Growing into my wisest self

A exploration on what can happen if we stay with what is...what then emerges?

Hi, I’m Emma, if you are new to this space, welcome, you can learn more about Being in Motherhood here. I’m a mother, writer, and artist. I have studied trauma, therapeutic tools, and mindfulness. I am moved by honesty, reflection, slow living, and a deep connection to the earth. I hold space for mothers to share their truths and be in their experiences. If you enjoyed this, please do subscribe and join me on this journey of being.

I am sitting at my desk in my new writing space at our new house. It is a shared space, my husband also works in here, but he let me have creative control on decorations and design, so it feels like mine.

I chose this room for the office because the way the sun is currently pouring in from the window, warming the room with intensity. I feel held in here and safe.

Our dog soaking in the morning rays as I write in my new space.

Moving has been a wild ride. Since we started last Thursday, we have not stopped. My husband has been in go-go-go mode and I, graced by the ovulation phase of my cycle, have been able to keep up. After almost a week of moving, unpacking, and organizing, I can feel a slight settling.

This is where we are, this is where we live, it is not perfect, but it will soon feel like home. I miss the house we used to live. I find when my system is searching for a sense of safety I think of being in our old house, and I settle while holding sadness in my body for what was.

Moving, like motherhood, is an excavator. It brings things to the surface, it ignites old parts of you and patterns you held that you thought you long put to rest. It removes your ground, your footing, and everything feels uncertain.

Moving has brought me into the present moment, because everything is always uncertain. But us humans hold this veil over life, thinking we can control it or figure it out if we just try hard enough. We do not have control.

This move has sent my insides spiraling into a search for home.

What is home? What is family? Where do I feel safe?

It is fascinating to me how safe I felt in our old house, how at home I felt and at peace. I felt held there. And as we slowly started to move and strip that house of its familiarity, everything start to spin inside me.

It is interesting how we are usually asking a question without it running consciously through our minds. Our bodies ask for us. I keep asking, am I safe? I keep looking for a place to land. And when I try to find places where I feel safe, I find few and far between.

I turn to my friends, while wishing I had family in my life to support me. I turn to physical comforts, I pulled out my dad’s old oversized sweatshirt. I turn to meditation, I bring my attention back to my body. I remember my body is my home.

And still, the ground feels shaky. Change happens quickly and it can take time to settle from the aftershocks of change. This house feels like our home during the day, and then night hits and I feel I am in some strange land and I want to go back to my comfort, the old house.

It makes me feel small. I assume these are feelings I also felt when we moved houses when I was 4 or 5. My family went from a small house, quite similar to the one I just moved out of, to a house double the size. It felt big and empty for many different reasons.

This house is also bigger. But this house feels like one where a family lives, I feel like a mom in this house, it could also be the phase of my cycle where patience is high and tending to the house brings me more joy than usual. I feel adult here.

Growing up

I am realizing I am not a little kid anymore. Trauma held me tight in its grips my whole life, and in this past year, I made great effort and strides to change that. I went from being a girl trapped in a woman’s body to being myself, age 29.

My younger parts used to dominate me. I have heard our inner landscape described as a conference table. At the head is our wisest and truest self, our adult self, our self who holds its roots in the present moment and sees with clarity. Around the table are our different inner children at their various ages.

I didn’t know I had a wise, adult self until I started listening to and holding space for my inner children. They hold the pain, the trauma, the grief, the anger. They live inside my body, and as I made space for what lived inside me, I gained more space inside me. Space for my wise self to step forward.

And I am feeling part of the grief around moving is about accepting I am no longer small. I can no longer drop into a younger part of self and act out, and just move on with my day. I know now how to tend to my smaller parts, slow down, and be with what I am feeling.

I kind of hate it. Have you ever felt like that?

Where you grow in a way you so desperately need, but sometimes you wish you could sink back to how you were before? There is something about making the unconscious conscious that asks us to hold ourselves differently.

It is beautiful and exhausting. I needed this internal shift, my son needed this shift, my partner needed me to grow into my wisest self. And I missing being small. I do not miss the pain, the grief, or the sadness lurking around every corner of my body, but I miss thinking someone else is in charge of my life.

