Towards Being Human

A woman yelled at me today at a bus stop.

She approached me and pushed me hard telling me to stand up from where I was sitting and move. She was mentally unwell, bigger than me in size, and I was scared. As I write, I still have the image of her leaning over me, her big dark eyes swirling wildly, wide toothless mouth wide open, belching out the raging words. A few moments earlier, I had seen her following and screaming at a man, who seemed quite frightened and disoriented too.

I noticed myself wanting to find a way to ease her distress, while having no idea how to do it. I said: “you seem very upset”. And then – “I am a little frightened of you”. It felt off. She kept screaming. I was looking at her silently, not moving - trying to find something stable inside myself to stay in compassion and presence. Then my bus arrived and I got on it, while she was still screaming, having now turned to someone else.

As I got on a bus, I took a deep breath and let some tears flow. I wanted to honour my experience and the impact of what happened - also the part of me that wanted to be strong and make things good, and failed.

This self-soothing movement wasn’t easy – my thoughts were racing along the lines of me having attracted the situation into my reality, because I had been struggling with finding a sense of being rooted in gratitude and inspiration in the last few days. “You have been crap at doing your inner work - now see what you are creating outside of yourself”.

There were also other self-blaming thoughts about having fallen into the rescuer role yet again, while what I should have done was to distance myself or find my roots and match her energy in standing my ground, whatever that could mean. These thoughts were painful and difficult to accept. I wanted them away.

I started to feel myself being sucked into the same vortex of pain and despair I saw in this woman’s eyes.

And then I found my pivot. A very simple one, yet foundational to all the approaches I value.

“Say yes to it”. I said to myself. “Say yes to this experience”.

“Say yes to all of it.”

And so I did - started by looking around and saying yes to everything I saw on the bus – the blue seat patterns, the bright yellow handles, the speckled windows, the kaleidoscopic landscape outside the window.

Something in me started to settle.

Then I directed my YES-infused attention to the people sitting and standing around me. The frowns and the smiles, the different shapes and postures, the gazes, present and absent, the details of the clothes, the hairdos, the voices– I was saying yes to what I saw with an intention to really acknowledge that things are exactly as they need to be, in their right shape and place.

Precious just as they are.

“Human experience” – I said to myself. “We all know pain and suffering. We all know confusion and fogginess. We all know fear and rage. We all know losing it. We all know failure and wanting to do more than we can. And we also all know love, and joy, and dreams, and grace, and gratitude, and connection. All of it. Feeling or not feeling any of it in the moment, doesn’t take from us, doesn’t make us more or less.”

Each of the people I looked at, seemed whole and in possession of a unique life story and experience that made them who they are and brought them to where they were this morning. I had a thought that each of them was deserving a book, or rather an infinite number of books and movies - written and shot in their name.

It was so obvious.

And as I was saying yes to them - all of who they are, I felt something shifting in me again - like I could see the reality of being more clearly. There was a sense of joyful glimmering in my chest.

At some point, I felt that I could also direct that same glimmering gaze to myself. To all of my experience, including my self-blaming thoughts, my fear, my self-protective mechanisms, my sense of contraction and wanting to leave my body – and also my values, my longings and my aspiration to stay present with the suffering.

“I am just a human, having a human experience – and it’s all very simple. Nothing to resolve, understand or figure out. I don’t yet know what this story with the screaming woman means to me, but I can explore it and weave the meaning out of it in a way that serves me – and others.”

At this point, I felt inspired – and this is how this text was born.

DID YOU KNOW THAT STUCKNESS IS AN ENERGETIC GOLD MINE?

It comes again. This feeling. Of wanting and not being able to write, of feeling stuck, voice-less. That’s how I used to feel for most of my life. Ashamed. Not having much to say, not having a voice. And also, simultaneously knowing that I have SO MUCH to say, that I have been gifted a unique voice that can touch people. I could never get that split. I felt confused by it.

And now, that confusion comes up again, and feels real as fuck. And I hear the story running alongside it: I’ve invested so much time and energy into all these trainings, programmes, healings and self-help groups and what not…

Yet here I am, again, feeling stuck. I manage to catch this story in my mind while it’s still a seed and hasn’t yet grown into a dense forest of self-doubt and shame.

Now that I’ve caught it,I know I am at a choice point. This is when I can decide what to do next, what practice to choose.

