To Go After Living The Life Of Your Dreams
Having cancer is a huge fish slap across the face. BUT, that slap is sometimes just the wake-up call you need, to give yourself permission to cram as much life as possible into every single day.
I recommend you don’t wait for the slap!
I challenge you to ask yourself “what would life be like if you could live your dreams?“
And if you’re going to deep dive into this, where do you need to give yourself permission to live that dream?
Let me ask this rather bold question.
“Do you have the balls to grow, evolve and live the life of your dreams on your terms, your rules, your way?”
One of the best healing lessons of my personal and professional life, occurred when I embraced the fact that I am responsible for my own happiness.
I stand by that statement, even after having chemotherapy and multiple surgeries. I still found some way in the situation I found myself in, to reframe the experience into an opportunity. It’s kind of like a life mission now, to reframe every aspect of life into something joyous.
You don’t need a cancer experience to have the same outlook or seek more positivity in your life.
It sounds completely obvious, but the implementation of being accountable for your thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and behaviour and let’s call it for what it is — adulting — can leave you feeling utterly smashed on some days.
Don’t kid yourself. We all have stuff, emotional baggage, life experiences that have knocked us down.
When you take ownership of that experience, you are granting yourself permission to heal and evolve from the aspect(s) that caused you pain. As you begin to confront the hurts, this form of adulting enables you to hold yourself accountable for your ongoing responses (as opposed to reactions).
It took cancer for me to confront the demons I had buried in a deep dark place. What might it take you?
Here are the gifts that you can receive by gifting yourself permission…
It is a gift to acknowledge life’s lessons from painful experiences.
When you acknowledge your emotional response, is simply just a component of your old survival reaction, you are giving yourself permission to pause. This acts like a circuit breaker on your stress response.
Once you’ve paused that survival reaction, you are gifting yourself permission to connect with your breath. This has a soothing response to your frazzled nervous system.
Those moments of connecting into a steady breathing rhythm are actually granting yourself permission to ground back into your body, instead of being disassociated.
It is at this point the healing begins — because you’ve landed back in your body and arrived at an energetic space of choice. You can choose to continue reacting, or you can choose to seek a solution.
This is the true gift for healing — granting yourself permission to pause, to breathe, and to do life a new way. That permission process reactivates your capacity to experience joy and revolves around doing your thing — not someone else’s.
It can be both a terrifying and truly liberating experience, to step into that space of vulnerability- the space that holds both your heart and your inner child’s wound, which is held in the shadow space of self.
There’s a few things you need need to do work in your shadow space:
- Patience
- Courage
- Permission
- Big balls!
It can be confronting to face the patterns of what causes you pain. The desire to heal and ultimately one day feel better within, requires permission, and patience with a side dish of consistency.
It’s not always easy to stand within your sacred space and shine your authentic light to the world. To shine your light, you gotta build a fire. For that bonfire 🔥 to illuminate you have to stack logs on the fire.
Here are 10 Ways to give yourself ‘permission’ to keep doing you!
1. Recognise we all have stuff
Everyone has stuff, challenges and hard things. It’s not a competition who has had the worst experience. We all have our own set of beliefs and behaviours, which drives how we respond or react to those life experiences.
The trick when you are triggered and feel yourself reacting is to step back and assess and reflect on, what within you requires your love and attention to heal? You can’t change anything unless you acknowledge what is there to keep or shift within you.
2. Don’t chase people for their attention, affection or approval.
Seeking external validation can contribute to the acknowledgment of your strengths and emotions. However, when we often rely on friends and loved ones for support and encouragement, this can weaken the signal from our innate gut response.
One of the best forms of accountability is to give yourself validation and approval. This singular action allows you to gain immediate ownership of your role in a situation.
When we stop listening to our internal signals, we risk developing negative seeking behaviours in order to validate our feelings and subsequent reactions, including:
- difficulty trusting others (because when we don’t receive immediate validation we feel subconsciously unsafe)
- high levels of anxiety (because we’ve not taught ourselves to the ways to self-soothe through/after specific situations or experiences)
- multitude of subliminal fears (including but not limited to fear of rejection, not being good enough, uncertainty, out of control — honestly the list here can be endless)
- unpredictable, uncontrollable emotions, defence-based reactions or confusing behaviours (because we’ve primed ourselves to seek an immediate dopamine hit or quick fix).
