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Category: self knowledge
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The Do Over – 5 Lessons From a Disappointing Year
You know those years where nothing seems to go to plan? 2019 was definitely one of those.
It’s all too easy to get disheartened, and fall down the dark hole of despair, which is exactly what I did, in a big way, for the last few months of the year.
Then along comes the hope of a fresh start in a new year, and, whatsmore, a whole new decade! It feels exciting, refreshing, and filled to the brim with hopeful anticipation of all the things you’ll create and achieve.
But before you know it January is over in a whirl of illness and domestic dramas, and you haven’t actioned the tentative plans and dreams you’d pencilled in to your fresh, new planner.
You see the new year spiralling away from you in the same way the last one did. The feeling that you’re letting time slip away from you grows, and you start to feel anxiety and panic eating away at your equilibrium.
Sound familiar?
How do you move beyond the self recrimination?
How do you pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and keep going?
How do you motivate yourself to carry on when it feels like you’re wading through treacle?
1.Use An Encouraging Mantra
On the front page of my planner I’ve written:
‘I didn’t come this far to only come this far.’
Every day when I see this, it reminds me that a lot of time, effort, energy, money and sacrifice has gone into becoming the person I am today.
I have a lot to give back, and it serves no one, least of all me, to keep it hidden away in my mind and countless notebooks.
Dory in Finding Nemo had ‘just keep swimming’.
Julian of Norwich had ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’
What will your mantra of encouragement be?
2. Celebrate Your Wins
I can’t stress enough how important this is!
Get into the habit of doing a monthly review, focusing your attention on your accomplishments.
When I looked back over 2019 and wrote down all the things I’d achieved, I was shocked.
It felt like I’d done nothing, but it turns out I could list some pretty big wins, including building a new website, upgrading this one, and holding a live chocolate making workshop.
We tend not to give ourselves enough credit.
We forget that, over time, small consistent steps add up to an imperceptibly long distance.
What do you need to celebrate?
3. Give Yourself Enough Time
Very often we over estimate what we can achieve in a certain amount of time.
This can lead to self recrimination if we fail to meet our own deadlines.
The danger here though is that, if we give ourselves too much time, we can procrastinate to the nth degree, never achieving our goals.
I’m not generally a fan of the notion of balance, perhaps because my troublesome vestibular system means it’s something I’ve always struggled with (a sensory pun for you there!).
However, in this instance, balance is definitely something to aim for.You want to give yourself enough time to get a task done without burning out, whilst not giving yourself so much time you never get the job done.
Self honesty is where it’s at – where might you be tricking yourself about time?
4. Use Your Tools
When we’re in the throes of despair, we can forget to use the tools we have at our disposal.
For this reason it’s important to get into a regular self care routine.
The old saying ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ couldn’t be more appropriate here.
When we use our tools regularly, they don’t have a chance to get rusty.
When we perform regular maintenance jobs, things don’t tend to get out of hand.
It’s much easier to spend a few minutes every day maintaining our equilibrium, than it is to claw our way back from burn out.
What do you need to dig out of your toolkit and start using?
5. Ask For What You Need
This one is HARD! The fear of rejection can hang over our heads like the Sword of Damocles.
Yes, asking for what you need can be scary, but it can also be incredibly liberating. And here’s something about it that you might not have considered before…
(Most) people love to help. It makes us feel good to know we’ve helped someone else. So by asking for help (what you need) you’re also giving someone else the opportunity to feel good. Win win huh?
And if they say no, that’s ok. You can survive the perceived rejection. Because you’ve been implementing the other 4 lessons, you’ve become much more resilient and can take it on the chin with greater ease.
What areas of your life do you need help with?
These 5 lessons won’t magically transform life overnight, but bit by bit they will make a big difference.
And one day, when you’re looking back over your monthly reviews for the year, you’ll see just how far you’ve come, without even realising it.
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Life Tracking
What is life tracking? On the face of it, it’s pretty simple – you track elements of your life to help bring clarity, self encouragement and accountability.
We’re quite used to tracking fitness data, whether it’s the simple use of a pedometer to track your steps, or electronic devices that track everything from sleep patterns to heart rate. There are apps that can help women to track their menstrual cycles. Apps to track finances, time spent on devices; you name it and there’s probably an app to track it.
About 18 months ago I started to make brief notes in my daily journal (more tracking) about things I was noticing about my mental and physiological state. For the last 5 months I’ve been keeping a more detailed daily diary just for cycle related tracking. It’s been enlightening.
In the 18+ months I was doing basic tracking, I realised that I was having,what I called ‘existential angst days’,on a very regular (monthly) basis. It was enlightening when I saw that these days,when I was feeling at absolute rock bottom, were following a pattern. It meant that, when I noticed that was how I was feeling, I could check back through my journal, and see if it was the same point in my cycle. Low and behold, it was. This then enabled me to realise it would quickly pass, and that I wasn’t sinking into the depths of depression – it was simply a hormonal response, not an unchangeable aspect of my personality.
