Category: Mental Health

Codependent Relationships Thwart Growing Up

Individuation is the psychological journey of becoming a whole, unique individual in our own right. A life-long process, individuation is how we gradually polish the diamond of our original Self, developing and becoming more and more who we really are at the core of our being. 

Codependent relationships typically stand in the way of the individuation process, by prioritizing psychological fusion at the expense of individual freedom and growth. 

Two Become One – But Not in the Way We Really Want

Psychological fusion means two people becoming one – but in a bad way. When we are codependent we entangle ourselves with another person in a way that’s called merging. 

Merging means that we sooner or later fall into dysfunctional patterns of control, enabling of unhealthy behaviors, and overly fearing the elements of aloneness and self-responsibility that are involved in growing into our own journey.

That’s because in our not-yet-healed state, we form a bond with another that is centered at some level around our wounding, in which we both attempt to care for the other, compensate for unmet psychological needs, and develop a condition of mutual over-reliance.

There is a higher, spiritual version of sacred union, wherein we each hold onto ourselves, and yet also can join to create a third energy. Codependence may be a kind of childlike attempt at that, but until we’ve had a chance to heal psychologically, it will be hard to sustain real freedom and wholeness in each person.

I’ll Heal You and You’ll Heal Me

The state of wounded merging (also called trauma-bonding) develops strongly where each person meets needs for the other that actually the other person should, developmentally speaking, learn to do for themselves. 

It can be quite sweet in the beginning. It’s like we agree to hold hurt pieces of each other until we’re each strong enough to do it for ourselves. We make up for missing pieces of childhood, providing safety, understanding, love, food, or whatever else is needed. 

We don’t have to make codependent relationships bad and wrong. We do need to see that they are relationships between two wounded children finding a way to get what they need by taking care of each other. No relationship can stay that way forever, because we do want, deep inside, to grow up, ripen, and mature spiritually.  

How Long Can We Avoid Ourselves?

Over-focusing on another can serve as a way of avoiding our own feelings, needs, and trauma. Codependency can be a distracting, addictive “fixer-upper” project, in which we direct our life purpose towards helping, fixing or caring for another person rather than looking at our own lives.

Each party takes on specific pieces for the other, making sacrifices and providing protections for the other. Both can become addicted to the same thing: using the other person as a way to delay facing one’s own life story. 

We can do this for a long, long, long time. But the call of our own life will never really go away, even if we try not to listen to it. 

Codependent relationships have negative impacts for both parties. Typically these negative impacts relate to the ways that we enable each other to stay stuck in patterns that aren’t actually positive or life-affirming. It starts to feel static and stifling. 

So many of us start to wonder: can we change the deal?

Changing The Deal

The hidden problem of the old deal is each person gives up a portion of their true Self, while requiring that the other do something for us. We each trade in our autonomy and self-responsibility, in exchange for emotional security, understanding, support, approval, or whatever goodies the other person gives us. The agreement boils down, if we look closely, to some kind of surrender of individuality in exchange for being taken care of.

What can we do about it? Well, once we realize that we are busy holding someone else’s wound for them, we can start to play with the idea of holding our own. We take our wounds back from the other’s arms, and gradually give them back what we have been holding for them. 

What wounds do we still need someone to hold, and how can we gradually be the one doing that holding? Here’s a journal prompt for you to explore this question. 

Journal Prompt: Turn the Love Beam Back on You

1. All You Give. Write out all the things you do for your partner (or other loved one). Include physical world activities, like making sure they have something to eat, as well as time spent of more subtle emotional activities, like supporting them emotionally, thinking of solutions for their problems, or even just worrying about them. Any of your own time you spend focusing on them, their needs, and their shape of their lives.   
2. Imagine Receiving from Someone Like You. Now imagine and write about what your life might be like if you were your own partner. If you met someone like you, who wanted to give you all that you have been giving away, what would that be like? How might you bloom and blossom under that beam of love? Does any resistance surface? What needs of yours still need the warm embrace of your own life-giving love? 

Thanks for reading!

SAD girl Summer 

Sun’s out and the sky is shining. Everyone loves summer… right? 

For some people, Summer feels like the season of dread. If this is you, keep reading to learn more about what causes these feelings of summer stress and mental health tips to help make this summer a little bit more comfortable! 

