Are You Brave Enough to Dig Deep This Summer?

Part 3 - Grounded through the Summer Series

Welcome to Summer where our typical schedules are thrown out the window. In this relaxed, yet stress-full in a different way season, there may be opportunities to pause for yourself.  

During those minutes while you are in the day-camp pick up line, hiking, mowing the grass, or any of the other activities you do during summer, maybe ask yourself some of the deeper questions you might avoid.

Questions like: 

Am I happy?

Do I feel connected to who I really am or want to be?

How can I stop living on autopilot and be the person I am inside?

What ARE my values? And how the heck do I live them?

Where am I most fulfilled? 

What environments or activities light me up?

These and other deeper questions are waiting for you. That may seem scary and full of pressure.  You might be thinking, “Mary Pat, I thought you were going to help me be grounded through summer and this idea of looking inside and asking myself deep questions just took me out of my body!”

I know, it IS scary. It is scary for me too. I’m often worried that the answers I find will either cause me to feel like a failure or not enough, OR that I’ll have to make massive shifts in my perspectives and environments to equal the awesomeness that I find inside. 

So let’s take a breath here. And come along with me as we explore what a coaching session can look like. Let’s see what we can find, together. Inhale, and a big exhale. Ready?

Let’s pause and consider where all that fear and anxiety just showed itself in our body. Was it your chest or stomach? Or did your throat tighten up?  Maybe your eyeballs popped out?

Wherever that expression of emotion showed itself, touch it, put a hand there, hold it lovingly.  And just breathe  into it softly.

Give it a few breaths. You can talk to it or to yourself. Invite that place to tell you why it did what it did. Use your imagination like you did from the previous post about the other sensations you found in your body. Let this sensation have a voice. Even if nothing comes up for you, pausing and giving your acknowledgement may be just what was needed.  You’ve calmed down your nervous system just by pausing and breathing. Do you feel grounded and in your body again? I hope so. If not, repeat until you do. Then continue reading. 

If we don’t look for the answers to those questions we’ll never find them. We’ll keep hiding who we are and living on autopilot attempting to check all the boxes that society, culture, family and obligations say we have to check.

That doesn’t sound like fun to me. That feels heavy in my chest and I get filled with dread. Doing inner work can feel daunting, but also exciting. Like the answers that I’ll find will lead me to places I’ve never been before. And to a low-risk taker like me, that IS scary, but living a life of dread is worse. I would rather do the work of answering the deep questions to see where I am led than feel trapped and hopeless. The possibilities of openness and freedom of the answers invites me to keep going. 

So how do we answer them? What’s this whole “look inside for the answers thing” work? First, pick one of the questions to ask.

Let’s examine the last question: What environments or activities light me up?”  

Now you need some space to consider. “Space to consider” might be going for a walk while you ponder, or making something in the kitchen while the other members of the home are occupied, journaling or going for a drive.

Being still in the car line is also an option as is continuing to mow the grass or pull the weeds. 

Maybe you want to make a list of the things you know you enjoy, or maybe you start with the things you know you don’t enjoy. Sometimes for me that is easier to do because the negative is “easier” to see than the positive. 

However you explore it physically through action, the most important part is to feel what emotions show themselves as you ponder.  

THAT is the inside part: paying attention to how your body reacts to the questions you are posing. Listening, observing, tasting, hearing, smelling, knowing and feeling are all the ways our inner self uses the body to communicate with us. As you ask yourself, “What environments or activities light me up” if you close your eyes, or keep them fixed on your task, what comes through? 

I do hope you did pause reading this to experience the answer. For me, I have a list of activities and places that feel yummy or fun or comfortable.  

So now what? Now that I have listened to my inner self through my body, now what do I do?

Keep digging!

Ask another question, like, “How can I get more ‘x’ in my life?” Go inside for the answer. Take a small action that relates to your answer and then reassess your inner answer. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

This practice of interacting with our inner knowing, our inner self is what we missed growing up. No one in my upbringing told me to trust myself. We don’t get told that until we are adults, by then we’ve denied our inner knowing so many times it has almost gone silent. 

That is why it’s so important to learn to trust it now. We have to lean in to trust it in spite of our upbringing, our own patterns of behaviors, our religion, our culture, our society or our institutions. When we go inside for the answers, we become uncaged. As we take action on the answers we discover inside it might scare others because we no longer fit the box we built for ourselves; or the boxes they built in their minds around us. 

        We need to find the other ones who are willing to look inside for answers. We need their support as we take our tentative steps into this dark wondrous space. We need their support as we take the tentative steps OUTSIDE in the light of day and show through our small steps of action that we are now living by our inner wisdom instead of the rules of life. (There is more I can explore here, but that’s where we can go deeper working together during a coaching session.)    

Do you remember the imagination you had when you were a kid? How we built worlds and had adventures? How we’d attempt to explain our “new world” with its adventures and rules to our parents or family, and they wouldn’t get it?  Hopefully we didn’t let their criticism dim our imagined world and the next day we’d play there again. That is kind of how listening to our inner wisdom is going to feel. We’re going to have to have that child-like resilience and stubbornness to follow our wisdom. Many won’t be willing or able to understand. ** 

At the end of our time here, how WE lived and followed our inner wisdom is the only thing that will matter. So maybe, this summer we can begin to learn this new skill. Softly, like a summer evening  breeze, allow ourselves to pause and go inside for our answers and connect to that inner knowing, our inner self. 

And if you want to share in the curiosity of the questions that I ask, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly email or consider booking a Discovery Call to see how I can support you individually on this path. Click the box at the bottom of this blog  to make subscribing easy. Let’s connect on my list or through a short call. Your one beautiful life is worth living to the fullest!

See you in the next post as we visit your playful side.