~ healing your wounded parts naturally creates inner harmony ~
For so many years I was striving for balance through consistency. Spending a lot of time down the yoga path, to be consistent required a tonne of self-discipline that I seemed to lack. The yoga world is more inherently masculine than feminine – not only was it created by men for men, its principles are also geared toward action and structure. Although the feminine aspects are absolutely still present, the main example being that all asana should be both sthira and sukha – steady (masculine) and easeful (feminine), and the modernised and popular Yin yoga, based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, the masculine still dominates.
The same felt true for me with the Buddhist approaches. They felt very confined and restricted, even though it promised expansion and freedom. Buddhism and yoga felt like, since this promised result was only achievable through strict discipline, I was never going to get there. I internally punished myself for not being able to show up for more than a few days for a 40-day sadhana, or sit still in quiet meditation, or get up every damn morning at the same freaking time and SIT and FOCUS and BE PRESENT.
Gosh, it was such a frustrating learning journey!! What I read in the Buddhist and Yogic texts, all the fabulous wonderful philosophical ideals that felt like a big YES YES YES to my mind and body, just would not and could not translate to my practical reality. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was just so inconsistent and undisciplined that the promise of balance, freedom and expansion would not be mine.
At least NOT through these pathways! After many years of drudgingly trying to fit into these frameworks, I absolutely wasn’t giving up. I knew that the promise of balance, freedom, expansion, inner peace, stability, calm and even to some degree, consistency, was absolutely possible for me. I just had to find the right way.
By the age of 26 I started to track my menstrual cycle. I had begun to notice that there was a pattern of extreme mood swings, which, once tracking my cycle, I noticed they were always the week before my period. My mood swings were so severe I could barely function. The rage that was stuck in my system from childhood trauma came out that week, every single month. Although PMS is now considered ‘normal’, it is not normal. It is normalised. Due to chronic stress, illness and women having to operate more from their masculine, PMS has become a huge issue. It was not really a thing in the past, when women were more in tune with their cycles and had the spaciousness to embody and literally live by their feminine nature (this is around before the industrial revolution).
As the years went on I continued tracking my cycle and was further committed myself to healing on all levels. I didn’t want to live this life of chaos anymore and I knew there was a way for my internal and external world to become harmonious.
The key I found was simply balance. This is talked about a lot, what does this actually mean? The way I found balance was by balancing my internal feminine and masculine. By recruiting all parts of me in a conscious way to really utilise the roles they were made for. And I’m not talking about wounded parts – these parts I’ve worked on healing which has contributed to this balance. I’m talking about the parts of my true embodied Self energy (which is technically ‘whole’). Our true embodied Self energy takes on different forms and includes the 8C’s from IFS – compassion, clarity, calm, curiosity, courage, confidence, connected, creativity. As a whole, I would call this energy as being centred and balanced.
The more I healed my wounded parts, the more I could embody my true Self energy, my centred, balanced and aligned Self. This is when the chaos began to subside, being replaced by a more harmonious energy. When we are centred and balanced within, our external reality will begin to mirror this harmony to us.
If you’d like to learn more about finding balance and ease, book an appointment now 🙂