5 things about summer that might bring on the Big SAD 

You might expect summer to be a universal mood booster, right? In the season of concerts, sleeping in and sunbathing, what could be a trigger for mood distress? As it turns out, a number of things- and you’re definitely not alone in feeling stressed out and totally over summer already. 

1. The heat and humidity makes it difficult to enjoy being outdoors.
2. Changes to schedules disrupt your routines and make the days unpredictable or stressful. 
3. Added stress from trying to plan for travel and change or the additional financial expense of summer events. 
4. Lots of pressure to “relax” and “have fun” to other people’s standards. 
5. Higher pollen counts can increase histamine levels and cause dysregulated emotions. 

How Common is Seasonal Affective Disorder in Summer?

Summer is a season of high energy that’s often associated with less work, more play, and days in the sun. But those things aren’t enjoyable for everyone and if you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people who feel completely overwhelmed, overstimulated and over the summer heat, you are not alone! 

 

Seasonal Affective Disorder, also called SAD, is thought to impact about 6% of Americans with around 10% of those affected during the Spring and Summer months. By the numbers, it’s not super common to experience Seasonal Affective Disorder but you’re certainly not alone if you’re feeling some type of way about the rising heat.

Is SAD just depression?

The acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder can lend itself to feeling like the whole experience is depression in the more stereotypical form. You may expect that SAD in any season will feel like, well, sadness. But it does not. 

Seasonal mood disorders have many facets, just like other mood disorders. Your moods may be affected by feeling more sadness or loss of interest in your activities. But that’s not all! SAD may manifest as increased frustration, stress, overwhelm, rapidly cycling moods or more. During Summer, anxiety is a likely manifestation of this type of mood dysregulation. 

Summer SAD has different symptoms than other seasons

The sizzling temps and thick air can contribute to a sense of being trapped even in wide open spaces. When the temperature rises outside, your body may require more energy to help you keep cool and, in turn, leave you feeling burnt out and exhausted when you feel like you’ve not done much. 

While winter Seasonal Affective Disorder is known to cause overeating, over sleeping and a general sense of malaise, summer SAD is likely to leave you feeling agitated, anxious and overworked. You may have heightened feelings of irritation, guilt or anger. It makes sense given they have different causes, but it can be frustrating when you’re trying to understand what’s happening and how to fix it. 

We’ve got tips to help you cope 

Now that you know what’s up with summertime sadness (hey Lana, thanks for the anthem) and why it happens, let’s get into the real important stuff. What can you do about it? These mental health tips can help year round but are especially important in summer if you’re feeling blue. 

Seek cool and dark spaces when you’re feeling the heat 

If you’re feeling agitated, overworked or overwhelmed this summer, take some time to lean into decompression in a dark and temperature regulated space. Turn the lights down low and keep fans or air conditioners running while you rest. Cool and dark spaces can help your body and mind both cool down from working hard, while also offering some relief from physical symptoms like migraines, dehydration and eye strain. 

Prioritize sleep and rest 

Longer daylight hours and more to do can leave you feeling like there are plenty of hours in the day, but not nearly enough at night. Struggling with sleep and rest can be the same thing but they aren’t always. If you’re finding that you’re not getting enough sleep, set a regular bedtime and do your best to stick to it at least 4 days a week. Ensure you’re stopping work and making relaxation a priority at least 2 hours before that time. 

 

When rest seems in short supply, pick one day per week where you schedule nothing. Leave that day open to whatever moves you in the moment and honor your need to rest. 

Consider using the cooler night hours to connect with nature 

Love being outside but don’t dig the heat and constant sun? Use the evening hours to spend time outside. Watch the moonlight on the ocean, enjoy an evening walk or do yoga in the garden beneath the stars. Nature is just outside your door at all hours! 

Honor your emotional experience in this season 

Guilt is a heavy burden and it takes up a lot of your emotional energy. If you feel like you should feel one way or another about summer and you’re just not, that’s okay! Honor the reality of your emotions and reflect on the ways you connect with different seasons or weather patterns. You may find your connection is more deeply rooted in other seasons and that’s a beautiful thing to discover, especially if you can be with the emotional experience of this season without guilt. 

No matter how you’re experiencing these summer months, we hope you’ve found these mental health tips helpful. If you or someone you love is experiencing substance abuse or looking for a new way to move through recovery, call us today. 