About 6 months ago I started to read more around menstrual cycle tracking, and the idea that women live in cycles and seasons within our cycles.
Suddenly everything fell into place, especially when I started noticing how this played out on a fairly predicable schedule, month after month.
I think this information is something that every young girl should be taught. I think it should be part of the discussion around women’s mental health. It’s something boys should be taught too.
For too long women have been expected to fit into the non cyclical ways of a man’s world. We’ve been mocked for our PMS moments. Where there should be understanding, there has been abuse.
The underlying assumption that women are unstable creatures continues to pervade society, including the healthcare world. I could talk at great length on this subject, but instead I’ll just refer to this post where I talked a little about how women are often dismissed by the medical profession.
If we all understood the beauty of a woman’s cycle, how we have seasons, just like the planet, imagine the world we could be living in? We’ve denied our connection to nature, arrogantly thinking we can control Mother Nature, in the same way we’ve assumed we can control the workings of a woman’s body. We have to see the correlation between the two things if we’re to stand any chance of repairing the damage we’re doing to our home.
How do we do this? We start with us, as individuals, tracking our days, getting to know ourselves and the way we interact with the world.
Instead of just tracking the metrics, we track the ‘soft data’ of our days.
We can track our mood and feelings – there are apps for that. But we can go deeper and uncover so much more information about ourselves. How?
We could track our sensory responses throughout the seasons. How about tracking our trauma responses AND our joy responses too? Once we have more data about ourselves, we can dig deep into why we do the things we do, and when we do them. Self knowledge unlocks so many opportunities to feel different, which in turn can lead us to creating the lives we’ve always dreamed of.
Women have an extra opportunity to gather self knowledge: get tracking your cycle! Even if you’re in the post menopause phase of your life – you’re still existing within cycles and seasons; you’re still part of the beating heart of the earth. And, you have the wisdom of having lived through all the seasons of a woman’s life – share your wisdom, it’s your gift to the world! Those of us who come after you need your knowledge and experience.
What will you start tracking first? I’d love to know.
In future posts I’ll be exploring sensory tracking in much more depth. If you want to know when those posts go live, do sign up for the Magic Monday emails where I bring you music, magic, mantras, and musings on things that don’t make it to the blog.
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First, Know Thyself
Versions of this aphorism have been credited to numerous men of stature through the ages. Women, not so much.
It seems to me that even now, almost 20 years into the 21st century, women are still rarely encouraged to truly get to know themselves. Our knowledge of ourselves is, more often than not, received and viewed through the filter of those around us, rather than via our own perceptions and exploration based self knowledge. This results in us receiving skewed data from sources that are working from their own agenda. This agenda isn’t necessarily bad, though often it can be, regardless though, if we put more store in someone else’s ideas of who we are, the shit is going to hit the fan eventually.
This is the same principle that I talked about at length in this post about having your feelings denied, and this one where I talk about how Reiki can turn your life upside down.
I’m slowly uncovering the ways in which I’ve ingested other people’s opinions about who this person called Techla is. What I’m discovering is that pretty much every belief I’ve ever held about myself, has been founded on someone else’s
bullshitmisunderstandingprojections.I think this is pretty normal for most women – I can’t comment for men because a. I’m not one, and b. finding men who are willing to talk about these sorts of things is rather like finding rocking horse shit.
Before I started to write this post I did a google search of the title, it brought up an interesting article that suggested that the premise of the saying is not just silly, but actually dangerous. My curiosity was obviously piqued, given that my experience has been that NOT knowing myself has been dangerous!
What the author of the article (a professor of philosophy no less) was saying makes sense, in some ways, but only in so far as we accept that who we are is a static creature of habit. Their argument was that, by knowing ourselves, we will become dogmatic in our choices, limiting our freedom to grow and change over time. I can see their point here, but I would argue that by knowing ourselves, we become much more capable of growth, and where appropriate, change.
We all change over time, and we all also remain the same in some ways too. I suspect just how much we change (or not), depends rather heavily on how prepared we are (or aren’t) to …. get to know ourselves!
I suppose that if you have a life that you define as successful (however that looks to you), then the impetus to get to know yourself is unlikely to be as strong as if you’re unhappy or dissatisfied with your lot.
If, on the other hand, your life is a stinking great shit show of despair, then getting to know yourself on a deep (not superficial) level could just be your ticket out of that awful place. It’ll take a tonne of courage, there’s no two ways about it, but the potential pay off has to be worth any discomfort along the way.
What’s perhaps even more important here is this: when you get to know yourself through your own filters, you’ll be much less likely to perpetuate the cycle of judgement. That’s one of the ways in which we can heal the legacy of inter-generational trauma, and THAT is world changing.