Hi Friends, 

If you've experienced trauma, you have a body that needs care. If you're doing this work, you're in a phase or a practice of healing.

So let me invite you to some questions:

How are you treating your healing body?

How are you treating your growth journey?

Sometimes you may oscillate between patience and demand.

It is important to notice and learn how to demarcate these two ways of being with your self.

Patience is the ability to be with what is, and nurture yourself while you wait for what will be.

Demand is a function of judgment. It assesses our healing work from a place of urgency. 

Judgement of yourself or assessing yourself as lacking will always create more pain and keep you from healing.

Why?

Because judgement and demand are rooted in fear and self-contempt/loathing.

The combination of fear and contempt is to become a cruel taskmaster. Putting pressure on and blaming yourself if you don't measure up to the demand. This will lead to a sense of burn-out and futility which is the opposite of growth. 

Although judgement and demand might feel like they will keep you safe and help you keep from "making mistakes" they actually create the opposite.

Judgement and demand keep you stuck and cycling the drain, by leaning into unsustainable will-power and then quitting because it's too hard or draining to "be good and right." 

Judgement and demand are actually traumatic re-enactments.

They are storied responses.

Does it feel risky to consider that judgment and demand don’t actually serve you (or anyone else)?

If you have managed yourself through judgment and urgency, it will take practice to become curious and slow. 

Judgement and demand are felt in the body. Fear and contempt (and shame) are nervous system responses with complex neural pathways.

Remaking that these pathways takes time.

On the healing journey, judgement and urgency actually harm our efforts to heal and slow it down.

So what is the anecdote?

Gentleness and curiosity. 

Gentle (I'm allowed to be kind to myself, which won't keep me from growing) Curiosity (I bet I can figure out what's going on or what happened to me).

Are you open to the possibility that gentleness will serve you more than judgment?

That curiosity will serve you more than demand?

Gentle Curiosity generates a pace of movement that treats your healing body with dignity.

It invites a robust commitment to yourself to meet you where you are.

How do you treat your healing body?

Xo
Lora