What’s your vibe?
Working with the etheric body will change your vibration and create love and trust.
- Place a hand on your heart.
- Take a deep breath.
- How do you feel?
- What do you need today?
- Where’s your head at?
And on a scale of Ugh, I feel terrible and I want to hide away to I feel alive and excited about the potential of my future, how is your energy flowing?
Your vibration, your vibe, is important. It’s the energy that courses through you, and that you radiate out into the world; and by extension, it’s the same energy that you welcome back. What you give more or less equates to what you receive, so getting familiar with your vibration is an important part of inner healing work.
If you’re hurting, you’re more likely to attract people who are hurting. If you don’t believe in your own worth, others won’t treat you as if you’re worthy of genuine love and respect. If your vibe is low, heavy, and dark, it will be difficult to draw toward you people and experiences that are vibrating higher, lighter, and brighter.
Instead of wondering what people think of you, consider what you think of them.
When you meet someone new, or even when you spend time with someone you already know well, what’s your focus? Do you find yourself wondering what they think of you? Worrying about how they’re interpreting your words, your movements, and general being? Do you spend hours after meeting someone new agonizing over whether or not you made a good impression?
You’re sending yourself the message that you’re unworthy of feeling good just for yourself, and that as a human being, you’re only valuable if that other person or those other people approve of you/what you’re doing/the words you say/the way you look, etc. You’re trying to be somebody else’s perfect. And honestly… that’s never going to happen. People hold different opinions and expectations and these are ever-changing.
Cultivating a strong sense of self and knowing your own worth are incredibly important for inner healing because you cannot stay on this path if you’re doing it for someone else. Undoubtedly, others will benefit from your healing. It will make you stronger, more empathetic, and truer to yourself, and your powerful vibration will radiate out and enrich the lives of everyone around you. But that can’t be the purpose of it.
Go back in time
The body develops during childhood, but that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. Now is the time to build a new relationship with your emotions.
The experiences we have as children can literally change the structure of our brain. That can be a really good thing, with positive connections made all the time; but when we have a bad experience before our brain has developed sufficiently to understand and process it in a healthy way, structures and connections are built that affect us long into adulthood. As a result, the trauma you suffered during your childhood could be governing the way you handle experiences and your emotions right now.
Although your childhood self may have been intensely impacted by traumatic experiences, leading to cognitive distortions that have lasted into adulthood, you can be liberated through healing
sit with your trauma. The big stuff and the small stuff. Sit with it, and notice what stands out. Depending on the length of your list, the practice could take up to an hour, a day, a week, or longer. Feel free to split it into shorter sessions; for example, you could divide your list into smaller lists of 10 memories each, and meditate on one of those smaller lists at a time.
Whether you decide to do it all at once or take it slowly, make sure you get to the end of your list. It’s important to sit with all of it. It’s absolutely, perfectly OK for this to take some time. Inner healing isn’t a quick-fire, snappy process; we’re in this for true, deep, sustainable results. If you need to move slowly, give yourself permission to do so – you can work at a pace that feels right for you.
It’s not magic – it really is work. But now you have a list of the limiting beliefs that you’ve identified. They’ve been governing how you live your life. You’ve brought them out of the shadows, into the light of day (or into the light of your lamp, or whatever light you’ve got going on). You can see them clearly.
What happens when you can see your limiting beliefs clearly like this? You get to change them.
Work with you in a new way
The mind is flexible. It wants to learn, and it’s willing to change.
You aren’t responsible for your childhood conditioning, but you need to take responsibility for changing it now, as an adult. Blaming your past for a limiting mindset doesn’t fix it. You have to seek new ways of thinking and being, and practice those new ways until they become more real to you than your old beliefs.
Practice really is key; and reparenting is a simple tool that you can use every single day. Reparenting is usually taught to parents because it’s a way to care for yourself as an adult at the same time as caring for your children, and to address your childhood trauma so you don’t pass it on to your kids. But this process can be of value to everyone – parents or not.
Sometimes, reparenting is as simple as repeating a childhood interaction in a different way. For example, if you regularly tell yourself you’re worthless when you make mistakes, you may create neural pathways that make that reaction – and the emotions and physical sensations that come with it – more and more automatic. It becomes easier and quicker for you to feel that you’re worthless.
But if you change that, and begin to work on telling yourself that you’re learning and developing every time you make a mistake, you start to build (and then strengthen) a pathway toward that feeling of growth. The responses you repeat become more and more natural to you, until you jump straight to those responses without even having to think about it.
