Brené Brown: Listening to shame

Unmet needs

What are your unmet needs? You mightn't have ever asked yourself that question. But if you think about what you struggle with, being accepted, being loved, being heard, that will lead you to the answers. Try tapping on the following set up statements and see what comes up.

Even though I needed ... but never got ... I accept that need

Even though I need ... and it still hasn't been met, and that makes me feel ... I love and accept myself

Even though this need (needs) makes me feel ... I accept how I feel

We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death ~ Leo Buscaglia 

Being present

I am following the 21 day meditation challenge by the Chopra centre and last week one of the meditations was on healing the heart. The four needs of the heart are: attention, affection, appreciation and acceptance.

The order of these needs is important because without attention I don't think the others can follow. Being present with ourself or others is essentially paying attention. Leonard Jacobson wrote a lovely piece on substitute needs and talked about presence as our true need. Paying attention, particularly when we're in pain or because it feels really difficult not to want to run away, is loving ourself. Try these set up statements and tap on whatever feels right:

Even though it's hard to pay attention when ... I completely accept my reasons

Even though I can't stay present with ... it is completely ok

Even though I want to run away from ... I completely accept myself anyway

Our past is our history

I am a bit sick of hearing: get over the past, don't live in the past, the past is the past, be in the moment, the present is all you have. I think what is really being said is “I am sick of listening to you” which can be very isolating. If we find it difficult to get over our past, there's usually a reason, and a good one at that.

Our past is our history. History can teach us a lot about people, nature, where we came from ... it's good and it's bad and everything in between, but being ashamed of our past is essentially the same as being ashamed of ourself.

Being in the present is important, it is where our power to change things lies, but not at the expense of forgetting our history. Forgetting, erasing or pretending our past doesn't exist doesn't feel healthy to me, integrating it and learning from it feels a lot better. Being at ease with our past is a sign of being at peace with who we are and where we have come from.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday ~ Pearl Buck

EFT helps me to feel ...

What emotions do you find yourself shying away from? When you feel what is a difficult emotion, try saying when you tap “tapping helps me to feel ...”.

Ask yourself how you know that the emotion you're feeling is fear and not anger for example. What helps you to identify it as fear, what do you feel like when you feel afraid? What do you feel like when you feel angry? jealous? guilty? Keep tapping until you feel the emotion starting to move, leaving you feeling calmer and more able to feel uncomfortable and difficult emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them.

Your tapping might go something like this;

Top of head: Tapping helps me feel this fear

Eyebrow: Even though I don't want to feel it

Side of the eye: Because it's frightening

Under eye: It feels like it could take over

Under the nose: And sometimes it does

Under the chin: And then I panic

Collar bone: And it feels awful

Under the arm: I have to do something to not feel afraid

Top of the head: Because it feels so frightening

Eyebrow: I feel afraid

Side of the eye: I feel afraid

Under the eye: How do I know I feel afraid?

Under the nose: Because I feel it ... (knot in throat, tight stomach, sweating, shallow breathing, tap on how fear shows up for you in your body)

Under the chin: My stomach is in knots

Collar bone: It feels constricting

Under the arm: This fear feels constricting

Top of the head: It feels like it's in control

Eyebrow: And I'm powerless

Side of the eye: It's very hard to do anything but feel afraid sometimes

Under the eye: It's so hard to feel this fear

Under the nose: But I feel it

Under the chin: Otherwise I wouldn't know what fear feels like

Collar bone: I'm afraid of what fully feeling this fear could do to me

Under the arm: So I have to avoid it ...

Or you can keep it really simple and say "EFT helps me to feel fear" as you're tapping on all the points.

If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it ~ Toni Morrison

Coughing to be heard

Have you ever had a dry, tickly, chronic cough that lasted longer than a month? What do you think caused it? If you have ruled out any medical causes or allergies, consider that you might be straining to be heard.

Feeling heard is one of the biggest issues many of us deal with and if we don't feel heard it can manifest in different ways. Louise Hay, in You Can Heal Your Life says coughing is a desire to bark at the world: “See me! Listen to me!”.

Rate how true her phrase feels when you say it out loud, 10 being true and 0 being false: “I am noticed and appreciated in the most positive ways. I am loved”, if you have any tailenders or objections you can start tapping on them. Tapping diagram and procedure

Being heard

is so close to being loved

that for the average person,

they are almost indistinguishable

~ David Augsburger

Relief or peace?

We all tend to take our health and other things for granted when we feel good. When we feel sick or something comes up we may realise how much we might have taken something for granted.

Sometimes we need relief in the moment because we feel overwhelmed and that's ok, more than ok. But sometimes we ignore what's underneath and instead of going for peace we go for moments of relief and then go back to our old ways of doing things. And the pattern keeps repeating ...

Looking at the reasons as to why we might want to ignore something is really useful. Fear can be a big reason as can any other emotion you find difficult or uncomfortable to feel. It's a good idea to first work on the strongest emotion (or whatever else you feel might be relevant) around an issue before working on the issue itself. Rate how strong the emotion is from 0 to 10, 10 being the strongest charge it has for you and start tapping. EFT diagram and procedure

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that ~ Martin Luther King, Jr

Feeling heard

It is really important to me to feel heard and to hear others. I think it is one of the most important factors in any relationship, including the relationship we have with ourself, we often don't hear what we're feeling. I came across this really lovely article by Carl Rogers that I really related to and wanted to share it here. Excerpted from www.listeningway.com

Experiences in Communicationby Carl Rogers
In my own two-way communication with others there have been experiences that have made me feel pleased and warm and good and satisfied. There have been other experiences that to some extent at the time, and even more so afterward, have made me feel dissatisfied and displeased and more distant and less contented with myself. I would like to convey some of these things. Another way of putting this is that some of my experiences in communicating with others have made me feel expanded, larger, enriched, and have accelerated my own growth. Very often in these experiences I feel that the other person has had similar reactions and that he too has been enriched, that his development and his functioning have moved forward. Then there have been other occasions in which the growth or development of each of us has been diminished or stopped or even reversed. I am sure it will be clear in what I have to say that I would prefer my experiences in communication to have a growth-promoting effect, both on me and on the other, and that I should like to avoid those communication experiences in which both I and the other person feel diminished.
The first simple feeling I want to share with you is my enjoyment when I can really hear someone. I think perhaps this has been a long-standing characteristic of mine. I can remember this in my early grammar school days. A child would ask the teacher a question and the teacher would give a perfectly good answer to a completely different question. A feeling of pain and distress would always strike me. My reaction was, "But you didn't hear him!" I felt a sort of childish despair at the lack of communication which was (and is) so common.

I believe I know why it is satisfying to me to hear someone. When I can really hear someone, it puts me in touch with him; it enriches my life. It is through hearing people that I have learned all that I know about individuals, about personality, about interpersonal relationships.

There is another peculiar satisfaction in really hearing someone: It is like listening to the music of the spheres, because beyond the immediate message of the person, no matter what that might be, there is the universal. Hidden in all of the personal communications which I really hear there seem to be orderly psychological laws, aspects of the same order we find in the universe as a whole. So there is both the satisfaction of hearing this person and also the satisfaction of feeling one's self in touch with what is universally true. Read on