Flourishing Seeds Wellness

Have you ever noticed how quickly we try and push away the feelings we don’t like, or the lengths to which we will go to avoid sitting with them? From early on in life, most of us have this way of thinking engrained. Fake it til you make it. Put on a happy face at all costs. Don’t think about that! Distract yourself. Tuck those “negative” emotions away. Turn that frown upside down! Out of sight, out of mind. Get over it! Of course nobody wants to feel pain, but what if I told you that discomfort can be a gift? Discomfort is a response to pain and fear. It is there to teach us something. If we avoid it, we miss out on its lesson. Furthermore, our fears will keep coming back until we effectively clear them and put them in their place. We cannot do that until we can feel that discomfort and know it in its entirety. Until then, we remain victim to those pain and fears, as they run amok creating anxiety and hindering our ability to cope as effectively as we could with life’s challenges.

Have you ever stopped to think about expectations and the role they play in your life? Which expectations do you carry that are tied to “wants” or “should bes”, as opposed to what truly is? How much frustration might be eliminated by managing those expectations? We have become a society of convenience and quick fixes based on those (perhaps unrealistic) expectations of what should be, but at what cost? We are now beginning to see and understand the effects of this on our global environment through things like plastic pollution and climate change (the entitlement of convenience at all cost), but what about the toll this is taking on our own personal environment? What effect does this have on our bodies and minds? According to the Oxford Dictionary, an expectation is “a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future”, or “a belief that someone will or should achieve something”. Read that again, a B-E-L-I-E-F. Not what actually is. Now, what happens when an expectation is not met? If you are anything like me, I would venture to guess you might feel a sense of disappointment and frustration. And what does that feel like in your body? Does it present like anxiety? Do you feel your body clench and/or your heart race? Do you feel yourself get red hot with anger, or perhaps feel your head throb? And what about your mind; do you find yourself spending a lot of energy perseverating on what isn’t or what you feel should be, instead of accepting what is and moving on? Do you feel your thoughts derailing? And how much time does it take your mind to recover from what isn’t as you think it should be before you can focus on your next steps? What if you could harness the negative energy wasted on those reactions and use it for solution-based thinking instead? As Wayne Dyer so poignantly put it, “Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than how you think it should be”. I can attest to the truth of this statement. I feel the significant difference in my mind and body since investing the time to retrain my mind. This does not mean that I do not have hopes and dreams for myself that I stop working on when obstacles present or stop me from achieving my dreams, it simply means that I have stopped wasting my energy on the things that I can’t change that I have no direct control over, and move my way around them, finding other solutions instead. I have stopped getting mad at things I wish were different, and instead accept them for what they are. I expect that when I call a company I may be placed on hold for a long time; I expect that when I wake up in the morning there is as much chance I will wake up to sunshine as to rain; In the winter, I expect there will be cold days – even many of them; I expect that there is as much chance that a planned day will go as planned, as it will not. Is this an easy thing to do? Well, I suppose that depends on how you look at it - how you interpret that word “easy”, and funnily enough, what your expectations are. The mind tweaks are not difficult concepts, but just like preparing to run a marathon, it takes patience and practice, perseverance, and upkeep. What I can say for certain, is this…. Through managing expectations to accept all possibilities, far less time is spent feeling those negative lower dimensional feelings of those “shoulda, coulda, wouldas”. You no longer give as much of your sacred energy away to those things you cannot change and instead have more of that energy to use on propelling yourself forward, and that is an extremely powerful and freeing feeling.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Lisa Wilder, and I have what I call a “wondering mind”. Although this can take me off on all sorts of tangents, it should not be confused with a “wandering mind”. It is much different. It means that there is very little I approach without curiosity. There is very little I see as black and white, and I believe that all things carry aspects of both good and bad. It is not finding something that is right, but more finding what is RIGHT FOR YOU, instead of letting someone else tell you what that should be. But in a world as crazy and busy as ours, how do we do this? How can we best bring forth food for thought and find different points of view? Through open and honest dialogue of course! Many of us have heard of Brene Brown. If you haven’t, I highly suggest looking her up. One of my favorite Ted talks is the one she gives on vulnerability. She says that “vulnerability is the only bridge to connection”. I would like to add something here though - I don’t believe it is the only bridge to connection, I believe it is the only bridge to TRUE CONNECTION, to honest connection, and to authentic connection. Vulnerability means letting the outside see your inside warts and all. It means letting people know your true thoughts and owning up to and sharing the all of who you are. Yes, this can be so very scary to do…letting others see what we feel are our weaknesses and flaws, but as she so poignantly puts it, “Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” I will add one other word here, GROWTH. It is through vulnerability that we grow. https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability?language=en Living vulnerably is easier said than done. It feels great when we are validated and people cheer us on, but what happens when we encounter “those against”? You know – those people who are quick to shoot down our ideas, who laugh and make fun, tell us we are crazy, or tell us we are wrong in our thinking? We shut down of course, turtling back into our shells where we feel protected again. This is NORMAL and part of natural progression!!!!!! Growth is never linear. Just like life, it is full of ups and downs, but without growth we stay stagnant which can keep us from reaching our full potential and/or living the life that speaks to our soul, and instead we fall into the trap of living the life others (parents, friends, relatives, and society at large) think we should. In the past 2 years I have learnt not just the importance of vulnerability, but the essentialness of it, in order to live my best life possible. Without judgement, I ask each of you to think about what vulnerability means to you, and where you might allow it to come into your life. What feelings do you have around it? Do you live vulnerably, or do you close yourself off? Do you speak your truth, or stay silent so as not to make waves or for fear of feeling silly? Who do you allow yourself to be vulnerable with, and what might allow you to be more vulnerable with others? Where might you benefit from adding vulnerability into your life? Then I will challenge you to take it one step further and consciously bring more of it into your life. Find comfort in the discomfort, move in a little closer, open yourself up, and make friends with that scary beast…let it become your ally instead of enemy. I can guarantee it will only help you in reaching your most authentic self, so you may shine the beautiful gift of you onto our world. As Brene Brown would say – “dare to be”. Wishing you all a wonder-filled kind of day!