What’s for you won’t pass you by but how will you get there?

The passion that bubbles within me infusing the blend of holistic therapies that I include in Embody Loving You is a rich the desire to generate balance in mind body & soul.

Most coaches have travelled a journey that inspires the depth & detail in their personal coaching style & for me this search for balance came from my own deep-seated sense of sitting in a state of imbalance for too long across too many areas of my life.

I couldn’t fully put my finger on it but I just felt out-of-synch with my sense of self.

It wasn’t apparent to others but it was ever present for me.

I was doing well in my career, but I had an abiding sense that I’d stumbled & fumbled into it & an awareness that the role only expressed part of me but consumed nearly all of me.

I kept telling myself that circumstance was forcing me to ignore so many parts of me & in truth every day was I was living with the struggle & impact of time-imbalance. Outside of work I was interested in holistic therapies & I loved art & music, but the role was so busy that I seemed to have no time for myself & at work my holistic take on life & its issues was dismissed as woo woo & I just didn’t have time to research or consolidate my learning so I could coherently challenge the nay sayers. I knew I had more to say, more I could do & more I could be, but I didn’t have time to explore reflect & find my true voice.

It was easier to say circumstance means I can’t do the stuff I know I’m interested in than to say I am disappearing under the weight of a life I haven’t intentionally chosen.

So often we find ourselves in the position where life is running us & we are reacting & responding to circumstance & the sheer busyness means we just don’t have the time or emotional resources to say ‘Does this sit well with me & also feel able to authentically answer ourselves & take the action to make changes. We may know it doesn’t sit well but being able to be open with ourselves as to why & act on it. That needs time, space & commitment to both self-reflection & change & in a busy world of competing demands we are often responding to the next circumstance before we’ve had time to get honest about the one that’s just happened.

The really getting honest with ourselves can also be scary & it can feel like opening Pandora’s Box. In our hearts we know what’s in there – its all the stuff we pushed down & pushed away – but once open we fear the chaos that may ensure so its easier to keep pushing it down & stay in the world of react & respond.

This was certainly true of me. I was frustrated by the world of react & respond but I also knew staying there allowed me to close my eyes to a deeper sense of imbalance – one that sat with me at the deepest emotional level – a sense of somehow never feeling totally at home with myself.

It showed up emotionally as a feeling of living my life in trepidation - waiting for something bad to happen & it showed up physically in a very negative view of my body that didn’t seem to relate to its physical presentation & wasn’t eased by eating healthily or daily exercise. At a soul level it showed up as a constant message to myself that yes, I had a deep yearning to learn more about self-connection but I had to deal with this crisis first – I’d call it daily spiritual bypassing because I was telling myself I was a spiritual person & giving myself little doses – a Reiki or some tapping but it was a plaster for the moment before I plunged back into the stuff that was blocking my connection.

The truth that would swoop up in unguarded moments (usually in the early hours fuelled by insomnia) was that I was living with an entrenched feeling of being disappointed in myself for not quite living up to the expectations I had of myself. No one else could see it because to all intents & purposes all seemed to be going well & I couldn’t really find the words to explain it because I was too caught up in reactive living to find the time to learn the vocabulary, but it was more than some kind of mid-life crisis, it had been with me as long as I could remember.

The truth was I needed to go deeper but I was afraid to even start.

Now there's a saying that what's for you won't pass you by & I do believe that when we have found ourselves off track, we will find ourselves redirected & if we are not taking the steps to self-reflect our way towards finding the right path our redirection can come in dramatic fashion & redirection came for me in the form of an unscripted redundancy in the midst of the Covid pandemic.

I discuss the cycle of change & belief that either extreme pain or radical self-honesty are the catalyst for change  as part of my mindset coaching in Embody Loving You but in brief when I was made redundant, I found my relationship with the change cycle was a case of ‘who feels it knows it’.

You may be familiar with the change cycle already or it may start ringing bells in areas of your own life. When I learned about it, it definitely did in mine.

So, have you noticed that when you want to make a change you start out all focused & determined – this is it, the time for moaning is done, you want change & you want it now but somehow you quickly find yourself caught up in your emotions, full of self-doubt; you tie yourself in knots & ultimately end up right back where you started with an added sense of ‘you see, it didn’t work’ & this ‘told you so’ feeling that makes it just that bit harder to try again.

That’s the change cycle & the truth is even if the grass looks greener our mind – our ego - does love the safe & familiar & it will work very hard to keep us in the place that we’re used to; even if do know we’re not even happy there. So our discontent may reach a crescendo of determination to change but just as we peak our mind immediately steps in with fear – the fear of failure – what if it all goes wrong? This catastrophising comes from our limbic brain - it’s part of our ancient survival instinct – the desire to stay safe & it whispers ‘better the devil you know’ & spurs us to thinking that things weren’t all bad, frustrating yes, but oh so comfortably familiar & the enormity of change starts to feel like a mountain, so we backtrack our way right back into the very situation we hope to escape.

Of course, there was a reason why we wanted to make the change & so pretty soon our discontent starts to rise again & the cycle will repeat - over & over again until we make the change & face the fear that is blocking us.

Whether you go for pre-emptive self-honesty or the tailspin of the dramatic circumstantial change, as you begin to regroup oftentimes you notice that you were in some ways benefitting from the very situation that was ripe for change.

