Shifting Gears

I have spent the past ten days in a tailspin. My guides told me that sharing channeled material is not what is intended, for now. They said this is instead the time for me to share right out of my own heart. To share my own processes as I navigate a spiritual path, to share my experiences and observations as I try to reconcile the desire and drive to expand with the ingrained human bullshit that keeps showing up for me. I didn't take this news very well. I was really moving along just fine, enjoying the channeled information I received from my teachers in spirit and enjoying sharing that info with others.To me, that is valuable information. To me, that is what people want and what they benefit from. Not me ninny-nagging about being stuck or lost or scared. People are busy enough with their own stuff; why on earth would anyone want to hear about mine?? But the message kept coming. Share your process. Write your experience. Be real. Be raw. 

This made me realize how unreal I've been. When I have tried to sit and write in the last week I've not been able to stop myself from falling into the habit of writing for the reader. Editing, polishing, tying everything up in a neat package, being aware of what message I was sending, and what image I was projecting. I mean after all, this is what a writer does! But I tried to stop, to shift gears, to follow their suggestion of being raw and writing purely from the heart. I didn't know how. This led to immeasurable frustration. I punched my fist into my notebook. I threw my notebook across the room. I ranted at my guides. I ranted at my boyfriend for well over an hour demanding to know what the fuck was wrong with me that this was causing me such turmoil and what the hell I was supposed to do about it. Nobody wants to hear my shit! That's not valuable! Advice from the other side, now that's valuable!

A second piece to all of this is that my guides also said that the writing I do is primarily for me and my personal experience. If I want to share it, fine, but it's not my main purpose to share. In other words, they could care less if I share it or not. This is  hugely upsetting news to my ego who needs a sense of purpose to feel valuable and who has tied all of my self worth to contributing. What?! It doesn't matter if I write professionally/publicly or not?? Nobody up there cares? How am I supposed to prove myself and feel good about myself if I can't gain this external sense of validation?! Once I had all of that tantrum energy out of the way I stepped back. I needed to put some space around all of this. I had no idea how all of this internal conflict was going to resolve itself but I needed to stop thinking about it for a while and just breathe. For a few days I didn't think about writing or needing to contribute. I planted a garden. I read a novel. I went to a festival.

And now, I'm sitting down at the keyboard ready to give this thing a try. Why is it so hard for me to write about my process and personal experiences? The truth is, I'm scared. The truth is, I care more than I thought I did about what people think and about being judged. The truth is I want approval, I want acceptance, and I want to be liked. And the truth is, more than I want these things, I hate that I want them. For me, living a life of freedom, empowerment, and authenticity is primary. It's everything my path is dedicated to. When I'm in those spaces of freedom and empowerment I feel completely in alignment with life. I'm happy, confident, and comfortable in my own skin. But when I'm not operating in that particular bandwidth--when I'm feeling insecure, small, and constricted I can't hold the same space of love and compassion for myself. Those times I feel lost, confused or small I have judged myself as a failure. I saw that as relapsing, backsliding. Undoing all the work I've done to be free of old conditioned beliefs. I believed I wasn't in flow with life when I was in that space of smallness. I would then resist vehemently the way I was feeling. Why am I back here?! I've done the work. I was feeling so good and sure of myself. It's not normal to be back in this place! I believed I couldn't function properly when I was feeling scared or small. I couldn't write from that space (I had to wait until I was feeling confident and self-assured to write). I couldn't teach a good yoga class from that space (my best classes can only occur when I'm in those spaces of freedom and empowerment). These are the beliefs I've held and the beliefs I'm being challenged to release. And this is where I've been caught up. I've been more attached and focused on producing/contributing to help others grow and expand that when my own shit showed up I got mad and frustrated about it, but didn't actually take the time to work on me. I thought I was, but I wasn't. I've been so outwardly focused on helping others, both from a sense of so desperately wanting to help people grow and from a belief that my self worth and value depended on me contributing and helping others. I've gotten lost in this outward focus of creating, sharing, doing, producing because my worth and value are so intrinsically tied to it, that I've lost sight of my true purpose. Which is to love me and understand at every conceivable level that my worth and value are tied to nothing external.


I've been separating my humanness from my spirituality, despite the fact that I preach the opposite. I advise people to honor and acknowledge and love all parts of their self, all of their various states of being. But I haven't been doing this for myself. I've been operating under this "I have to have my shit together" mindset. I only believed I had my shit together on the days I felt most balanced, clear, free of insecurities. But the days I don't--that requires a new perspective. Feeling lost or stuck or small does not mean I don't have my shit together. It means I'm having a human experience. Yes, I want to move through it with as much grace as possible. Yes I want freedom and empowerment to replace those feelings of inferiority for good so I can stop circling back to them. But I can stop judging myself so harshly and stop feeling like a complete failure for "being here again". I'm not meant to reside in a narrow bandwidth of emotion and expression. I have a whole range. And it ALL contributes to expansion. Now, by learning to honor that whole range I can learn to love myself wholly and fully. I can stop dividing myself into parts. I can learn to love myself brave and love myself scared.

So what this means going forward is that my writing will be different. It will be raw, uncensored and from my heart. I won't polish it to please the reader. I won't censor my language for fear of offending others. I will write for me. I will write for my own healing and my own expansion. I will pour out my heart--the good, the bad, the beautiful and the messy, because writing all of that out helps me. I don't even need to share it, that's not the point. But I will share it just in case it might help someone else love themselves a little bit more. It is always my hope that what I do will in some way help others. But that can no longer be my driving goal at the expense of my authenticity. Right now, my goal needs to be cultivating unconditional love for myself. By learning to grow more fully into self love and a sense of self worth that is completely independent of what I contribute and what people think about those contributions (or lack thereof), I believe I can do the most good in this world. We are all connected. We are each one thread of a wholly connected tapestry. By healing my own wounds, I heal humanity's wounds.

In Love,
~heather