Friendships.....

I have been doing a lot of self awareness and healing work these days. I guess in the bustle of life, I had a little bit of a breather where I am not taking classes, the kids are fairly occupied so these days I can sit with my thoughts and make sense of them.

I have been thinking about friendships lately. Friendships are extremely important relationships that goes without saying but how important they have been to me lately was something I had not realized.
Friendship has so many facets, we have to be our own best friends before we can even begin to extend this gift to any one else. I feel most of the time we fail to do that, we are critical of our own selves, we shame our selves we are impatient with our selves and we do not extent a lot of love to our selves.  That is one thing I am actively trying to change.

Than there is the friendship between spouses. This is the most important friendship you will have in your entire life, I had read somewhere marry the person you love talking to because after the initial high fades its important to have that space where you can talk about anything. This requires a lot of courage because true friendship cannot exist without the capacity to be vulnerable with one another. Without truly allowing your self to be seen and feeling accepted relationships get stagnant. People become creatures of habit they are required to wear a constant facade, their relationships become routine and superficial.  For any true friendship to take place we have to have the capacity to be vulnerable and to be accepting of our own selves. When we are our own best friends and are accepting of our own selves we will have the capacity to extend that acceptance to others and most importantly to our partners.

I for one has always needed friends, people I can talk to openly about my challenges and triumphs. I guess for one things I am a person who needs to talk it out or write it out to process whatever I am going through. So yes over the years there have been friends whom I have leaned on for support. Most recently there has been some wonderful humans whom I have shared cups of tea with and spoken to length with about my trials and triumphs. I think the best gift we can give anyone is the gift of our time and presence. When some one is going through a rough patch, the best thing you can do is just listen and offer them a space without judgement, I have been very blessed to have had friends who gave me that. They were a witness to my life by listening to me by letting me cry and laugh and just be me.

I have met so many amazing girls and boys, men and women in my life journey so far. Some friends I know now,  I truly wish I had known when I was a younger and without the constraints of adult responsibilities we would have had some pretty mean adventures. We 'd have climbed trees and played hop scotch, talked well into the night over the phone and analyzed everything under the sun.

Some of our closest friendships are with our siblings and cousins, I have had those too. People I relied on and who no matter how far they are took the time to listen and be present. You see a true friendship cannot occur with masks and facades it requires us to be willing to let go of the fantasy version of our selves and of another. It requires us to be able to be seen in all our rawness.

For me personally a friendship is a precious thing. In the words of William J. Bennett

"Friendship is more than acquaintance, and it involves more than affection. Friendship usually rises out of mutual interests and common aims, and these pursuits are strengthened by the benevolent impulses that sooner or later grow. The demands of friendship frankness, for self-revelation, for taking friends' criticisms as seriously as their expressions of admiration or praise, for stand-by-me loyalty, and for assistance to the point of self-sacrifice are all potent encouragements to moral maturation and even ennoblement.

In our age, when casual acquaintance often comes so easily, and when intimacy comes too soon and too cheaply, we need to be reminded that genuine friendships take time. They take effort to make and work to keep. Friendship is a deep thing."

To all my dear dear friends old and new know that you are loved, you are seen and you matter. Today think about all the things that you love about your self and start being your own best friend. :)

Emotion, what is it?

The first time I entered into a therapist office, racked with fear. Having panic attacks which were crippling my day to day living. I went in and said to her, please help me. I do not want to feel. She looked at me and replied, you have to feel my dear. Emotions are not good or bad.  These words started a long journey for me. I learnt a lot about emotional health, about brain science, about challenging emotions and trauma and how it manifests in our body. How all this affects our day to day lives and interactions.
 I hope to share some of those insights with you, with the hope that it will help you on your journey to more wholesome living. Lets start with the basics, our brain is pretty complex but if we were to draw a very basic model for the brain we can divide it into three distinct parts. The brain stem, the limbic brain and the neocortex. The brain stem and limbic brain are the more ancient brain structures and they sit under the realm of conscious. They comprise of the subconscious, each brain system evolved to regulate the lower brain system so there is a top down and a bottom up regulation going on in our body.
Mostly the brain stem functions involve all the body functions that are not under our conscious control like breathing, heart beat etc. One of the main functions of the brain stem is to signal the higher brain and body that it is safe. They way it does this is by constantly scanning the environment for anything that reminds the body of threat and safety.  The only input the brain is getting from the brain stem is am I safe or am I not safe.
Next up is the limbic brain, this part of the brain is responsible for the emotional response in our body. It produces these emotional responses in the form of physical sensations in our body. This part of the brain is also not under conscious control and its main purpose is help make sense of a safe or threat response. Our subconscious brains respond faster than our conscious analytical brain almost 5 times faster, especially when it perceives a threat in the environment, this may be a real threat like a bear in the forest or a perceived threat such as a past experience which brings out a similar body response of elevated heart beat or other physical manifestation. Think of this as what happens when one is near a hot object, your body recoils before you even have time to process that you are in danger.
We have all heard comments like, oh so and so is so emotional... well I have news for you folks. We all are emotional because emotions are biological responses of our body. Its like the response we have in our body to hunger or thirst. The only one who is not emotional is a dead person or a robot and as more and more robots get advanced I think it wont be long before even robots become emotional.
 Biologically an emotional response is this, we receive a stimulus from the environment this produces a electric response in our brain, this electric response produces a chemical response in our body in the shape of hormones and chemicals these in turn produce an energetic response in our body. This energetic response can be felt in a myriad of physical sensations. In the case of challenging emotions like anger, sadness and anxiety these get manifested in our body with sensations such as butterfly like feelings in stomach, tightening of the chest, tightening of facial muscles, numbness in legs and other sensations. Emotions are the body signals to help us understand if we are safe or in threat and they have a biological purpose.
We do not control emotions, our emotions are our own and no one can read our emotional state unless we talk about it with them. People tend to numb or distance them selves from challenging emotions and this has dire consequences. When we do not acknowledge our emotional states they tend to fester and cause us undue grief. Sometimes when we are facing a difficult emotion we tend to project it onto another in the hope that it will make us feel less powerless and less uncomfortable, or we use other methods to numb and distance ourselves from the challenging emotions. Different people use different methods but denial is a very common strategy, pretend it is not there and it will disappear. Numbing using electronics, food, drugs or codependence on another are other common strategy to coping with challenging emotions.
How do we break this cycle? The most important thing to learn is cultivating presence and having the capacity to sit with our emotional states without attaching any judgment or value to them. Think of this like soothing a child when they are upset, just listen to your body sensations and allow your self to go through the cycle of activation to calm. Allow your self to feel and do not attach any meaning to how and what you are feeling. This takes practice just like we learn to eat, cloth our selves, ride a bike or a car. We can learn to be present with our emotional states and nurture them without judgement. This is the first step to developing self awareness so that we are better able to recognize our triggered emotional states.
The second step is to verbalize how we are feeling or write what we are feeling, this allows our thinking brain to start processing the emotions and making sense of them. This also helps us to be in a better position to ask for the support we may need because remember no one can read your mind or your emotional state.