Maybe you are putting too much pressure on yourself to relax? Or do you give yourself a hard time each time you trip up? You think, oh darn it, even after all this inner work why can’t I simply cut it. What will it take to experience a permanent and lasting state of relaxation?
How about we start at the baby you and look at:
1, what is driving you to feel the need to relax
2, what does it mean to relax for you
3, what is wrong with emoting?
When a baby starts to find his inner sense of self, he realises his mama and him are not the one entity he thought. He and Mama are separate. He doesn’t need his mama to carry him to where he wants to go. He can toddler there on his own. He can finally reach that very very pretty green and gold ceramic plant pot. Voila! Once he gets there he finds that it can be moved, and even swayed, boom bang and down it falls in pieces. He finds this new discovery very very fascinating until his mama comes to the scene and explains that we don’t break things even when it’s so so exciting. He does this again with other objects that can break and this starts to break his mama. He might start moaning and protesting that mama has put these items out of reach for him. For him having that access was a sense of freedom, it being taken away has become a loss of independence and when he emotes, if his mama admonishes him for that, it frustrates him because he cannot even let off some steam!
When we are in a state of flow, without any ebbs, we glide; there is a zero sense of danger which is where mama’s presence will provide a safety net for bubba to explore unhinged and unhindered. He is fully relaxed because his back is covered. When mama is no longer a safety net, once you have your own compass, you know how to carry on and even continue to feel relaxed knowing you got your own back covered.
What happens to this sense of safety then allows us to relax?
As we navigate life through to adulthood we pass out teenage years, adolescence and what have you. There are layers and more layers of experiences that will have built up. These will carry a blueprint of what is safe and what is not. At some point you might feel totally unsafe after some experiences and this will again sit inside of you. We will need to return to that part of you that feels this, and then relive almost to the emotion then, really immersing in that past, grieving it, and recalling a part of you that might have been lost. Each time our sense of safety is threatened it literally causes parts of us to flee the scene to protect us. If you remained with toddler sensors all of your life, great stuff you can actually live fully feeling and very whole with little fear. But, can you imagine toddler pain when rejected or at the behest of any pain or abuse? They would feel it a lot more than those who might have either learnt to tolerate or numb parts of them. We cannot really physically lose parts of our soul or blueprint but they are almost dormant or laying low till they feel the danger has passed. And that’s when they can relax and come out to join the rest of yourself that is still intact.
This whole process climaxes in what we call integration. Once you are whole, and you have really worked on parts of you that felt they had to run for their life or else, and then really had a chance to shed tears age and developmentally appropriate historically (so if this pain comes from you the toddler you might find yourself crying like one automatically – the act of crying too is very fluid – don’t control it you just let it all out the wails and all if that’s what’s coming), that’s when you can sigh into a deep sense of relaxation finally able to integrate those fragments of the lost self.
In the meanwhile, what stops us from relaxing is our own self. The ego self doesn’t like to relax. It loves the drama and action. It loves the peaks and troughs after all that’s what you have been conditioned to believe life is all about. All, so far the fragmented self has only attracted other fragmented selves. We will only ever live who we are. And that includes all those we associate with. If there’s someone you don’t like, chances are it’s something about you that you don’t accept.
Once you have integrated these lost parts, that’s when you can ease into you and shape your life using the quotient you will. This is where you find wholeness reflected back to you. This is when you find relaxation when you are triggered as opposed to falling apart although even that is welcome.
The triggering you realise again is an opportunity to check in and congratulate yourself on having recalled your lost parts. The being triggered and your almost reaction since by now your reaction will almost be very on the outside with you as a bystander, will remind you of the old fragmented you that “reacted” and now the new “original version of whole self” that can simply observe smile and say wow imagine now I can recognise who I was and who I am.
You will stop putting yourself under pressure to be relaxed. It’s okay to fully feel. That my friends is a life fully lived, and your toddler senses are fully activated only this time you have your own back covered – you are your Mama to you!