Over the years Hugh has had the privilege to meet many people who have shared different experiences and challenges whilst seeking support and restoration to re-find balance.
Some have been living with life-long chronic conditions where pain has diminished their everyday life, others have faced diagnoses of terminal illness or abrupt loss. Whether it’s a seismic shift or the everyday we are dealing with – the restless, the hot and searing, the lethargy that sinks inwards beneath the skin or the numbness of a black hole inside us, at some stage all of us find ourselves out of our depth and at sea with what we are facing.
These changing tides of somatic experience and differing flows of emotion are a natural part of our life journey but so too is the healing that can restore balance.
Such is the interdependence of our experience that: to find healing we need to live our life and to find life we need to heal. “What does it mean to live our life?” and “what do we need to heal?”
We can all spend a lot of time re-working the past and speculating about the future, attempting to reinvent or invent what is beyond our control. These are very energy consuming activities and are addictive for our minds. They not only deplete us in our everyday life but create a false perspective on reality and turn our world upside down.
These energy sapping ruminations of the mind can mean we are not fully present or appreciative of pleasant experiences be they personal or shared, too wrapped up in anxieties that may never happen or stuck in an emotional hangover that’s making us miserable.
Emotional imbalance, with its fault finding, self-criticism and judgement, mean we develop habits of closing-down as a way of defending ourselves from the uncomfortable. We hold onto harshness, animosity, resentment, discontent and restlessness letting it wear us down. It takes us away from being generous and kind with ourselves leading to increasing exhaustion or an unsustainable rush and then a crash.
These experiences point us towards what we’ve found to be the most important expression of healing, that is the restoration of energetic balance where tension dissolves and we return to feeling light and expansive, our energy flowing to its fullest capacity. It takes patience and courageous effort to learn to trust rather than tense to allow the healing that is natural for us to restore balance in this way.
We need to experience how to be comfortable in ourselves to meet uncomfortable sensations and underlying patterns of tension rather than follow our habitual patterns of avoidance and pushing through or away. This allows us to reconnect with our loving and compassionate heart, opening-up with generosity to all the tight places where we have unknowingly rejected and abandoned ourselves in difficult moments. Holding ourselves softly in this way restores our energetic balance and helps us grow a relationship of love with ourselves, learning in each new moment to have the courage within to trust rather than tense whatever we are facing.
As we give time and energy to our inner life like in this way, we can observe our reflexes to look outwardly for comfort, distraction or projection onto others soften and then at different times no longer arise. The invitation to keep trusting and not tensing is an open one for the whole of our life journey and we come to realise nothing is ever certain or fixed. and only this relationship can sustain, nourish and heal us. This constant change invites us over and over to find the natural healing we need to live our life, to grow a relationship of love with ourselves and so discover what it means to live our life.
Some have been living with life-long chronic conditions where pain has diminished their everyday life, others have faced diagnoses of terminal illness or abrupt loss. Whether it’s a seismic shift or the everyday we are dealing with – the restless, the hot and searing, the lethargy that sinks inwards beneath the skin or the numbness of a black hole inside us, at some stage all of us find ourselves out of our depth and at sea with what we are facing.
These changing tides of somatic experience and differing flows of emotion are a natural part of our life journey but so too is the healing that can restore balance.
Such is the interdependence of our experience that: to find healing we need to live our life and to find life we need to heal. “What does it mean to live our life?” and “what do we need to heal?”
We can all spend a lot of time re-working the past and speculating about the future, attempting to reinvent or invent what is beyond our control. These are very energy consuming activities and are addictive for our minds. They not only deplete us in our everyday life but create a false perspective on reality and turn our world upside down.
These energy sapping ruminations of the mind can mean we are not fully present or appreciative of pleasant experiences be they personal or shared, too wrapped up in anxieties that may never happen or stuck in an emotional hangover that’s making us miserable.
Emotional imbalance, with its fault finding, self-criticism and judgement, mean we develop habits of closing-down as a way of defending ourselves from the uncomfortable. We hold onto harshness, animosity, resentment, discontent and restlessness letting it wear us down. It takes us away from being generous and kind with ourselves leading to increasing exhaustion or an unsustainable rush and then a crash.
These experiences point us towards what we’ve found to be the most important expression of healing, that is the restoration of energetic balance where tension dissolves and we return to feeling light and expansive, our energy flowing to its fullest capacity. It takes patience and courageous effort to learn to trust rather than tense to allow the healing that is natural for us to restore balance in this way.
We need to experience how to be comfortable in ourselves to meet uncomfortable sensations and underlying patterns of tension rather than follow our habitual patterns of avoidance and pushing through or away. This allows us to reconnect with our loving and compassionate heart, opening-up with generosity to all the tight places where we have unknowingly rejected and abandoned ourselves in difficult moments. Holding ourselves softly in this way restores our energetic balance and helps us grow a relationship of love with ourselves, learning in each new moment to have the courage within to trust rather than tense whatever we are facing.
As we give time and energy to our inner life like in this way, we can observe our reflexes to look outwardly for comfort, distraction or projection onto others soften and then at different times no longer arise. The invitation to keep trusting and not tensing is an open one for the whole of our life journey and we come to realise nothing is ever certain or fixed. and only this relationship can sustain, nourish and heal us. This constant change invites us over and over to find the natural healing we need to live our life, to grow a relationship of love with ourselves and so discover what it means to live our life.
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