humans do nothing BUT attach meaning to things. It’s how we operate, the ego’s job, and determines our perspective of the world.
Attaching meaning to things creates our belief system, which impacts our behaviour and how we show up in the world. How we show up in the world creates our reality. It’s the core of creation/ manifestation. Whatever you want to call it.
That’s right, your life is not an accident or a collection of circumstances outside your control. It all happened energetically because of the beliefs you hold about yourself and your place in the world. These beliefs were mostly inherited or formed when you were young from the emotionally immature generation that came before ours.
For example, I have a long-held core belief that I am stupid. It used to be entirely subconscious. Nowadays, it is conscious, but it still trips me up now and again.
Because of this ridiculous belief that I formed when I was four years old after I drowned, I have spent much of my life detached from my intuition and believing in the word of experts over my inner knowing.
I’ve also kept myself deliberately small, so I’ll never be exposed as a fraud!! Haha. How has this played out? Exactly as intended. I’ve been fearful of showing up as the weird, fully expressed, flawed version of myself. (Well, until I started writing these emails anyway.)
Further to how we humans attach meaning to things, I have come to understand that we each have our own distinct pattern of thoughts and emotions attached to our personal dysregulated nervous system states.
When I am slightly activated in fight or flight, I notice that I start to experience the emotion of anxiety. With the double deal combo of fight or flight + anxiety, my thoughts generally lead me down a familiar path. It goes something like this:
“What do I have to do? I’ll never do everything that I have to do. I’m a failure. I’m never going to get what I want out of life. I don’t have enough time. I’m a washed up has been. I’ve peaked. There’s no way I can do it all. It’s impossible.”
Generally, throughout that experience, my mind will be racing, and I’ll pile a tonne of shit onto my schedule and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, I can’t do it all; it’s too much, and I’m literally in a state of arousal (fight or flight) that prohibits executive function and rational thought.
Perceived overwhelm goes through the roof. I can’t slow down enough to regulate. The thoughts continue to feed the emotion, and the emotion in my body continues to keep me dysregulated, and vice versa.
My dysregulated nervous system creates an experience in my body that stimulates anxiety, and the sensation of anxiety triggers the patterned thoughts. The experience is annoying and heartbreakingly familiar. I’ve been in this pattern for most of my life. I call it a loop.
(Though, through using my Awareness Journal, I’m finally getting unstuck from it, and real change is happening!)
This pattern, or loop, has been one of the biggest ones I’ve tackled since starting my Awareness Journal. But on the weekend, almost thirteen months into the practice, I learned something VERY interesting. And I wonder how true this is for others. (I suspect it’s very true.)
On Saturday last week, I passed out during Breathwork. I literally passed out on the beach by myself during my morning practice.
A screengrab of my Saturday morning breathwork practice.
I was filming myself at the time. Afterwards, I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, so I reviewed the footage in the car, and sure enough, I collapsed like a sack of potatoes. I even let out a strange sigh as I went down.
And down I go.
At first, I felt utterly exhilarated. Passing out has been one of my greatest fears during my breathwork practice, and I have faced it and survived. I felt like there was nothing left on this earth to frighten me.
But behind the exhilaration was a tiny seed of doubt. And a quiet little voice started to whisper – “You idiot. What do you think you were doing? You can’t even practice Breathwork properly. You think you can just follow your intuition and do this practice, but you don’t know anything. Stupid. Idiot.”
And then a conversation with a friend made me feel even smaller. My thoughts spiralled further, “Who did I think I was? I could have killed myself. I have small children to think about. What kind of ridiculous 43-year-old passes out on the beach? I don’t even know how to breathe. What kind of a fuck up am I?”
I pushed it all to the side, went to bed as always and woke up the following day feeling … off.
I didn’t allow myself the space to think about it. Urgh, who wants to go THERE? However, my disciplined practice of filling out my Awareness Journal was upon me, and I had no chance but to face my demons.
The first thing I recognised was that my nervous system was in a state of Freeze. For those who know polyvagal theory, Freeze comes after fight or flight as arousal continues to rise. First, our nervous system readies us to fight or flee for our lives, and then it shuts down our main functions and makes us very small in the hopes that the threat will pass us by.