760-814-8214

The Inner Child

The Journey of Healing the Inner Child is the quintessential healing epic. That’s because the Inner Child is at the core of our Self. 

Like the center of a flower, the petals of our life’s purpose all unfold from the Inner Child. Even when we grow up, there is always a part of us who is still the Inner Child. 

The Inner Child is an original. She is our gemstone, our butterfly wing pattern, our snowflake.

Inner Child knows the way to our highest potential. When we rescue the Inner Child from the harm that was done to her – the memory of which lives on in our bodies as trauma – we can at last become who we really mean to be.  

Meeting Our Wounds

Even though the Inner Child is where our joy, our creativity, our presence, our happiness and satisfaction at being alive lie, she is also connected to our deepest pain. 

Before we can get to the original, unscathed Inner Child, we first have to meet the Wounded Child, the one who shows us how we got hurt by the world.

It’s painful to encounter the Wounded Child. But it is also deeply meaningful when we witness that the Inner Child recovers, and returns to her original nature. 

8 Steps on the Journey of Healing the Inner Child

1. Make Contact

The Journey of Healing the Inner Child begins with getting to know her, and creating an environment of such safety and acceptance that she begins to trust you. Much like adopting an animal who has lived in a shelter and might have some reasons not to trust human beings, your Inner Child also has some reasons not to trust human beings. Therefore, have patience and be gentle as the sunrise. But say to yourself, “Hi Inner Child. I want to get to know you. I’m here”. She’s listening.

2. Build a Relationship Based on Trust

Children respond to love and attention like plants to sunlight and water, so if you give love and attention to your Inner Child, she will bloom. Build trust through using kind, loving words when you sense her showing up within you, taking time to check in with her, and letting her have some influence on your day. “Inner Child, I’m so happy you’re here. I love you so much, you’re the child I always wanted. Do you want to read our book or watch a movie tonight?”  

3. Play!

Children need play. They die without it. So whatever it is that feels like fun to you, do that, do it a lot, and your Inner Child will be able to attach to you and feel safe at last. Read children’s books. Draw. Play games. Make pancakes. Take baths. Pick flowers. Collect rocks. Do puzzles. Take time to be together, and let her choose what’s fun.   

4. Adopt a Learning Mindset

Being allowed to explore, to try new things just for the experience, is important for the Inner Child and might not have been fully allowed during your actual childhood. Adopt a learning mindset: you have a right to try things just because they sound fun. You have a right to fail or change your mind. You have a right to grow just through experiences themselves.

5. Protect the Child

Children need protection and to not have to think about overwhelming, adult things. It’s ok to shield yourself during this process, from topics and people that make you feel less safe in the world. Picture tucking your Inner Child away in a deep inner chamber, safe from the outside world. 

6. Celebrate the Child’s Spontaneous Nature

Children are delightful and surprising even if they’re a handful sometimes. When impulsivity, loudness, unruliness, messiness, a desire to follow fun rather than do her homework shows up, celebrate that Child Energy bubbling up in you, as much as you can. If encouraged, the Inner Child can lead you to a brighter, deeper life.

7. Get ready for the Wounds

The Inner Child has wounds. She has to cry, she has to scream and throw tantrums, because a lot happened to her that was both devastating and out of control. Her feelings of victimization, fury, and grief are all natural human reactions to situations that hurt the soul. Validate her.

8. Support the Inner Child

Support your Inner Child. Help her find words, draw pictures, run it out, hug it out. When the feelings are over, change focus to something that gives her joy. A capable adult who loved and cared about her should have been there back then, to show her how to release overwhelming feelings out of the body. Ok, so it didn’t happen then. But you’re here now – better late than never. 

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use or a history of trauma that continues to affect daily life, reach out to us today to learn more about our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Your body is designed to handle small amounts of stress. You are a well-constructed machine with the capability to overcome most anything that happens to you on a regular day. But what happens when you’re not having a regular day or, as this pandemic marches on, you can’t even remember a regular day? 

Let’s take a look at how stress affects your body and what that means for you. 

The Anatomy of Stress 

A stressed body feels like a body under pressure. When you’re feeling stressed, you aren’t at your most effective. From the top of your head to the tips of your toes, each part of your holistic being responds to the chain reaction of stress. Every system of your body is affected. 

What Does a Stressed Body Feel Like?

