Why is it so important to support ourselves?
[Intro] Hello and welcome to Empowered to Thrive. I'm Corinne Powell, your host, and I am always so thrilled to have this time with you. Thanks for joining me. I'm here with my cup of coffee, looking forward to this time that we get to spend together.
Corinne Powell: How are you doing? I always hope this is a time where you get to exhale for a few minutes and feel that you're supported in this space because you deserve that. My hope and my aim are that you leave feeling like you've been given a warm hug and a dose of hope, knowing that somebody's cheering you on because I am.
And I know that right now things are difficult for many people. There is so much going on in the world at large. And honestly, I feel like that's always been the case. But because we have so much broadcasting, social media, news coverage, we're inundated with horrible news. We are constantly being told something, being shown something. It's overwhelming. And that is why it is so important we have boundaries in place.
We have to know what is to our benefit to listen to, to take in, and how much. There's times when I'm somewhere, I'm at the mechanics, I'm out in public, or I'm at a hotel, and I have the option of putting the news on. And I have to be really aware because I can only handle so much.
There's an energetic dream to hearing horrible, horrific news, and especially when it's constant.
Think about the news station - people are tuning in, tuning out, tuning in, tuning out, just like the radio. So they're putting things on repeat. So you're hearing and watching one story and then a little while later, the same thing is being put in your face. And you're hearing the same thing and you're seeing the same thing. Let's all support ourselves in this, in the world we live in right now. We've got to limit our screen time. We have to limit what we put in front of our face, what we put into our ears, because it is impacting us.
We need to get outdoors and step into nature more often.We need to ground ourselves either by being outdoors or in other ways that we can ground ourselves. Turning off. Unplugging. Laying down, sitting down, noticing, like just taking time to notice. How am I doing? How is my body feeling? Breathing. Intentional breathing can reset everything. There is so much to be said about doing life differently than what is typical in the US right now. I don't think it serves us well to mirror a lot of what is happening.
I know that I make a tremendous effort to be in front of my screen less, to connect more with my children, to sit on the floor and play with them, to engage with them, to not have my phone constantly in front of my face or in my hands. I'm aware we need it for various things, but I'm convinced we don't need it as much as we have it.
Yesterday, I didn't purposely, I just left my phone at home when I went to do school pickups. And it's about an hour and a half round trip. And it felt so relieving to actually know like, I don't have a way to do any work right now. I don't have a means of listening to say a podcast, I could have chosen to turn on the radio. I didn't. I wanted the silence. If my daughter asked me to turn on a certain song, I would just not be able to. I didn't have Apple Music. I didn't have YouTube right there.
I really was relieved that I didn't need to contact anyone and nobody needed to contact me. In the back of my mind, I thought, what if there's an emergency and the school is trying to reach me? The only reason I have my volume on during the day is because in case the school tries to reach me, otherwise my phone's on silent. I'm a busy mom. If I get a business call, I'm not gonna answer that call unless I'm in my office. If I'm with my kids, I don't typically even take other phone calls and chit chat. It's too difficult for me because my kids are needing me, pulling at me. It's very overstimulating to me to try to have a conversation with somebody and call that enjoyable when there's all the other demands around me.
So with this...I bring it up because my son says to me on the way home, mom, what if you had broken down? Like you didn't have your phone with you. Because we're so accustomed to always having the phone. It feels like a catastrophe could happen if we don't have it. But I know we lived without phones.
So, hey, I am the type of person who would stand outside of my car and wave somebody down if I needed to. I would do it. And I would expect that at some point someone would help me. And I really do trust that the universe has my best in mind and that I am safe. And this is not a conversation that I'm trying to bring up for you to feel the need to remind me of all of the things that could happen to me in that type of case that would be harmful. I live my life the way I live my life, and I'm not afraid of those things.
So what can we do in the everyday to support ourselves? And that leads me into this place of just bringing up why it's also helpful and important to have a guide, to have a support system in place, a person you can talk to when you're on your own healing journey. Because there are going to be outside perspectives that you're not going to be able to see.
This doesn't mean you have to listen to what someone else says and bypass your own inner wisdom. It's more so enhancing your outlook. It's illuminating it by bringing in other perspectives, ones that have your best in mind. If you were to ask about somebody that I deeply care about, I'm going to have my opinions, my judgments, my hopes and desires and dreams for them.
And of course, even if you come to me for a session, I have my own biases. Yes, there's judgments that I still carry, but it's a little different than say, if you're one of my family members coming to me and we're talking about something. And why I bring that up is because sometimes we have family members, we have friends who want to give us their opinions. They want to interject and say, here's advice. You should follow this advice. And they probably come from a really loving, caring heart. And sometimes that advice might be exactly what you need. And other times it's overbearing, it's pushy, it's driven energy versus the energy that says you're an adult capable of trusting and listening to your own inner wisdom. You're an adult you're allowed to make mistakes. You're allowed to just figure it out as you go. You don't need to know everything before you start making changes and making moves forward.
So I think an outside perspective can be really helpful, can illuminate things that you might not be able to see, that the people closest to you might not be able to see. And it's a way of knowing someone's in your corner whenever you need it. As far as I'm concerned, we get enough criticism, we get enough judgments passed on us that we don't need more of that. When somebody comes and shares what's going on in their life, what they're trying to work on, it's not that I think everything is perfect, that there's nothing to improve on. It's simply that my focus isn't on talking about what they're doing wrong and how they need self-improvement.