Image by Fernando Kokubun

“It’s just not flowing”, close the notebook, go read more self-help and gain more mental knowledge. Which is okay and it’s also would mean me practising that what I have tons of experience with – feeling disempowered, telling myself a story that I can’t do anything about it. This practice has taken me so far in life.

Or I can choose something else.

To work with this stuckness in this present moment, move with it, use its HUGE energetic potential, alchemising it into something life-affirming and aligned with my purpose of guiding other beautiful human beings back home, towards their power, inspiration and joy.

By the way, did you know that stuckness contains a huge amount of energy? Have you ever been told that if you find the right key, you can actually channel that energy in the way that serves you and what you want to create in your life?

I wasn’t taught that - I had no idea that that’s how it actually works. I used to think of stuckness as a very passive state. Low energy, no charge, no fire. I was so wrong! From the neurobiological perspective, stuckness is a form of a collapse – there is a huge amount of energy in the system, but most of it is spent on keeping the motion in one place, of shutting the body down.

One beautiful alchemical recipe that I have discovered – nourish yourself with plenty of self-compassion and then take action in the chosen direction, letting go of the outcome.

How does it look in practice? Just before I wrote this post that’s what I did: I hugged myself. I caressed my face, I stroked my hair, I gently held my left (feminine) hand with my right hand.

Then I spoke to my inner child very softly: "I hear your doubts. I see that you are feeling scared. It's ok, sweetheart. I love you, regardless of your state. I am here and it doesn’t matter to me how well you will do out there, no matter how you are received, my love is always there to catch you, no matter how many times you fall. You and your joy are my utmost priority.

I repeated it a few times, until I started to feel that my body was softening and relaxing.

And then I danced to some aggressive rap, imagining myself kicking the shit out of the programming I received from my environment. Smashing all those nasty beliefs that I took on as true. Especially that one: "I need to come up with perfect creative results and performances in order to be noticed and receive affection and appreciation". FUCK THAT. I was stomping my feet and kicking, kicking, kicking with my arms. Some of you may know I am not a fan of rap, but there are times when it can be just the perfect medicine :)

And then I sat down and this post just wrote itself, organically.

I hope it serves you, when you are struggling with feeling stuck and need a reminder that there is a different way of being with it and that “self-compassion + active movement” can be a very powerful combination when it comes to transforming the feeling of stuckness into something more flowing.

I also want to share that I would have been ashamed to share such intimate details of my process (especially about caressing my face or stomping my feet) in the past. But now I feel zero shame.

Self-soothing is what I teach people who I work with too, if they feel open for it. I teach them to care for those very tender, vulnerable parts of our psyche in some very tangible, physical ways that work for them. In the way that their nervous system recognises and responds well to.

And our nervous system responds best to gentle, loving touch. Amazing news - it doesn't matter if it comes from ourselves.

You can try it for yourself too, and if you do – let me know how it goes, what works and what doesn't - I’d love to hear how it went.

Also, if you feel that the stuckness you experience is deep-rooted and you might need some extra support with moving through it, I also offer 1-1 private sessions, where we can explore your experience in depth and look at what's standing in the way of the flow of your aliveness. Don't hesitate to reach out - I would love to support you.

Image by Jen

How to Find Joy in Challenging Circumstances with a Couple of Simple Reframes

Where is the source of your joy – inside or outside of you?

This is the question I asked myself this afternoon, having caught myself rolling my eyes and murmuring: ‘my oh my, there is not much joy in that, is there?’.

I was standing at the swimming pool’s entrance, blankly staring through the transparent glass wall at the crowded lanes. Lots of kids splashing and screaming, the two available adult lanes swarming with aggressively moving swimmers.

 I felt gutted and annoyed with myself. I had been wanting to go swimming for the whole day, and only managed to get myself out of my house after 6 pm. I knew full well that that’s the time when most people end their working day and go for their daily dose of exercise. I also had had the luxury of choosing to swim during the day, at a time when there is pretty much no one around. I so enjoy the quiet spaciousness of my experience, when I have the lane all to myself. I can contemplate, I can meditate, I can savour the slowness of my movement, I can experiment with different tempos, I can stretch my arms widely…And yet I made the choice I made. The slow and relaxed movement is not going to happen under these conditions. Now what?