Like many things, stress is, unfortunately, a holistic experience. You feel it in your core and every vital system to your survival. Let’s look at each of our primary systems, how stress impacts their function, and the way you experience its effect. 

Muscles and Bones

When stress begins to rise in your body, your muscles coil and prepare for the impact ahead. Carrying around the tension of that preparation can lead to cramping and extraneous pressure on your skeletal system. The way you carry yourself changes to accommodate the tight muscles caused by stress. 

Breathing 

Stress destabilizes the pace you bring air into your lungs. When your breathing is rapid, your body struggles to keep up with supplying those important tissues with oxygen. This may feel like shortness of breath, tightness in your chest, or even trigger asthma attacks in vulnerable people. 

Heart

Much like your breathing, your pulse picks up when you’re feeling the pressure of the world around you. Stress causes a hiccup in the coordination between the flow of nutrient-rich blood from your heart to your body. Over time, it can cause chronic inflammation in your arteries.

Hormones 

Your body recognizes stress by its hormone signature. Most famously, cortisol levels are associated with both your stress response as well as your kidney function and energy levels. There are other hormones that interact with your stress levels though. Adrenaline, glucose, and even testosterone levels are all responsive to the stress you experience. 

Sleep

Stress can keep you awake at night, pondering the worries and woes you didn’t have time to worry about in your waking hours. Stress-induced insomnia affects your circadian rhythm and can make it feel impossible to let your body relax enough to find rest. 

Skin and Hair 

Stress can make skin and hair feel dull and temperamental. From flaring existing skin conditions to causing hair loss, there’s no shortage of the way stress can impact some of your most visible body systems. 

Digestive

Also called the gut-brain connection, your digestive system is undeniably linked to the things you think and feel. It’s no wonder that stress can cause all manner of gut discomfort. Gas, constipation, and heartburn are some of the most commonly reported impacts of stress on the stomach.

Reproductive

With stress playing havoc on hormonal systems, it’s no surprise to find that it also may impact your reproductive system. From desire to menstruation, there may be a change in the familiar patterns of your body when you’re stressed. 

Immune

When your body is battling your stress levels, it’s a whole lot harder to fight off intruding germs and bugs. Your immune system feels the strain and it exhibits a weakened response to the outside world that can make you sick. 

Can stress cause long-term damage? 

Stress shouldn’t be left unmanaged or without holistic care, it needs to alleviate the fight-or-flight intensity of it.  Over time, the reactions your body experiences due to stress can wear on you. Long-term stress can lead to serious diseases of important bodily systems. 

Chronic stress can cause or contribute to a number of disorders. From direct correlation to a waterfall effect, there is evidence that it can also contribute to the development of substance use disorders.

It’s possible to be addicted to stress too 

For some, stress is something that drives the desire to numb that often precedes substance use. For others though, stress can be an addiction all its own. If all you know is adrenaline-laced intensity, relaxation may feel unsafe to your body. Stress addiction stands apart from substance use recovery but many of the treatments can overlap in how they engage your body to begin rewriting your healing. 

Identifying the cause of your stress and the effects you feel from it in your daily life can be a powerful tool to stop it in its tracks. Through a sustainable and consistent routine, you can develop the tools to reduce your stress alongside your road to recovery today. At Villa Kali Ma, we offer programs to help our clients combat the effects of stress on a holistic level. Connect with us today to learn more about how we help our clients heal and manage stress. 

Journaling is one of the easiest, most accessible, and low-cost ways to nurture mental health. 

There are many ways to journal. It’s ok to experiment and play around until you find a practice that fits you. If you’re doing journaling at all, then you’re learning and you’re on your way.

Free writing

As the name suggests, the practice of free writing involves writing freely and without stopping for a predetermined amount of time, such as for 15 minutes. 

Important to understand is that you are not writing anything specific, you are more like dumping out the contents of your mind, a bit like you might overturn a messy drawer to see what is in there. 

Like meditation, the practice is to simply notice what is there without engaging with it particularly, letting it appear & disappear according to its own flows.

You are not writing for the outcome, as you might if you were composing a poem or an essay. It’s more like mental jogging. 

The biggest challenge of free writing is our tendency to interrupt ourselves with judgments. We may find it’s hard to let go; we may want to control, shape, or manage what we are writing. 

With repetition you get the hang of simply turning on the tap of words and letting them flow. 