3. Use Self-Care to Self Validate
Incorporating a daily or multi-day activity each week soothes your frayed, stressed-out nervous system. These small actions, like meditation, yoga or walking each morning, act like a circuit breaker to your subconscious survival program.
The more small actions you implement regularly, the faster you break down the intensity of the initial survival reaction. Additionally the more you shift the body out of flight-fight-freeze and into rest-digest, the more relaxed you will feel for longer periods of time.
The more frequently you acknowledge the chaos, pause and insert a circuit breaker, the faster you change your neuro-plasticity for a calmer life.
4. Practice saying no
When you have an underlying subconscious fear of abandonment, rejection or your self-worth is so low on the agenda, it can feel confrontational to say no to others.
Whilst it feels great to be of service to others, I often find myself sharing an old proverb with my clients — “you can’t pour from an empty cup”.
If saying “no” feels confrontational or uncomfortable, start with the following phrase the next time someone asks you for something “can I check my diary and get back to you?”
5. Surround yourself with positive
I was coaching a client the other day, who was all over the shop. Bounces from job to job, and admits to struggling to stick with anything.
I asked the obvious question “what does happiness feel like to you?”. My client drew a blank and experienced one of the best aha moments I’ve ever witnessed.
It’s all well and good to surround yourself with positive people, activities and affirmations, but if you’re not connecting with that feeling of happiness, you’re missing the point.
Become an example to yourself, of how it feels and looks to be positive.
It starts with the intention you set for yourself before you even get out of bed! As soon as I wake up, I set my intention ‘I am the priority of my life’.
I instruct clients to create an invitation to pay attention to how they feel and what event causes them to experience anything negative!
6. Journal out the negative
Writing is a beautiful and passive way to express all those feelings and thoughts that swirl around your head. It’s a brilliant tool to express all the stuff doing laps inside your head which block your capacity to verbalise words.
Any form of expressing the emotions within you, gifts you the opportunity to release the negativity and return to a space of neutral calm. The less drama you have inside your head, in terms of overthinking, over-analysis, worry or doubt, the more space you have to welcome positive alternatives.
There are occasions where the release of old, unwanted emotions leaves a void that simply must be backfilled with the energy of something alternative. These are the moments you could write yourself a love letter. But to shift that, you may require a fuck-you letter first!
7. Attract loving people into your life
Work hard to just be yourself. The more focused you are on yourself, being present, and clearing out your old negative stuff, you naturally become a beacon of light.
The more you shift the brighter your light shines. When your light shines bright, you naturally attract amazing human beings into your life who make you want to be and embrace more.
9. Detach & Distance from Negative Juju
Some people simply thrive on remaining negative. They literally receive a dopamine hit when something goes wrong and validates their negative perception of a place, person, or thing.
They are brilliant at sabotaging everything in their life. These are the people who will sink with the Titanic and then gloat about it.
Detach. Distance. Avoid at all costs. Don’t let them drag you down. These people provide you with a choice of how best to view your world, and make choices to be happy.
Just do your thing. Be true to you and shine your light brightly on the world.
10. Immerse into Nature
There’s been a bunch of positive medical research to demonstrate immersion into nature is great for the mind, body, and spirit. It’s because it’s not man made, it’s vibration is natural and has a harmonizing effect on the human body.
Ask any physicist, psychologist, or ecologist, and they will respond the same way. Humans increase their capacity to relax amongst living things (as opposed to man-made spaces), because the particle-wave motion of living things resonates in a similar way to the body.
A simple walk in a nature reserve can be almost meditative.
Conclusion
Making positive changes in your life doesn’t have to be or feel hard. It’s simply a matter of making a commitment to yourself and gifting yourself permission to make yourself a priority.
You really can choose to change and bloom from within xxx
Want to read more like this?
This is My Roar – signed copies of my first published book can be purchased from this website.
Self Reflection – A little Look Within – click here
8 Hot Tips How To Journal – click here
Can You Risk Not Stepping Up To Mother yourself? – Click here
About Karen
Change Facilitator
Karen Humphries is a Kinesiology Practitioner, Health & Business Coach, LEAP & NES Practitioner, Intuitive Meditation Facilitator, and published author. She is a self-confessed laughaholic. She loves being of service to the world with her humorous and positive approach to life, encouraging people to ‘choose to change and bloom from within.’
