Some of us don’t know when to stop whilst others don’t know how to start. Either you are a hamster that can’t get off the wheel or a cat that can’t be bothered to get off the ground for some hunting!
Once again we hit a topic that is pretty familiar territory to all of us. We have had moments of a lot of action and those of total slump borderline stagnating couch potatoes. On either end we are pretty much screwed because there is no balance.
You will know when you are in neutral gear and in balance when you:
- Feel at ease with your life pace
- Are effectively communicating with your tribe be that family or grinds with our having to ghost or screen (just imagine! We actually do this now – all because of the age of ‘instant’ that overwhelmed us so we left spontaneous communications to timed scheduled ones
- Feel excited about waking up just because it’s a new day
- Feel no guilt when you give yourself a self care treat such as a bath
- Rarely if at all depend on any stimulants such as caffeine
- Self sufficient
- Aware of your intricate web of you
- Smile mostly for no reason
- Laugh
- Relaxed
- Can engage in conversation with strangers without feeling armoured or self conscious
- Can engage in self talk
We would like to be in a state of emotional equilibrium most of the time but this doesn’t always happen. Perhaps you had a caregiver as an infant who always criticised you. Or maybe you were never shown any boundaries or containing.
You will find the answers to why you push yourself so hard or not at all in your infancy. It all starts there mostly.
If you were always pushed into performing excelling and achieving chances are you are going to do the same to yourself. It will be so internalised that you see none of it as being something that you are not or you have developed in infancy to meet the demands of your caregivers lest they deprive you of their loving sustenance.
Children get scared and very scarred when we admonish ridicule or withdraw our affection from. They will try to adhere to what we set out as the norm but most of the time it is out of their far of losing us than any real understanding of why the norm is thus set.
My toddler wanted my attention. He started off by asking me to carry him but waving his arms up. I said not now. The next time he shouted I said please wait. After that he was holding a mop on his hand and hit my back with it. I told him off. He cried. Ouch. Now, who here is the parent and who is the child? What would ideally have happened? Mama to go down to his level after the mop was struck and say “you wanted mama to carry you and mama didn’t so you are upset, right?” And then follow this with a hug. You have just struck the jackpot making the toddler feel validated, most importantly seen and heard.
Some of us won’t get that. We might have been rebuked for using the mop and nothing after that. The child us would have gone on to impress upon mama and tried to please her by bringing good grades becoming popular in school and all else it took in the child’s infantile mindset to win affection.
The converse is true of us when we are stuck and won’t take action. We might need a release. We might find it hard to cry and again the root will be in our childhood.
What is so surprising is that any causality between infancy and our adult lives is very much overlooked in our autobiographical accounts.
How do we change that so we can actually look back into the root of our original wounding instead of attributing any issues we have to all the cumulative wounds that we were subjected to?