Three different options sprang to mind. I could choose being gentle with myself, go home and try again some other time. I could choose to go swimming, because this was something I had already decided, so it had to be done - I would swim and resent myself and the world for how unpleasant the environment feels. And I could also experiment with making this different experience into something exciting and joyful. Without an expectation to succeed at having, but just with an attitude of giving it a try. Why not? Don’t I full-heartedly believe that the source of joy is within, not without? In that case, having fun in a crowded lane should be possible. At least in theory.

You can guess which option I chose. Yes, going home seemed quite tempting too. Yet I was craving some movement. And I also didn’t want to miss an opportunity to test my set of beliefs out – in real waters. I set an intention to love myself even if I fail to enjoy. I would praise myself for trying no matter what my experience ends up being. That commitment to self-love was a game changer. It took the pressure off and actually made my experience into a game. My mind now had an exciting task to play with. How can I turn anger and resentment into joy? How can I use this experience to give myself even more compassion and love?

I chose to use one of my favourite tools – working with the energy of “being gutted” in an embodied way. Expressing it through the way I swim. Aggressively push and kick with my legs, visualise the heat going out of my finger tips, puff out the energy of resentment, splash it out. Feel the waves of emotion move through my body with each and every stroke. Soon enough, the energy shifted and I felt a whole-bodied sense of aliveness. It felt pleasant. My heart felt light.

At the same time (in between the aggressive puffs!), I was also complimenting myself for the choice I was making. I was telling myself how proud I am of my commitment to growth and learning, no matter what. I was praising myself for making more and more conscious choices in my life, and noticing how good it feels.

I was also telling myself that I am practicing something really important right now – a set of skills that I can transfer into all areas of my life. I was practicing staying in my own centre, taking responsibility for my internal wellbeing, regardless of the external circumstances. I was practicing an empowered mindset. I was working on my own recipe to alchemise challenge into power, resentment into self-love, seeing what works and what doesn’t. Trying out things. So that I can use it myself and share with others.

The result? The re-frame of the situation as an experiment and self-love practice turned out to be super potent. I was feeling physically and mentally great. I succeeded in proving my belief right. Again. I had been practicing similar re-frames on many occasions, and I now had yet another confirmation of the efficiency of this practice. I was left with yet another story of having fun in a situation, in which I would have normally complained and felt like a victim of my own choice. I left the swimming pool empowered, feeling a stronger connection with the source of my joy and excitement, more confident in my ability to generate it internally. Also inspired to write this post and share that inspiration with whoever is on a similar journey towards an empowered, colourful life.

‘A Bigger Splash’ by David Hockney

And if you are, I want to come back to my initial question and ask you about your experience of sourcing joy and excitement from within. Is it something you are familiar with? Is it easy? What do you find challenging about it? Please share - I would love to hear your perspective.

From the Pain of an Ending into the Gift of Authentic Connection (and Some Projections in Between)

Yesterday, I was sitting on a plane back to London, feeling really sad. There were tears in my eyes. I felt the grief of letting go of the tranquillity of the Finnish forest, of sharing moments of beauty and joy with my partner, of not having anywhere to rush, of being in what felt like the most organic habitat. Of the sound of the woodpecker, of the crunching boughs underneath my feet, of the layers of forest smells, of the baby mushrooms cheerfully sticking their colourful heads out from underneath the moss. Of the peacefulness of the lake and the soft iciness of its waters.

By Sebastian Unrau

I was consciously allowing myself to grieve the ending and the parting that it implied. To feel the pain of separation, which sent me all the way back to my childhood, when it was time to say good bye to the warmth of the summer and embrace the harsh reality of the school life that I hated. To welcome those memories in from a different place, from the place of warmth which I did not have back then. Also, to feel my fear of losing the sense of closeness with my partner, knowing how our busy schedules can easily take over and drive us apart, once we reach the British soil. And to welcome the despair and loneliness that were tiptoeing besides the sadness.

I allowed myself to feel it, because over the last couple of years, I have learnt to trust the wisdom of my experience. In the past, I would have tried to calm myself down by downplaying the grief. I would have confidently followed the impulse to say things to myself like: ‘Don’t be silly, you are overdramatising, there is no real ground for that”, or “Stop it, there is no point in being sad – one thing has ended, another one will start”, “Don’t be so negative, just be grateful for what you have, all it well”.

This way of talking to myself, which I learnt from people around me, worked for me in the past. Particularly in my teens, when there was plenty of painful stuff happening in my life, which I had no clue how to be with. I became quite masterful in shifting the focus from what was going on within me to something external. For instance, channelling the energy of my painful emotion into some form of consumption – whether intellectual or material, didn’t really matter. I learnt well how to distract myself from my actual experience and feelings. At the time, I was also convinced that feeling less was a good thing. What’s the point of being negative, right?