The new systems of understanding that we create through reparenting can weaken the negative connections we made as children, and build stronger, alternative pathways that give us a more positive way of seeing things
You are free
Freedom is not a place, but a state of the self – and an expression of being whole. Of healing.
An important part of experiencing freedom is knowing that you’re a part of the fabric of the Universe. Not just knowing this with your brain, but feeling it, embodying it, knowing it with every cell, every subtle energy flow, every part of you. Knowing that you’re not the wave, you’re the ocean.
Get settled. As always, you’ll need to be in a quiet and comfortable place, free from disturbances. Take your time to make the adjustments you need to make: closing doors, putting on (or taking off) clothing to make sure you’re a comfortable temperature. Anything you need to do.
- Find your seated posture. If you feel comfortable sitting upright without support for your back, great; but if not, feel free to sit on a chair that supports your spine, or sit on the floor with your back against a wall. The goal isn’t to adopt a formal meditation posture, but to feel steady and comfortable, and able to focus on your practice without being distracted by an aching back, hips, or shoulders.
- Close your eyes and take a few deep, full breaths. Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. The out breath could be gentle, or you could turn it into a powerful, loud sigh – whatever helps you to feel relaxed, to arrive in the present moment, and to let go of the rest of the day up to this point. Then allow the breath to settle into a natural rhythm.
- Notice the body. The parts of the body that are supported by the ground, the floor, or the furniture beneath you. The parts of the body that feel warmer or cooler than others.
- Notice the length of the spine – from the very bottom, right up to the top.
- Notice the weight of the eyelids.
- Allow yourself to be here, and only here. Because there’s nowhere else to be. Nothing else to do.
- Now, bring the awareness to the center of the chest. We’re noticing this area – the heart and the space around it – because this freedom practice isn’t just about the mind. We’re going to use the mind to do it, but it’s working on every aspect of your being. It’s a practice of the heart as much as a practice of the mind.
- So, notice the heart. Notice the chest. As you breathe, allow the chest to expand. The shoulders broaden slightly. The chest opens. The heart opens. The space that grows there is a space of connection, and you feel your constant, unshakable connection with a greater whole.
- Say the following statement, or affirmation, out loud, or silently in your mind: With an open heart, I’m connected with oneness.
- Allow this openness and expansion in the chest to remain – without force – as you begin to visualize yourself standing on a beach.
- Really take the time to put yourself there. Notice the sand or pebbles beneath your feet; the textures against your bare skin. See the color of the sky and the ocean out ahead of you. You can smell the salt on the air. Feel the gentle breeze brushing against you. You can hear the waves, softly lapping at the shore.
- You stand at the edge of the ocean. Looking out.
- And then, when you feel present in this moment at the edge of the ocean, dip a toe into the water. You lift your leg – feeling the muscles working, the extension of your toes toward the ocean. Then you feel the coolness enveloping you as your toe touches the water.
- And you notice that as soon as you come into contact with the ocean, you become water. That toe becomes water; it’s still you, and yet it’s water. You move your foot further into the ocean and as you do so, your whole foot becomes water.
- When you pull your foot out, it’s as it was before: your foot. Skin, bone, muscle.
- Curiously, you decide to go further – because you feel the power of becoming one with the water. You feel the strength of being not only you, but also something bigger.
- You step into the ocean with both feet. Gradually, you go further out and as each part of your body is submerged, it becomes water. Until you are water – all of you. You’re a part of this expansive blue, and it feels good.
- You lie on your back with
- your water body, feeling perfectly supported and held by the ocean. You float on your back, gazing up from this altered state, and you’re no longer held captive by doubt, uncertainty, or insecurity, or fear.
- Because you’re not alone. Not ever. You’re supposed to be here. You’re a part of this. You always have been, and you always will be.
- Take your time here. There’s no rush.
- And then, when you feel ready, gently make your way back to the shore. Perhaps you swim, or simply move there effortlessly.
- You stand up and your body resumes its usual form.
- You take a few easy breaths, and look out at the ocean again. And a gentle smile spreads across your face because you’re not trapped in any perceived or prescribed version of yourself, or of who anyone thinks you’re supposed to be.
- With that smile, you say again: With an open heart, I’m connected with oneness.
- Finally, in your own time, bring your awareness back to your breath. Take in three deep, slow breaths through your nose and slowly let them out through your mouth.
- And when you’re ready, gently and slowly open your eyes.