The Importance of Embracing Our Story
“You are not your story, you are the light of your heart.”
If you are living with feelings of despair, hopelessness, shame or symptoms such as internal isolation, I understand why this quote above may not resonate with you. During times like these, you can feel so alone. Feelings of unworthiness, thoughts, of “I do not belong” may be the consistent program you play in your mind. It can feel like there is no other way, no way out for you. This state of being can be filled with debilitating self-shame accompanied by a heightened inner critic.
Recognising and acknowledging these thoughts and feelings are the first steps to becoming the witness to them, perhaps giving you just a moment of reprieve.
Take a moment to allow yourself to wonder who you are beneath the shame, the unworthiness, as you embrace kindly the possibility that you are not the story you tell yourself, you are not your symptoms, thoughts, or feelings. However, while experiencing a life lived with these symptoms, you can lose sight of this.
What I am sharing here has come about from my many years of questioning who we are at our core. As a life seeker in the quest to unravel who I am beneath my own PTSD, over the years, I have come to understand, as I live into the experience of knowing deep in my body that I am not my story, but the light of my heart. I have sat with clients and also noticed how initially, each client blends with their story, believing they are their symptoms and identifying with the impact each experience in their life has had on them.
Perhaps you may allow yourself just a moment to consider some of the ways you may have lost connection to your innate sense of who you are, or where along the way your natural developmental stages became slowed down, through the experiencing of overwhelming emotions when young, causing an inability to self regulate, or trust in your own wisdom within.
The life we have lived, the experiences we have had, the people we have met along the way, and the traditions and cultural rituals we have passed down and taken on as our own have all shaped the person we have become today.
These visceral experiences stay very much alive in every cell of our body from birth.
Everything we need to know about ourselves today, we can find in our story, in our generational cultural history.
The degree of emotional and physical safety we felt in our bodies as young children is the extent to which we allow ourselves the ability to form emotional intimacy and connection with ourselves, others, and the world around us, at an unconscious level.
Throughout our childhood, most significantly from the ages of 0 to 7, our nervous system is actively learning to design itself into a unique shape as an adaption to each of our childhood experiences, (eg it can shut down, freeze, numb, become hyper vigilant, or disassociate in the experiencing of fear). As we grow up, we are constantly re-designing and refining that nervous system response, which can become activated by situations that feel familiar to the original pain we experienced in childhood. These symptoms and feelings may be fleeting, or may have become the only way you see yourself, as you create a life externally, as a reflection of your internal world. Our nervous system can also become accustomed to feelings of love and safety, which is the foundation of forming a wonderful template to bring into adulthood.
We can learn to believe that our body is not a safe space to live in, and so we begin to experience life from our busy minds, believing we are each of these mind-body symptoms.
As children, what we see, feel, and hear in our external world becomes our truth over time. When we see and feel something different from what we were told we saw and felt, we begin to lose our self-trust, disconnecting from our inner wisdom.
Our sense of self-worth and self-esteem is formed through each experience and circumstance, even from a young age.
Most often, it is not until we enter environments in childhood that are different from ours, safer, prettier, more financially abundant, chaotic, unnurtured, or unhomely, that we begin to feel we may be different from others. The adults around us may treat us differently from other children because of family circumstances, or you may find kindness from those around you that you have not felt at home.
As we grow up, we unconsciously bring with us, internalised messages of feeling less than, better than, different to— and so our sense of separateness, self-judgement, and judgement of others begins. We carry these messages into adulthood, believing that this is who we are and this is how it is.
Feeling separate from our external environment can create a shame so painful that we can begin to close off and isolate, even from ourselves. We can create barriers and defences to protect ourselves from feeling this pain.
Instinctively as children, we can sense the needs of the adults around us. We learn to blend in by being quiet, being good, being perfect, taking on the responsibilities of the adults around us, preempting the feelings and moods of our environment, all in an effort to stay safe. And we continue this way of surviving into adulthood.
Over time, we can become unsure of whose feelings we are feeling. Are they from those around us? Or are they our own?
As children, we can learn to keep secrets and develop a sense of misguided loyalty in an effort to stay safe and create a false sense of belonging, even in toxic environments. Sometimes, there is no place to name what is happening. During these formative years, we are each learning unconsciously how to live uniquely from our own experience, from the inside out, carrying these symptoms and values into adulthood.
However, what lies deeply within each child at their core are the qualities of fun, giddiness, mischievousness, creativity, self-trust, spontaneity, intuition, and a deep sense of all-knowing, expansive, love, and joy. I believe all children intuitively know when they are being treated unfairly, abandoned or rejected, or when they feel safe and loved by the adults around them.
Often, there can be far too great a pain to feel our feelings as children, and so we build lives, repressing and denying these core wounds, carried through life as repressed feelings, depressed feelings.
It is vital for each child to have open-minded, open-hearted guardians of the heart at home, at school, and in the community.
However, as we live in a world of much brokenheartedness, the adults themselves may have lost their way and are struggling internally. They have not yet learned to nurture their own unique heart’s qualities or reevaluate their lived experience. So we find ourselves living in never-ending cycles of generational lostness and emptiness.
This lostness and emptiness within is a core wound so great. It can hold shame and unworthiness, masked in adulthood through the guise of perfectionism, controlling others and our environment. It is the birthing ground for addictions, overachieving, pushing ourselves too hard, burnout, forming cycles of codependent, toxic relationships, all in search of love and approval externally, not knowing how to nurture ourselves back to our innate heart’s qualities from within. This way of living removes us further from ourselves, paradoxically creating even more lostness and emptiness within.
When we take a moment to look inward lovingly, embracing all we have gone through, we find a resilience and strength that has developed along the way. We begin to understand, through exploration, awareness, and acceptance, the difference between who we have become and who we are at our core.
To discover the richness of our lives from within, to live a more peaceful, harmonious life, and to break generational cycles in family systems, I believe in the importance of embracing our story and understanding how each of our childhood experiences has impacted the life we have built today.
We must learn to do this in kindness, gentleness, and patience as we move toward acceptance of all that has happened.
However, I believe our purpose in life is to transcend beyond our stories and experiences into the realms of our truest potential as we learn how to return home to our true nature.
I call this process “Returning to the Heart Self”. In this light, I place great emphasis on the importance and process of restoring that lost connection back home to the heart, where we not only know from our head but are living fully in the embodied experience of transcending beyond the false identities we place on ourselves, knowing we are not our story but the light of our heart.
Anne