Benefits of free writing:

Free writing builds trust in the unknown, and strengthens powers of discipline, concentration, and focus. 

Journaling About Feelings

Journaling about feelings is a more targeted technique, and the time to use it is when you notice you’re upset.  

When triggered to use, or feeling hurt, anxious or angry, we don’t want to act on those feelings or share those raw emotions and thoughts just yet.

Rather, we can transmute the feelings into something easier to share and safer to act on by first spending time journaling on the question: “What’s going on with me right now?”

Very important with this journaling method: Don’t try to be good. Don’t should on yourself, by judging, suppressing or trying to improve the feelings. Feelings hate that. 

Rather, just let the feelings out. Let the thoughts, especially the ugly, selfish, angry, babyish ones, be just as they are. Personally, I’m a big believer in cussing in my journal. 

Benefits of Journaling About Feelings:

After releasing the full emotion and all it has to say into the journal, you feel better and you know more about what’s really going on. Then you can make calm decisions about what, if anything, you want to say and do from here. 

Lists

Lists are exactly what they sound like. You identify a category and list all the things you can think of that go in that category. 

Suggested lists to journal on:  

What am I grateful for? 

What do I surrender to my Higher Power? 

What am I holding as a burden today? 

What do I need help with today? 

What do I long for?

The options are infinite, so certainly make up your own categories. You can get very creative. 

However there are two key lists which are helpful for anyone in recovery: a List of Fears and a List of Resentments. That’s because fears and resentments are the biggest triggers to use. So definitely include the following two lists in your practice from time to time:

What am I mad about? 

What am I scared of?

After completing a list, the suggestion is that you take a moment to form the intention in your mind and heart, to surrender all of the items on the list to God, your higher power, or to your own inner Observer (whatever loving presence is the most trustworthy to you.) 

Benefits of Lists:

In addition to helping you get back to surrender, lists create space in the psyche, giving you room to breathe again. 

Dialogue

My personal favorite journaling tool is dialogue. 

The way to dialogue is write out a conversation, in the same format as you would a script for a play or a film. The dialogue is between yourself and some portion of yourself that you’re curious about or struggling with. 

Me: Hi, again, Fear. 

My Fear: Hi Holly Mae.

Me: How are you doing? 

Fear: Not great… 

Me: Ah. Want to tell me about it?

Go back and forth between the sides of you and witness their interaction. 

Benefits of Dialogue: 

Dialogue allows you to get to know the many different sides of your own nature. This helps you to dis-identify from all of them, while you gradually grow to care more for each side of you. Ultimately, dialogue leads you to harmonize all the forces moving and shaping you from within. 

~~

Have fun journaling!

Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder that alters your brain chemistry, resulting in extreme and unstable moods. These extreme fluctuations, and the slow cycling between them are that set bipolar disorder apart from mood swings make it difficult for the body to adjust to what you’re feeling, resulting in an inability to live holistically with unmanaged bipolar disorder. Taking charge of your health and cultivating a healing relationship with your mind is empowering, but it may feel scary or confusing to do so with so much misinformation littering the helpful finds. 

Whether you are looking to destigmatize your own experience with bipolar, understand a loved one’s diagnosis or make sense of the impact bipolar disorder has had on your life, let’s begin by separating the fact from the myth with us below. 

1.) Myth: There’s one kind of bipolar disorder.

Fact: There are currently four specific types of bipolar disorder. 

According to the DSM-5, the symptoms of bipolar most commonly occur in four ways. 

Bipolar I is a manic-dominant episodic mood disorder, while bipolar II is marked by experiences of both hypomanic and depressive episodes. Cyclothymia is characterized by symptoms similar to bipolar disorder and is classified as a milder subtype of erratic cyclical periods of mania and depression. Lastly, bipolar not otherwise specified (NOS) has the hallmark bipolar symptoms of unpredictable and extreme mood shifts but doesn’t quite fit any typing. 

2.) Myth: Bipolar is just a fancy term for mood swings. 

Fact: Bipolar Disorder is a chronic disorder of mood episodes. 

Mood swings are a cycle of human experience. People move through the world responding to the things they see and feel. Those responses create moods, and those moods may change quickly but typically last minutes or hours. When you live with bipolar disorder, mood episodes that last for days or more often weeks are a draining part of your lived experience. It is not something that happens to you occasionally or cycles past quickly, but something that you live alongside constantly. 