For me I had a well-paid seemingly secure job & even though I was often deeply frustrated by the role, I would say to myself ‘you’re a single parent, this income keeps us buoyant; we have a roof over our head, clothes on our back & food on the table’ & I’d back my safety seeking with my catastrophic thinking ‘what if you leave & the next job was worse or it falls through’ or a thousand different scenarios -  all fears that kept me thinking it was better to moan & be frustrated because jumping ship was just a step too far.

Until that unscripted redundancy pushed me overboard.

Out in the murky waters of ‘what next’ I had space to really explore the roots of that attachment to my story of ‘Better safe than sorry’.

In the open waters of redundancy, I began to notice that the truth was I’d become stuck on a rut of a life led in opposition – pointing out what was wrong with the system - but this enveloping in opposition was both not changing the system & was blinding me to issues I needed to face within myself.

My roles for years had always been excessively busy & I threw myself into hard work with a bitter relish. It took my son frustratedly telling me that I was a workaholic & then a slow & achingly tender unpicking of the stories that lay behind this to understand the ways I used hard work to avoid facing the raw & buried emotions that layered over a history of trauma. Like any ‘aholic’ I would use my personal addictive prop to distract myself & I could keep going to astonishing levels – trust me I could work anyone under the table.

Until I couldn’t because I reached burn-out – unrelenting insomnia & a body wracked with aches & pains. I had been reaching this phase in the months before my redundancy, but I’d been trying to use an old strategy - ignore it & crunch your way through – & it was time to face the truth.

Owning our issues requires extreme self-honesty.

It might not have been drugs or alcohol but my addiction to work was toxic to my wellbeing & sat in absolute contradiction to my belief in healthy eating & holistic therapies. I knew it but whilst in the world of reactivity I could keep saying ‘Well I would do something about this but….’

So, I had to wean myself off my addiction of overworking & learn about what lay beneath – those feelings of imposter syndrome & all the limiting beliefs that fuelled my fear of failure & that deep sense of being a disappointment to myself. In my quest for self-knowledge I was thirsty for knowledge & at first I was imposing the same crunching pace of workaholism to my learning but you don’t heal by going back to what broke you & so I l had to learn to pace myself.

I decided to take risks & let go of the excuse that ’I would do it, but the job doesn’t give me time’. I took time, deciding not to look for quick fixes or one-dimensional answers but to address the need beneath the behaviours – the desire for balance in mind. body & soul. I’d always dreamed of the kind of support that tends to each had kept finding that the support that was about emotional healing didn’t look at the way emotions affect our body & stuff that focused on the body didn’t seem to consider emotions in the ways I wanted & the soul seemed invisible to both. But my gut said that each feeds & interacts with the other & so I set out to train & learn & make the links, blending my passions because I knew that this was the key to healing for me & to find my own coaching voice.

I wanted to

• explore the ways that our limiting beliefs cloud our mindset, fuelling overthinking & restricting the growth we may aspire to & make sense of how this is inlaid & perpetuated within us.

• understand the ways that mind & body are intrinsically linked & when we are caught up in toxic thinking, it’s our body holds the score & learn about the power of somatic– body-based - therapies in helping to release the stored pain of emotional wounds

• weave energetic therapies - Reiki, meditation & breath & chakra & crystal work – into all I did because of the ways that they encourage us to connect to the wisdom of our higher self & they ways that they focus on the power of shifts within our energetic body in the journey towards healing heal in mind, body & soul.

I had a vision of how this could be – standing alongside clients helping them to uncover & understand the limiting beliefs that constricted their mindset; supporting them as they explored the ways this might be showing up in their bodies & helping them release the blockages they might be experiencing through somatic & energetic healing.

But at times this has felt overwhelming & I would question why I had to make my life more difficult. Surely it would be easier to stick with one – work on mindset coaching; train as a Reiki or a Reflexology or EFT practitioner or stick with working with crystals & indulge my passion for creativity making crystal jewellery but I found that I couldn’t let any of my passions wither because I felt the connection to each & all.

Eventually I realised this desire to blend ideas to seek balance is just part of me. I have many different interests & creative pursuits & acknowledging this has been part of my emotional growth; letting go of the negative sense that this makes me a Jack of all Trades, just not a specialist or ‘good enough’ at anything & instead embracing the powerful sense that I am thirsty for knowledge & can’t help finding connections in all I do – that this is my unique specialism.

It took the extreme pain route to help me reach into radical self-honesty & embrace the changes I needed for my mind, body & soul.

Sometimes getting started & holding ourselves accountable is the hardest thing.

If you know you want to change something in your life, but you feel locked into that change cycle of hope, fear & dejection & you want to pre-empt the extreme pain route with some radical self-honesty I have 4 powerful questions that may help you explore what’s keeping you stuck – what you’re afraid of’ what may be keeping you invested in your current situation even if you know it’s not right.

These are questions that can help you to visualise what could be so good if you bite the bullet & make the change – they can help you add colour, texture & detail to your vision & give you tangible intentions & desires for what you want & don’t want to hold onto for when fear starts banging at the door

• What will happen if I choose to make this change?

• What won’t happen if I choose to make this change?

• What will happen if I choose not to make this change?

• What won’t happen if I choose not to make this change?

Take your time, let thoughts flow, write them down in a journal & give yourself space, noting down & coming back every time a new thought comes up.

Allow your reflections to give deep consideration to the impact of change on your mind, body & soul.

Don’t rush it because this is your life & you deserve to live it in full & authentic connection with yourself.

I wonder what will come up for you?

Warm wordy hugs

Laura xx