It took me a little while to recognise that I was in Freeze. I can recognise fight or flight in an instant these days. And I can recognise freeze when it is on the tail end of a super overwhelming experience – like grocery shopping (I’m not joking; I believe grocery shopping is one of the most overstimulating things we do as modern humans.) Since I hadn’t been grocery shopping at 6 AM on a Sunday morning and felt calm in my body – not heightened and flighty – I almost overlooked it.
Then I took a peep at my little polyvagal chart and recognised that, although I was calm, I was also completely shut down. There was a downward energy in my body and a disconnection. My heart rate was slow. My limbs felt sluggish. I was cold. And sad.
I kept journaling. I listened to the voice in my head, its whispers. I realised that what I was feeling was shame. My old story about being stupid had raised its head. I felt like my friend, who I shared with, thought I was a stupid idiot and shuddered to imagine what she thought of me.
A snippet of my practice on Saturday morning. I wrote, “at first I felt exhilarated for facing a fear, but this morning I’m feeling fearful and stupid.”
Shame differs from guilt. Guilt is the feeling of ‘I feel bad because of something I did’. Shame is the feeling of ‘I feel bad because of who I am.’
As I journaled, I allowed the shame to be present. I didn’t try to push it to the side or intellectualise it. I allowed shame to flood my body. As I finalised my practice and went for my dip, I emerged freezing cold. I started to shudder with cold. I sat down to do my Breathwork (jumped back on the horse), and instead of breathing, my body just wanted to shake. So I let it.
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t shivering from the cold. I was convulsing. My body, mainly my chest, was rhythmically convulsing, tremouring and shuddering. And this went on for half an hour. I know because I was filming.
Finally, I reached a point of completion of this physical expression of shame and left the beach for my Sunday morning market shop. I was still disconnected at the start of my shop, but a lovely moment of connection and eye contact with one of my favourite stallholders broke me out of my internal experience.
After that, I went home and had a very slow and leisurely morning, and by the afternoon, I was feeling so at peace in myself and my body that I had transmuted my shame into love, joy, and gratitude.
I wondered, are shame and Freeze connected for others? Is that why so many people feel so powerless to move? To pursue their dreams? To express themselves the way they crave? Is this sense of inadequacy that we all carry, and the avoidance of feeling it, the main pattern, or loop, that many of us spend our lives in?
Huge questions.
I don’t have anything to feel ashamed of. I’ve been practicing Breathwork for ten months, mostly by myself, and I’m mostly untrained. What Breathwork has given me through a connection to my soul cannot be explained in words. Breathwork is one of the main practices that I attribute to the deep sense of love, trust, and peace I spend most days feeling. And why my nervous system is so much more robust.
Yes. I passed out. And I learned from it. Pro tip: don’t deliberately hyperventilate after three rounds of Breathwork with very long, deep breath holds on the exhale.
But you know what? I am out there doing the uncomfortable thing. I’m pushing myself, my body and my limits behind what I thought I was capable of. And when we allow ourselves to be uncomfortable, miracles happen.
I consider my passing out and my friend’s concern to be one of the greatest gifts from this year of practising Awareness. The link between shame and Freeze is going to allow me to recognise when I’m in it with even more regularity and consistency. This means I can feel, acknowledge, and let go of shame faster and get back to a beautiful state.
In a beautiful state, I am present, embodied, grateful, connected and filled with love. I’m a better partner, mother and friend. I can show up more in the world and live out my purpose.
Shame, as with anxiety and any of those other emotions we try to avoid, is just there to deliver a message and move on. Feeling safe in shame and giving myself permission to shudder and convulse on the beach for half an hour was my honour.
So, no. I’m not disappointed that my Awareness Journal practice hasn’t stopped me from feeling negative emotions. Negative emotions will always be there. The world is full of polarity. Darkness and light. Yin and yang. Masculine and feminine. An inhale and an exhale. Day and night. Full moon and new moon. Love and fear.
You cannot have the light without the dark. And how sweet the light is when you’ve walked through the dark.
What is more powerful to me is that my practice has allowed me the space to FEEL the full spectrum of my emotions. When we avoid the uncomfortable ones, we shut down all of them.
Do you have any idea how much more capacity I had to love my children after loving myself in that moment of shame?
Sunday afternoon. Satiated, spent and expressed. Out with the kids.
Don’t be afraid to feel. Through feeling, you will find yourself. And trust and safety in your body NO MATTER WHAT.
I love you.
Lauren X
**Originally published to my email database on the 14th of October, 2024**
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