3.) Myth: Treating your bipolar disorder will kill your creativity. 

Fact: Your art is not a product of your struggle. 

While mania may make you feel like you’ve had a stroke of genius, there is no sustainability to manic episodes. Receiving treatment that makes you feel empowered can hone your artistic instincts, but it doesn’t change who you are or what you’re capable of. You can strip back the unparalleled ferocity of disordered moods to cultivate controlled chaos that allows you to use your creativity in ways that feel best for you.

4.) Myth: Bipolar disorder is curable. 

Fact: Bipolar disorder is treatable. 

There is no cure for a disordered brain response to the hormones that influence your mood. Diagnosis is a phenomenal first step to controlling the power your mood episodes have over your daily life, however. Alongside possible treatments from a physician for symptoms of bipolar affecting your health, treatments for mind, body and spirit can help to align and balance your response to mood episodes. Even still, you may still experience symptoms of bipolar and there is nothing wrong with you if that’s the case. 

5.) Myth: Bipolar disorder is rare. 

Fact: Bipolar affects millions of people. 

Over 2.5% of the world’s population are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and there are undoubtedly many who remain undiagnosed. There are a number of factors that increase the likelihood of developing it, notably having a family history of mood disorders. You are not alone in experiencing the difficult and often confusing symptoms of bipolar disorder, and connecting with others who can relate to your experiences may be a cathartic part of your healing.  

Living with any mood disorder can be fraught with confusion and frustration. Particularly when you are living (or learning to live) with bipolar disorder, fighting the uphill battle against myths and misunderstanding feels like a lot. It is a lot, but you don’t have to do it alone. 

Community is key for feeling supported as you navigate the struggles (and strengths) of your unique bipolar experience. Whether you are struggling with co-occuring conditions like substance use or just looking to be understood, developing supportive relationships is key to flourishing with bipolar. 

Your experience is unique, tailored to who you are and what you need as a holistic person.  The treatment you seek for your bipolar disorder should be too. Being honest about the experiences you have with bipolar, the struggles you face and the healing you’re hoping for are all within reach when you begin to untangle the myth from fact. Your bipolar disorder is not your identity. There is hope, and Villa Kali Ma is here to help you heal. 

 

 

You’re sitting at your keyboard preparing for that meeting in 10 minutes and you know exactly what you need to accomplish before it starts, but every time you return to your task you find yourself refreshing your email. You don’t need your email. Indeed, you don’t even need your computer for this task but you’re caught in the loop of brain fog and struggling to accomplish anything beyond the immediate. 

Feel familiar? Us too.  

The daily mix of routine and upheaval can be a battle of wills between body and mind. If you’re struggling to find the clarity you need to win that battle today, we’ve got you covered. With five tips to find your way through the fog and a variety of programs to support you, let’s clear the haze together. 

1. Get the rest you need

Everyone has differing opinions on how much sleep we need to be successful and well rested. Both sleep deprivation and sleep cycle disruption can contribute to the feeling of brain fog that invades your waking hours.

If getting 8 hours doesn’t feel attainable or isn’t doing the trick, try focusing on the quality of sleep as well as finding ways to rest your body and reset. By reducing pre-bedtime screen exposure to focus on relaxation and lowering the temperature, you can create a more ambient resting space to make the most of your sleep. 

2. Connect with nature 

That sweet, sweet vitamin D does us all a little good but even if the sun isn’t shining, getting outside can be a powerful way to sweep away the dust in your mind. Increase clarity by going for a walk to get your blood pumping and take in the world around you as you go. 

Plan a hike to that summit you’ve always wanted to see or go explore a forgotten corner of your local beach. Spending time in less structured spaces and engaging with the beauty of the world around you is a powerful way to create a clearer consciousness. 

3. Focus with mindfulness 

Our mindfulness practices give a boost to body, mind and spirit. Both mindfulness and meditation can help you to  increase your focus, productivity and blood oxygenation levels- all a part of a clear mind. 

If you’ve never practiced mindfulness before, it may seem quite simple. Focusing inward on the breath and acceptance of whatever comes can be trickier than meets the eye. If you find yourself struggling, stepping out of your comfort zone and trying a group practice may help hone your mindfulness skills. 

