THE “HOW TO” OF LETTING IT GO
Following from my last blog post: Stress – Are You Its Master or Slave , I’ve noticed a theme in my clinical practice, of people adversely affected by taking on other peoples energy and carrying it around as if it were their own, creating yet another layer of stress for themselves. How often have you caught yourself being consumed by other peoples’ concerns, battles, illnesses, grief, anger or injustices as if they were happening to you?
There is an old adage, “A problem shared is a problem halved” and although this can be true of the person sharing their problem, the one who is listening or supporting, helps neither their loved one nor themselves by carrying something which is not theirs to carry.
In a culture of emerging mental health awareness and a long overdue acknowledgement of the experience of depression that does exist in our society, there is a positive cultural movement of being more available for those in need, being willing to extend a listening ear and not shying away from supporting troubled souls. It is therefore vital for us all to learn to support others without taking on, ‘their stuff” and potentially derailing ourselves in the process.
TURN UP THE VOLUME ON YOUR SELF AWARENESS
The first step in being able to let go of other peoples’ stuff is learning to tell the difference between what is yours and what is theirs. This involves turning up the volume on your own level of self awareness. Becoming self aware is like learning several languages at once; physical, mental, emotional and energetic….each aspect has subtle nuances of sensation and experience. When you are able to perceive through all of your senses what it is that you feel in your body, mind, emotions and energy field at any given time; your awareness of yourself is illuminated, this is your current baseline of awareness. Then, if your baseline equilibrium changes, either physically, mentally, emotionally, or energetically, you can notice when and how it happened and then take measures to re-balance and find your centre again, but that’s only dealing with yourself….how do you tell the difference between what’s yours and what’s theirs?
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHAT’S YOURS AND THEIRS
An analogy I like to use to explain how to discern between what’s yours and what’s theirs, is that of hanging a coat on a hook: if you hang the coat on the door and there is no hook, the coat will fall to the floor; so if someone tries to ‘hang’ something on you and you don’t have an internal hook or trigger and by this I mean that you do not feel charged up in your response or reaction to them….then its not yours. I need to explain here that it doesn’t mean that you are un-empathic or do not feel anything at all. The subtle difference between feeling what’s theirs and what’s yours, is the level of potency and charge that is felt. For example: when feeling someone else’s stuff, it’s like watching a movie that makes you feel sad, you feel the sadness on a certain level, but when feeling your own stuff, if for example you discover that your pet has died, the sadness you feel is more personal to you and has a much greater potency and charge.
When it comes to feeling others’ stuff, the ‘other’ may be: your partner, family member, friend, stranger, staff member, boss, the collective consciousness of your entire family, your company, a specific group of people or animals, humanity as a whole, your city, your country, the earth herself…..and on and on it goes.
SELF HONESTY AND OWNING WHAT’S YOURS
Self honesty is paramount when it comes to discerning between that which belongs to someone else and that which belongs to you. If what is going on for someone else triggers you to feel charged up about a memory, experience, an idea, a principle or value of yours that has been overlooked or betrayed, a disappointment, a sadness, an embarrassment or humiliation, a shameful event….then its yours and in order to regain your peace of mind and equilibrium, it’s necessary for you to own it and deal with it. Its important here not to blame how or what you feel on someone else. If you feel it with potency and there’s an energetic/electrical charge around it, then even if someone else triggered it, it still belongs to you. Gaining the support of a talking therapist of body practitioner may be beneficial to assist you in processing whatever has been triggered for you in order to find your equilibrium and peace again.
ROLE PLAYING
Sometimes, taking on or carrying the stuff of the ‘other’ can be the result of a role that you’ve been cast in and have continued to play throughout your life, such as: rescuer, carer, organizer, the responsible one, the reliable one, the strong one, the capable one. There may also have been a certain pay off for you in playing this role, e.g. gaining confidence, control, love, being liked, feeling useful, feeling special, feeling strong or even feeling superior. The question to ask yourself is: “Does this role serve you now?” and if so “In what way?”. If you are experiencing the adverse effects of carrying other peoples’ stuff, and you want to change this, it may be necessary to evaluate the role that you have played and give yourself permission to resign from that historical role and take up a position that’s better suited to what you would prefer to experience now.
ENABLING OTHERS
Your intention may be positive in taking the load off others in order to help them, but in doing so, could you be enabling their reliance on you? When you enable other people, by carrying their load for them, you can unintentionally rob them of the inner power and authority that they will gain in the process of learning to be responsible for themselves. You may even resent them for not taking responsibility for themselves and never really see that you could potentially be contributing to the problem by carrying more than your share.
A PERSONAL NOTE
Growing up as a highly sensitive being with an over-developed empathic nature meant that I could feel Everything and Everyone around me like listening to, and experiencing life, with the volume at MAX. I used to find this incredibly overwhelming and anxiety producing as I unconsciously thought that what I was feeling was all mine, and somehow my fault, my karma or whatever my young mind perceived to by my own personal burden. When I first encountered my kinesthetic ability to sense the ailments of ‘others’ within my own body, it totally freaked me out but it did give me my first reference of ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’.
After years of development and understanding of both the interconnectedness and simultaneous separateness between myself and others, I attained a sense of freedom. This freedom came from being able to understand that what I was feeling was simply not all mine, it was a huge relief that dissolved both my personal overwhelm and anxiety, guilt and overdeveloped sense of responsibility for everyone and everything. So the pure awareness that NOT everything I was feeling was mine alone, allowed me to disconnect from the unconscious pressure of continuously carrying all that weight and instead to give myself permission to be able to pick it up and put it down.
So from personal experience, I understand it can be upsetting and frustrating to be unaware of the stress of carrying others’ stuff building up until we are flattened by its weight. It can make us feel very disconnected with ourselves and it can be unnerving and make us question “whats the point” especially if we’re consciously motivated from a positive intention to help others. If anything, let it be yet another of ‘life’s’ encouraging ways of getting you to pay attention to yourself.
FINDING THE WAY THROUGH
As discussed, finding the way through involves learning to understand how we uniquely experience our body, mind, emotions and energy field allows us to have an internal barometer as a measure for when we’re starting to wobble and get out of balance. Resigning from our old historical roles that no longer serve us and intentionally changing this habitual nature by allowing others to carry their own weight and gain their own sense of resilience and inner authority, is incredibly liberating in itself. Then discerning between our own felt experience and that of others is yet another level of subtle re-positioning of ourselves that allows us to navigate through life in a far more deliberate, satisfying and unburdened way.
LIVING WITHIN DUALITY
Living as a human being on earth succumbs us to an existence of experiencing dualities: day/night, dark/light, gravity/weightlessness, bad/good, joy/sorrow, love/fear, them/us…..yet from the quantum perspective, we are all energetically connected and without separation.
So, in terms of quantum energy, there is no ‘them’ to speak of, and everything is all ‘us’. Therefore in the end, whether what we experience is ours or theirs….given that on some level we’re all interconnected and reflect one another, then what is theirs is also ours and our power to effect the world around us lies in how we respond to whatever and whoever it is that we encounter. The art of life as I am continually learning to understand it, is in balancing our separateness and uniqueness with our simultaneous interconnectedness and finding the joy in both.
All the best in finding yours
Written by: Chrissy Diamond