That's not my goal. I believe things will improve organically as nurture and loving care is given to specifically the inner child. And then it also translates into the present self being given that support. Because think about the little person you were at five years old. Now, you're still the same person. You've grown up, you've developed, you're still the same person. So if I'm speaking to your five-year-old child self, intuitively, your present self is being impacted as well.
But I'm not going to sit there and shame or criticize that little five-year-old and tell them what they're doing wrong and how they could do it better and start correcting them. I'm going to actually start to cheer them on and talk to their heart perhaps about the sadness they're feeling, the anger that they have, the attention that nobody's giving them that they need. I'm going from that angle. To speak to their soul in a transformative, powerful way.
So some people might look at it and say, but wait, that child needs correction right now. That child needs to be punished, to be told what they're doing that they shouldn't be doing and what they should be doing. And I really think a lot of behavior corrects itself when people are given the space to feel their emotions, to be validated, in their emotions. “I see you're really sad. I can tell you're really frustrated. That's so disappointing what happened, isn't it?”.
And then attuned to, “I feel your sadness. Yeah, I'm here with you. It's okay to be angry right now. We're not gonna hit when we're angry, but it's okay to feel your anger”. I might offer a somatic suggestion for what they could do in that moment. My little two year old sometimes would roll around on the floor. Sometimes my 11 year old will push against a wall, breathing, planted feet firmly on the floor, pushing against the wall as a way to release some of the frustration. Sometimes we just need to get in the fetal position and cry. We need to go stand outside, feel the coolness of the air and breathe. Connect back into our body. Allow the emotions to naturally process through us so they can be discharged.
My two year old doesn't need to feel her emotions for a super long time to then have me be there when she's ready to reengage in play. But if I tell her, stop crying, get up off the floor, and I hijack the process that she needs to be taking, I do something detrimental for her. But if I just allow the natural process to take its place, she moves through it, and then I'm there to help her re-engage and have a good time. All she's doing is feeling emotions in her body and trying to figure out how to manage them because sometimes it can be really overwhelming to feel that flood of emotion in the body.
But if we learn that - “Oh, this is natural to feel, I'm allowed to feel it”, and then it passes pretty quickly. Then we can just naturally move through it that way and not get stuck in it. And then we move on to the next thing. We didn't suppress it, we didn't repress it. We're not bypassing it and moving on to the next thing. We naturally process through it and then we move on to the next thing because that's the natural thing to do. It's actually unnatural to get stuck in anger, in depression, in sadness. We should be able to feel those things and move through them, come out of that emotion into another.
If I hear a very sad story, I touch in with the sadness, I might cry, I might feel this pit in my stomach, deep grief. “Oh, how that must feel to go through what they're going through”. I might do some other things visually in my mind's eye as a means of supporting myself and offering loving energy to them comforting energy to them, because I believe that were connected with other spirits in the universe. So I'm hearing someone else's story, but I believe that the way it impacts me actually benefits them.
And then I move through that I feel it deeply and intensely and then I can release the grief that I felt and move on to making dinner, to doing the next thing. And that at one point seemed heartless to me. It seemed wrong to not stay stuck in their pain and their grief. But now I know if I stay stuck in their pain and their grief, I can't handle my own. I can't handle the next story that I hear. And it just builds up. And that's no good for me. That's no good for anyone at that point. I need to be able to go and make dinner in peace with a lightness in my heart.
It's not wrong to feel something and move through it. If you think, “I need to stay stuck because that means I grieved it enough or I cared enough. I felt appropriately. I felt the guilt I needed to feel”. This is time for you to know - it is okay to let those emotions go.
You don't have to keep feeling the shame and the guilt. You don't have to keep feeling the anger about what happened. You're allowed to release the sadness. And if the tears want to come, let them come. But if the laughter wants to come, let it come. If the smile wants to creep across your lips, allow it. There's nothing wrong about that. There's nothing inappropriate about that. Please don't stay stuck for anyone else. Don't stay stuck because you think you should. Allow yourself to release it and move on - to any heart that needs to hear that. I'm gonna say it one more time.
Allow yourself to release it and to move on. Allow yourself to be forgiven. Receive it. It's right there. You don't have to carry the guilt. You don't have to feel the shame. It is okay to let go of the sadness. It is okay. If you've held on to these things for a long time, it can be really uncomfortable. It can feel really scary to say, let them go. What is that gonna feel like? What is that gonna be like? I don't know what my life is gonna feel like or be like if I do that.
I know. I know it can be really scary. If you want safe, supportive help, I'm here for you. If it's not me, find somebody else. Because you deserve to live another way. You should get to look out and see and feel the sunshine and allow the smile to come across your face. You should get to walk with your head up high, not hanging down.
[Outro] I dream for you to be able to wake up feeling lighthearted and hopeful expectant about the day ahead. I don't want you to have to dread it anymore. I don't want you to have to wake up, feeling terror in your body. Feeling depressed and sick to your stomach. Another day. The heaviness, the stressors of another day. I know how real that is. I know how difficult that is.
But I also know it doesn't have to stay that way. It doesn't have to be that way. There are other, easier, ways to live. And my hope is that you get to experience that. So friend, a warm hug from me. Much love, much care and I hope we connect again soon.
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