I remember when I received a call from a young mother, who was desperately reaching out for support. She said, ”I don't think it was an accident that you have come into my life. I really need help with my daughter, she's got so much anxiety building inside her. Maybe it's not anxiety, but she's just so grumpy all the time!"    

I gently asked, "Hearing your inner sense of desperation, I'm wondering if you would be willing to receive some empathy guesses from me?"   

"Yes," she responded, "I'm so desperate I will try anything! It's so hard to parent her!"   

"Oh, feeling so desperate," noticing my tummy contract, I paused for a moment, "I'm wondering if it might be supportive just to drop into your body for a moment and notice any sensations, any sense of where in your body this feeling of desperation reside?"   

After a moment of silence, she answered, "In my stomach."  

"Does it feel tight or hard?...

Have you ever felt intense emotions? I have. It’s really important, if we haven’t had anyone to accompany us with intense emotions, to know that it’s possible to develop not just a tolerance for them, but to welcome them and recognize energetically what they are meaning for us.

To recognize what the gifts are that they are bringing to our awareness, rather than trying to push them away or smoosh them down. They will just get bigger when we do that.

I was working with someone who was feeling very intense emotions. They would have very intense anger, then it would flip into very intense sadness. Their experience was, when these intense emotions came, it always made life more difficult, everything would get worse, and they always felt they were made wrong.

There was no sense of welcoming of their intense emotions, so their intense emotions got even more intense. That can burn us out, it’s really hard on our nervous system, pumping all this cortisol and...

Fear and anger can be really powerful forces. When I’ve worked with people, and taken time to do my own inner work, a discovery that I’ve made is any time that I’ve had an anger reaction, when I can slow it down I unpack it, I discover there was a fear right underneath it that started the cascade of emotional reaction within me. Depending on what our life experience has been, that can look really different for all of us. 

I was working with someone the other day, and they noticed that this fear came up really quickly, and right on its heels there was an anger. Just a feisty anger and so much of it. Then, there would be a complete shut down right after that.  

As we took time with this, and went into the process of Healing You, there was an image that came up of a small child within that had a sense of heaviness and wanted to cry. There was no comfort, no soothing available. As we rode the wave of this energy there was a memory of big people and lots...

Life can feel really hard, and it can feel extremely exhausting. I know in my life there have been times when I’m in that place, when I’m that uncomfortable, that it feels like others just won’t understand.  

Or, maybe it seems as if I’m being treated different because of my age, or my gender, or my job, or where I’m at. But there is some kind of a judgement that comes, and it feels like people don’t really know me. Or maybe for you it’s like people don’t even know how to have a conversation that’s real, rather than just surface. You can end up feeling sad underneath that, and all alone. 

For some of us, when we go down that slippery slope, it’s a balance between falling into a pretty severe depression or feeling a lot of anger. It’s kind of black and white.  

As I’ve worked with others, and myself, with this problem where life just feels so hard and so exhausting, what I’ve discovered is...