I want to judge myself for that statement, but for years, the sentiment of waiting for someone bigger, stronger, and wiser to step in gave me hope and comfort. I thought someday my whole life would be made better by some person who would take charge of it all. The ironic thing is I was right in believing this.

I didn’t know that person would be me, I thought someone else would come save me, but I saved myself. I held the space for myself. I change my relationship to my past. I did the hard work of taking responsibility and moving the decades of pain and shame through my body.

And it is not done. Feelings will arise, there are still sticky places inside of me, there are still inner children I have not met, I am sure. But right now, I can hold the space of my wisest self and I do not have to shy away from her.

Letting go of fear

I spent a lot of my life doubting myself, feeling like the next bad thing was around the corner, searching every situation for a problem to solve, so maybe just maybe I would feel some sense of safety. My mind has being doing the same thing with this move, and I am realizing there is nothing to fix or solve. It just is.

Sure, there are actions to take, plans to make, things to organize. There will always be something to do to move life forward and there is this quality of being. Things just are, things change in time, life just is.

Did you know I am not the great controller of my life?

I am learning this. I can make plans, I can make decisions, but ultimately things just are and things are going to happen I cannot prepare for. So, I can live my life afraid because of this truth or I can be with each moment as it is.

I choose, as best as I can in each moment, to be with what is. I have lived the first 3 decades of my life afraid, I do not want to be afraid (consciously) for another moment. I want to be a grown up, I want to spend more time in my wise self than in my younger parts.

My wise self has big plans for me, she has dreams, she has faith in things working out, she has trust in me and in others. She knows in her depths everything is okay and everything is for our highest good. Smaller parts of me want to punch her in the face, but instead my wise self helps them to look to her for her guidance and leadership.

Can I let her lead the way?

Can I let go of this desire to slip back into my old, familiar ways?

Can I stay in this moment and all that it is holding?

What if I could…

I took these notes one day during the hectic moving process and I offer them to you for your own reflection.

What if I hold it all…what if I stay with it…

The tantrum, the sadness, the pain, whatever it is I am feeling or experience in this moment…instead of trying to change it or make it go away...

Can I slow down and stay with myself? Because this is what I need and the pace I want to move at.

Can I make peace with this feeling in my body instead of trying to fix it?

What is possible if you stay with what is moving through you?

I used to hate the sentiment that feelings cannot kill you or hurt you, what hurts more is the denial of what one is feeling. I used to shrug at this and disagree, I was certain what lurked inside my body was deadly. What what inside my body, all those ignored feelings, it hurt to feel them. I felt sadness, grief, pain, anger. And I walked through them, shakily with tiny steps.

I now agree…the resistance to what is right in front of us or moving through us hurts more than the thing we are afraid to feel. It may be uncomfortable, but it is navigable.

And if whatever is moving through you or asking for attention in your body, feels bigger than you…trust that.

I didn’t process my trauma without support. I worked with therapists, I leaned on friends, I placed different practices in place to hold me as I processed heavy feelings. You do not have to feel what lives in your body alone, and I do not recommend you do, it is important to find support.

If you ever need help finding resources, therapists, or practices to use for self-tending, I am happy to talk with you.

If you like me have a lot of inner children who need tending to and you want an introduction to moving through some of these feelings, I recommend Goldmining the Shadows by Pixie Lighthorse. I held this book close to me through my months of deep healing and processing. Honestly, any book of Pixie’s is a beautiful start and invitation to explore what lives inside your body.

What is possible if you stay with what you are feeling?

What happens when you stay with what is right here?

What could happen if you chose more often to stay with what is in your present moment experience?

I invite you to share your thoughts and feelings with me in the comments.

Love,

Emma

Recent writings you might have missed…

• The only home I have ever known - lessons from moving houses around impermanence and being with what is right here.

• Motherhood Blessing for Violet Carol - help us as a community support and nurture this new mother-to-be as she begins to make her transition into motherhood.

• Flipping my core belief on its head - how a Zen teaching is changing my perspective on showing up fully.

• Motherhood Musings: Collection 1, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3 - the topic of this collection is our expectations compared to our realities of motherhood.

• Unspoken Words: Volume 16 & Volume 17 - mothers sharing their experiences of what is hard for them in this season of motherhood.