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15th Feb 2023 - The challenge in feelings of anticipation and excitement.
Dear reader,
My last few weeks have been filled with excitement! I was so grateful to make it to Belgium for my brother's army base training graduation day. It felt like a late second Christmas too catching up with family I hadn't seen in a long time. The daffodils are telling me spring is here and anyone who knows me, knows how much I love the sun returning.
A time for new beginnings and how much this is true for me right now. We can't wait to seal the deal on our own home (fingers crossed please!) and that's not the only deal we'll be sealing this year :) All the sensational future planning, marriage, honeymoons, hens, family gatherings, visions of house renovations and new opportunities coming my way, is testing me to stay grounded.
I'm so proud of where the road has lead me in my work and have really enjoyed conversations around my newly launched group programme. Some of you I've noticed might prefer exploring these topics one-on-one and I'm listening, so do tell me if there's support you are looking for and haven't quite found yet. All info's on the bottom, so I won't get into it here, but I did want to share my immense gratitude to the bravery and honest presence I've been honoured to witness in my group gatherings and private clients lately.
Now life hasn't been all rosy and there's been the usual obstacles, but I wanted to take the opportunity here to normalise the challenge in anticipation and excitement. If you're anything like me and you have a sensitive nervous system, the life situations that arouse these feelings, might keep you from finding your inner calm sometimes too.
After thrilling adventures, entertaining get togethers or exciting news, I can literally be lying awake at night daydreaming or planning my future. Feelings of excitement can lean quite closely to anxiousness in our system looking for safety and security. Even though too much safety could get boring and prompts us to look for adventure. It's ok to need some time to process and come down from the adventurous ladder at your own pace to find solid ground and a clear head.
Have you ever asked yourself why you're not feeling as great as you should with 'everything' going well in your life? Or why you are not fully embracing an amazing opportunity or good thing happening to you? The more you are looking for the answer to why you are feeling a certain way, the less there is space for you to actually just feel it, let it flow through you and move on. We can really get stuck in our head figuring out all the reasons why.
Now the question 'why' can be a useful one too. Let's all praise my mum who answered my endless but why... but why's... from when I was barely able to speak. Curiosity and eagerness to learn can open our minds to the wonders of life. And with awareness comes all sorts of power: to understand, to utilise, to discern, to decide, to change, to say yes or no, ...
But sometimes it's more supportive to just stay present with your experience and unapologetically feel what you are feeling. Understanding that you should feel happy or grateful, is not what will make you feel it. Thinking that you shouldn't feel tired or restless, won't make you feel rested.
I love allowing myself to celebrate the goodness in life in three stages: the anticipation, looking forward to exciting times ahead; the experience, noticing the goodness when it's happening; the memory, looking back with gratitude. Without experiencing the present moment, we're not allowing ourselves the actual goodness and we're all here wanting to feel good.
Life has been quite exciting, so I'm being extra kind to myself.
Things can be good and you can still be extra kind to you!
Spring is in the air and I found some tunes to shake it all out! My partner's words when I was doing an imaginary tribal dance: well that went from being slightly into chanting and drumming music into a full on obsession pretty quickly :') It's so important to move our bodies, now dance for 5 min and tell me you don't feel any different after it.