To be fair, these voices showed up yesterday as well. And I was tempted by them. Yet I noticed something interesting. In each moment that I was giving in to the impulse to push my sadness away, I immediately felt a lot more distant from my partner. Luckily, the consequence of my disconnection from my experience was very easy to observe, as it got projected on the relational ground between the two of us in a moment where nothing much was happening. My partner was reading, my head was resting on his shoulder. There was barely any relational movement going on, no food on which projections love to feed on. The process of feeling close versus distant was clearly happening only in my head.

By Eric Ward

At one point, I noticed an impulse to physically move further away from him, which I did not act upon. Instead, I noticed the impulse, and chose to engage with my inner experience – a motion that for most of us will require consistent and persistent practice. When I don’t catch myself doing it, I am likely to act my impulse out , which I have done so many times- I will move away from the person whom I perceive as distant and then push them away, when they try to connect. Instead of being present to my inner experience, I will see it happening over there and will probably end up resenting the other person for being distant. Which they may well become, if they my pushing away and resentfulness triggers a sense of rejection in them.

What I am talking about here, is the cost of disowning our actual experience. Of trying to fix it and change it, without honouring it as it is. This cost is high. At the very least, it often costs us our connection to others, be it beings or processes we love. It costs us our authenticity and that is likely to also cost us many other things, including our health and our capacity to feel joy, fulfilment and pleasure, but that is a subject for a different post.

But if we choose to welcome sadness, fear and other uncomfortable instead? That is what happened for me after I had made this choice yesterday. As I embraced my experience within myself, I managed to honestly express it to my partner. I said I was scared of our separation and was feeling very sad. That felt like a very intimate and healing exchange. As I felt authentic and whole within myself, I also felt very close to him. Our actual good-bye was beautiful, and I am smiling now remembering how my heart felt as I was leaving. Open, warm, glowing, full of love. This experience is still within me.

On a different note, I had yet another moment of clarity in terms of why it is so important to own our experience as it is, warts and all. My feelings were clearly showing me what matters to me the most and what I yearn to create more space in my life for. Being in nature, appreciating “simple” things, moving slowly with no rush, being close to the person I love.

By Katharina Von Knobloch

There is nothing more empowering than knowing my experience. As I establish a solid connection with what I value and desire, I can consciously move towards weaving it into my everyday reality. Pragmatically, in my situation, I can invest more time into researching ways to create a home together, invent new ways of connecting while we are physically apart, spend more time in nature (until we can have a house in the forest!), allow for more slowing down moments… That’s what constitutes the horizon of hope, that is so important for us, humans, to have.

Having felt it all yesterday, I woke up today, feeling fresh and creative, ready for the new chapter of my life. There have been some lingering glimpses of sadness and nostalgia, and I made space for them too. I chose to see them as reminders of the things that matter so much to me, that I don’t want to forget. And now I am writing this post, which could not have happened had I chosen to distract myself from my experience. Which feels meaningful in its own right.

I hope this story inspires you to become more aware of the moments when you feel tempted to push a part of your experience away. I’d love to hear about your experience with “uncomfortable” feelings, particularly grief. How do you deal with endings and transitions, both major and minor ones? Is it easy for you to express your uncomfortable feelings to others?

Why the Concept of “Self-Love” Can Be Our Worst Enemy Disguised as a Friend

“Self-love” is a big concept in today’s world. Most of us, particularly women, grow up with an understanding that self-love is a good thing and we need to somehow be able to love and respect ourselves, no matter what. It’s very much present in the mainstream cultural narrative: “You’ve gotta love yourself first before you give love to someone else”, “You are the love that you are seeking”, “Love yourself and others will love you” and all that jazz.

I was convinced that I should love myself many years before I consciously embarked on my healing journey, probably as early as in my teenage years. What I did not know, was that the concept of “self-love” was also one of my greatest enemies at the time. And in fact, I believe that for many people it IS an enemy, a destructive internal force, rather than an ally.

Image by Kat Jayne

Coming from a person, fully committed to self-love it may sound absurd. How can anything to do with love be harmful? But here is my story.