4. Eat more brain fuel 

You already have to eat, so you may as well make that food work for you.  What we eat becomes a part of who we are and how we think. Balancing your diet to include the things that help superpower our brain function will maximize clarity without an active task to add to your schedule. 

Your brain is made primarily of fats, so a healthy dose of omega-3s will replenish and support your busy brain cells every day. Add a bit of caffeine for a supercharged boost to energy – make it green tea to double up on beneficial brain food. Last, focus on antioxidant intake from a variety of foods like blueberries, oranges, turmeric, or even broccoli for a colorful edge. 

5. Anchor yourself with awareness

Whether it’s awareness of the task you’re creating or awareness of your limitations, being aware of what may crowd your mind helps to lessen the burden. Distractions that creep in gives them the element of surprise, which can add to the stress, so give them breathing room for 5 or 10 minutes a day.

“Every day, stand guard at the door of your mind, and you alone decide what thoughts and beliefs you let into your life. For they will shape whether you feel rich or poor, cursed or blessed.” – John Rhone

 

Stay aware of the shape of your task. Providing some structure to your headspace (and your schedule) by putting a hard limit on how long those distractions can take a front seat can help you to navigate them with more control. 

Clarity is more than concentration 

There are so many facets to the things that go on in our mind. From conscious to unconscious, we move through millions of moments and processes every day. Some linger, creating a condensation of complication that can gather into a haze and keep us from feeling our best. That doesn’t feel great, especially when you’re busier than you want to be and still have so much to do. 

You have the power to lift the fog and clear your mind. With the tools we’ve learned together and the many you arrived here with, clarity is already within your grasp. For more support or individual guidance, reach out to us today. 

Whatever we were looking for as we journeyed through addiction, it certainly wasn’t mindfulness. You might even say we sought mindlessness.

We wanted to be “comfortably numb”, as the song goes. Fuller, deeper awareness of our own experience was the opposite of what we were after. 

Mindfulness does in fact walk in the other direction. Mindfulness digs towards embodied, grounded, integrated wakefulness. It creates a palpable body, inside of which we discover a spacious dimension. Mindfulness summons presence within us, a part able to tolerate all sensations, feelings, thoughts, and inner conflicts of the human condition.

A curiosity you may have noticed when playing with mindfulness: in an inner ambience of openness, acceptance, and stillness, a painful state of being sooner or later clears itself, dispelling all on its own. 

This is great news for those of us who like the idea of problems taking care of themselves without us having to do anything about it. If we can learn to provide compassionate witness to whatever is in us – that means a kind, loving, patience – we can learn for ourselves to eventually trust this natural process of consciousness taking care of its own needs. 

Simple, but not easy, like most good things!

If you’re like me, in the sense that you are influenced by the addict archetype, the idea of being more aware of what’s going on internally sounds at least a little bit threatening. The suggestion to experience what it’s like to be me more vividly…no thanks. I’m quite aware of what it’s like to be me, and it’s not that fun some days.

Mindfulness leads us towards ourselves, which is why those of us under the spell of addiction fear it, because we do not want to go towards ourselves. Ourselves is where the pain is, so we’re trying to get away from there. 

At the root of the problem of addiction, however, is the fact that avoidance of our inner sensations, no matter how justified, only makes it worse. Yes, our inner worlds are hellish sometimes. Yes, it is a natural reaction to pull our consciousness away from those hell realms to keep from fracturing. And yes, it all still needs to one day be witnessed mindfully. Because mindful loving witness heals. 

By avoidance, we turn the heap of problems that burdens us into a raging fire capable of true destruction. Because all inner soul signals suffer from the state of disconnection from love, when we withdraw our loving attention from our own inner signals, we are guaranteeing their exacerbation. 

And what’s within us is not an accident or an inconvenience. It’s not just the background hum of our life – it actually is our life. It’s us. If we’re in pain, that pain is us. All that we are yearning for is bound up in that pain. 

Mindfulness is what will take that pain and release it into a different kind of energy – aliveness, maybe even joy. Certainly, creativity and purpose. 

Ultimately, mindfulness will do for us what we tried to have happen through substances – help us tolerate what it’s like to be us. Help us transform. Reduce the volume, the intensity, & difficulty of that which we must face. Give us the power to experience our lives from a place of agency.  

