This year our team is making big shifts to step more into our purpose to give you the tools and the power to help you dive deeper into healing yourself and feeling your best. Our column, Unraveling, focuses on a new topic each month that we believe is important to address when you’re trying to navigate all the different stages of growth in your life. The purpose of this column is to help you drop the identity of all the programming and conditioning you’ve taken on throughout your life that’s negatively (and often silently) impacting your health and wellbeing on the physical, emotional and energetic layers of your body.

green leaf holding in the air

Shifting

There’s something about this time of year that makes me sit back and ask myself a bunch of questions about everything. I sort of think of this time of year leading up to September as a sort of semi-New Year more so than I do in January.

Perhaps it’s because of all those years of going back to school in September and starting a fresh year that makes it feel this way. I think that’s what it is. Perhaps you can relate? Even at 36 years old, I still feel like life is about to change and shift and start fresh in a few weeks for a whole new school year. You could say I keep myself on a ‘school calendar’ if you’d like, but perhaps that’s what keeps the child-like playfulness to my life.

The last few months of summer have left me feeling like a huge shift is happening in every area of my life. I’ve been feeling this way for a few months now but it seems every month brings about more awareness, more change, more shifts, more growth, more depth and more clarity. I believe a lot of this started when I began to feel better. When you’re cooped up for 12 years trying to survive and your only outlet is your work, doctors and sleep, you sort of end up in a life that feels like a horse with blinders on. It’s odd because when you’re in the thick of it, you don’t even realize you’re in it, but when you get out of it (and the unraveling process of getting out of it) you can’t help but wonder how much you didn’t see, feel, think, hear, smell, touch, etc. in life because you were so cooped up inside your own little world. Trauma is weird. It’s creepy in a way because we’ve all had traumatic situations in our lives but we brush them off as nothing, yet we carry around their emotional and energetic heaviness and wounds for years, sometimes lifetimes without realizing how much those situations shaped us and changed us.

Slowing Down

The shift I’m feeling in my life currently is the pull to slow down. I talked about this a few years ago in my feature about Why the Hustle Isn’t So Fabulous and I think that was the start of a spark inside of me to slow down. To slow my entire life down. Not just the running around to meetings. Not just the filling up my calendar. Not just trying to be everything for everyone. Not just the trying to do it all. But the deeper hustle- like not multi-tasking and actually being present when I’m working on something or writing this article or speaking with someone. I became really good at mutli-tasking. Really, really good. I’m sure you can relate. While it’s wonderful for getting stuff done, it messes with your life and actually makes me feel dizzy just thinking about it. It kept me in this loop of the trauma cycle (more on this coming soon) and completely out of my body always wanting to do, do, do and get more done and be more efficient and it totally whacked out my body and left me in a state of not being able to be present with people.

And right now, at this point in my life, what I want is to be more present, more grounded in myself, more self-aware because to me that’s the real growth in life. When we succumb to our knee jerk reactions and allow ourselves to be triggered by others (all of which just stems from our own childhood unmet needs) we feel out of sorts and discombobulated and our cortisol and adrenaline is sky high and our head is pounding and it’s a NIGHTMARE. Yuck. Not my cup of tea. Those days of getting ‘bent out of shape’ are over for me.

I’m slowing down everything. The way I food shop. The way I cook my meals. The way I have a conversation. The way I say, “NO” more. The way I spend more quality time with myself to reflect on the woman I want to be in my future and how I want to step forward into a new season and so much more.

Releasing and Letting Go

All I can say is that I feel such a release, a letting go, a deeper sense of relaxation in my nervous system, which is helping to speed up all the healing in my body. But most of all, I have peace of mind. I’m not endlessly scrolling through social media. I’m no longer trying to attend every event or gathering. I’m not feeling like I have to do it all. I’m just BEING and wow, what a shift. I’m not going to lie, a bit (and a lot) of anxiety pops up at first when you’re shifting because your nervous system is so used to going, going, going, going, going, going, going but when you sit with that resistance, it fades like the steam coming out of a tea kettle and what you find is stillness and peace underneath it.

Shifting doesn’t mean rushing or seeking advice from someone who is trying to squeeze you into a one-size-fits-all approach that isn’t addressing what you need. During my own journey, I felt every so-called “expert” I saw was trying to fit me into this boxed approach and sadly I started to rely on these “experts” as the authority and trusted their advice more than I trusted myself, which meant I lost complete trust over my own intuition and I also completely lost myself in the process. Yet what the process of unraveling myself has done for me is to teach me and guide me into who I truly am and to realize that the power is always inside of me, not in someone outside of me, as much as society tells us that’s the way to go. Do yourself a favor and begin to deepen the trust in yourself and get still, get quiet with yourself and allow yourself to shift slowly into the woman you’re meant to be. This is a shift in your energy and it begins with you.

Shifting is a beautiful thing. It can feel scary, sure, if you let it scare you. Or you can let life shift around you and let yourself flow with it instead of fighting against what life is trying to tell you.

Here’s what I do know about shifting and growing and change…it’s a slow process and it’s also a beautiful one filled with lots of signs throughout your day that you wouldn’t otherwise catch if you were busy going, going, going. Life is always trying to teach us something, to help us heal, to be a mirror for us to see our own unresolved fears that are reflected back to us and so much more…

So, this week, allow yourself some quiet time to think about the woman you want to be as you step into this new season/New Year and allow your life to shift with you instead of fighting whatever it is that’s happening. What you can’t see, yet is how whatever situation you’re in is bringing you to the exact place you’re meant to be. Trust that.

Enjoy these last few days of summer.

Much love,

-Amie


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3 comments

  1. Pretty! This was an extremely wonderful article.
    Thank you for providing this information.

    1. Thank you so much Heather; great to hear from you! So glad to hear. Keep going. Transformation is a long journey and it’s a beautiful one. Enjoy! xx

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