Up until just a few years ago, I was someone deeply ashamed of myself. I did not like myself, I found fault in everything I did, I had a terrible self-image, I would speak of myself badly, without a blink of an eye. I clearly sucked at self-love. At least that’s what I believed. This is what I could tell others. And I perceived my inability to love myself as yet another failure of mine. It was something that I was clearly supposed to do and I just had no clue how.

I tried my best. I read self-help books. I did affirmations. I did some trainings where the term would come up. I did try to force myself to love myself, standing in the mirror and saying the right words. Trying to fake it till I make it. But nothing changed. I still didn’t feel able to do that little thing called “self-love”. And I felt deficient. I couldn’t find my way in. I felt powerless. I felt stuck.

Image by Engin Akyurt

It didn’t help that people around me would often say: “Ah, if only you could love yourself”, “But why are you being so negative about yourself, you don’t have any reason?”, “Ksenia, you just need to love yourself more!”. These words would confirm for me that I am not coping and falling short. Again. I felt helpless and hopeless. Pathetic in my perceived disability.

So, what was wrong with that whole self-love thing? Well, many things. One was that aiming for self-love as a mental concept, I wasn’t quite sure what love ACTUALLY was. No one had taught me this. I did not have an embodied experience of it. Or rather, I knew love, but in its conditional form. When some parts of me were accepted, encouraged and praised, and others were rejected, shamed, suppressed and abandoned.

Those parts I had no idea how to welcome, let alone how to love. Actually, I was not even aware they were there. What I learnt to do was to reject, shame, suppress and abandon those parts when they would show up as my thoughts, feelings or behaviours. To judge them as “too much”, “too angry”, “too self-centred”, “too indecisive”, “too sad”, “too lonely”, ”too evil”, “too greedy”, “too passive”, “too negative”, “too fearful”, “too confused.”, “too lazy”, “too weak”, “too needy”, “too excited”, “too stupid”, “too self-conscious”. The list goes on and on and on.

I did not have an experience of those aspects of me being lovingly embraced by another being. So I was hiding them, from myself and even more so from others, until they sometimes would just suddenly jump out, without asking my permission. They would show up with force as actions or expressions that were not of my conscious choosing. They would hurt others or myself. And then, I (or the part of me I tended to associate with my self) would have to face the disastrous relational consequences. Which would then confirm my understanding of those unwanted aspects of me as evil and horrible, to be further suppressed. Giving love to them? Nonsense. How would that even look? I had no relational model for that. No wonder I was failing!

Another thing was that at the time, I was solidly operating from a “should” mindset. All of my life choices were very much driven by external expectations, whether it was in a form of conforming to these expectations or rebelling against them. If the culture and people around me said I needed to love myself, I had to try to comply. That was my way to belong, to be okay, to be normal, to be accepted.

Another “choice” was to rebel. “I hate myself, I want to die. I refuse to love myself and that makes me different and cool, deeper and better than you self-loving lot” - I lived with this story too, when I was in my late teens. I did not know any better.

I did not know there were other choices available. I had no idea that I was living in a “should mindset” (had no clue what the hell that is). And I was not aware that there are other, very different ways of approaching life. Free from ‘shoulds’, free from pressure, free from expectations and performance anxiety. I did not have it modelled to me.

And I didn’t yet discover the part of myself that knows how to love, nurture, and be unconditionally kind to myself, that is inherently free from any judgement. The sad and funny thing was that trying to “do” self-love from a place of a should (“I SHOULD love myself more”) was mission impossible. I would doomed to fail, as this was the wrong place to approach it from.

So I believe there is often a HUGE piece missing with all that self-love narrative. Actually, three things come to mind.

1. The understanding that self-love is something that most of us will need to cultivate, step-by-step, as a life-long practice, and it will take a lot of patience.

2. The understanding that we will need a lot of relational and mental support on that journey, we will need warm, caring and compassionate others to reflect our essence back to us, to show us what true love feels like and to hold us in the many instances of grieving, which are part and parcel of the self-love journey.

3. The understanding that in order to love ourselves, we will need to embark on a journey of getting to know ourselves, getting to know different parts of ourselves, which we may have no clue about. Including the part of ourselves that is wise and compassionate. Including the part of ourselves that is divine.

This is the introduction to the topic of self-love and understanding ourselves as highly complex beings, consisting of many unique parts, that are often in conflict with each other. In my next post, I will expand on the three missing pieces and share 3 KEYS to turning the concept of self-love into an ally.

P.s.: Much love on your self-love journey

Image by Evie Shaffer