Fortunately, there are many ways to be mindful. While we do need to be honest with ourselves about what mindfulness really is and what it is not, there are many paths in. We should walk in the ways that feel comfortable and most accessible to us, especially when first starting out. 

If you are able to access a kind self-witness through running, great. If a gentle flow state comes to you most easily when singing, painting, wandering in nature, great. Celebrate that. If you find peace in yoga or sit on a cushion, wonderful.

Self-validate if it is hard for you. Many of us have to spend years first building basic safety at the physiological level to be able to spend any time witnessing our own signals. 

That means learning to work with the nervous system to create and sustain sensations of safety, just being in your own skin and feeling ok. Experiment with calling upon the soothing powers of the parasympathetic nervous system, using practices like chanting and breath to help our biology work with us rather than against us. 

Above all, honor your own way. You are allowed to have a different experience than the others. Your mindfulness will be yours, as mine is mine. And the gifts you get from your mindfulness practice will be yours, too, truly yours. 

Of all the things addiction takes from the human spirit, most devastating of all is the loss of free will.

Handing ourselves over to the tyrannical rule of the addict within results in a soul-chilling condition: complete absence of personal power. 

No one has perfect control over themselves, and that’s ok. But in our intact state we normally have what is called “executive functioning”, which means that we can use our heads to decide what is best.  

Addiction takes away the executive function and rules us from the bottom up. Over time, we take on the form of a chaos of instincts rather than a coherent living organism with choice and meaning.  

The shame and guilt of having no self-control – being too gluttonous, too self-indulgent, going too far, wanting too much, not being able to say no – is a signature experience of the addict.

It is very debilitating not to be able to rely on one’s own will to make good choices. It’s embarrassing, at times humiliating, and it erodes self-respect. Not liking ourselves, we have even more of a reason to avoid ourselves through addiction.

But we can be released from excessive self-reproach through understanding that it’s not personal; addiction just is what it is. It’s an illness that targets willpower.

Treatment programs and recovery programs typically emphasize that to get anywhere in recovery, we must begin with recognizing the impairment of our will that has taken place without our realizing it. The addict within hides the facts of addiction from us, so that we did not see ourselves clearly. Even though no one likes to realize such a thing, there is a curious freedom on the other side of it. 

The silver lining of the loss of willpower is that we realize it no longer makes sense to blame and condemn ourselves. During the addiction we have to constantly struggle with ourselves – we fight, shame and blame ourselves, make up excuses, set intentions only to break them again. This is so dispiriting!

In recovery, we can set aside this whole dehumanizing pattern and recognize that like it or not, we have lost the executive ability of the brain to override our thoughts and impulses. 

In the state of surrender which recovery requires, we are arguably better off than if we had managed to keep our willpower intact. Recovery demands that something else other than the ego, something besides the “the little me” personality (Eckhart Tolle’s way of putting it) has to take charge here. 

The beauty of this is that the ego is really no fun, so in the end it’s a blessing to have it cracked away by recovery. The ego isn’t good or bad per se – what it is is an answer to pain, a collection of defenses and ways of separating ourselves from others psychologically so that we don’t have to constantly experience overwhelming feelings. It’s a patch, a band aid, a hack. It keeps us together for a while, but life under the ego is not the same thing as a fulfilling, joyful, meaningful, creative, or connected life.

The choice that addiction really takes from us is the option of living egoically only. What recovery shows us is that there is an alternative to living in the solitary confinement of ego – we can learn to rely on benevolent presence, higher forces, unity consciousness to help us navigate.  

Within an overall surrender to higher intelligence (which I believe is our own, and is found deep within us at the collective, unified level, as well as out there all around us), we can have preferences. We can collaborate. We can say “I vote we do this”. 

But it remains wise to say, “If that is in alignment with the best good of all” or to add on a quick “Your will, not mine”. 

There is still a part within me that does not want to yield control, nor admit she’s not really the best one to decide. That’s my ego, and just because I fired her from the executive role, it doesn’t mean I don’t have compassion. Of course she wants to be in charge. We all would like to have potency, agency and influence. I acknowledge it’s ok that she wants it. 

But I still choose to say, “I hear you, but let’s just run this up the flagpole first & see what Unity says.” I do that because I have found out the long, hard, un-fun way, what happens if I don’t. And I have found out the long, hard, un-fun way, the kind of pleasure, fulfillment, and lovely creative surprise that can happen if I do.