I read a post on Facebook the other day that shifted something in me. I don’t remember the exact words, and to be honest I have probably heard them a million different ways, but something about how it was phrased made me think.
What if I was just nice to myself regardless of what I was doing? What if I was nice to myself when I messed something up? When I was lazy or unmotivated or especially when I slipped back into an old pattern, something I tend to beat myself up for.
What if regardless of what I was doing, done, or going to do, I told myself ” I will be still love, care and honor myself regardless of the outcome”.
We as humans are so mean to ourselves. NO one, and I mean no one is as mean to us as we are to ourselves. Even if we have had people in our worlds that have treated us badly, we tend continue the behavior. Shaming or blaming ourselves for not stopping the abuse sooner, internalizing the bad behavior as we must be “bad” or deserving or it somehow. Or even internalizing their voices as ours, replaying it over and over again in our heads, becoming our own inner voice.
No one is as mean to us as we are, because no one is around us as much as we are around us. We are with ourselves every moment or every day. There is actually no escape from ourselves. So why don’t we make it a little easier to be with us. A little less negative self talk, less judging of ourselves and a bit more forgiveness. AND *gassp* some love, some nurturing or nice words of encouragement.
“Hey good job Anna! I see you out there trying new stuff every day, willing to look dumb and willing to say the wrong thing despite being nervous about it, you are doing a good job”.
I’ve been having a mind blowing kinda week. One where a simple phrase in a training has landed deeply, and makes me rethink my entire business.
But not in a bad way, not in a way of ” let’s throw out everything I have done and start something new”. But in a way that is just a slight shift from my original idea. A new way of looking at the same thing, but with a fresh prespective. One of Joy.
My old bio in my instagram said ” Helping people break free from their cage of conditioning”… which yes that is the aim of my business. I have come to know that we are so, so much more then our past conditioning from our childhood, past life’s, ancestral trauma, school, religion etc etc etc…. and I want to support people in shedding these layers.
But something just wasn’t landing, something was missing. I naturally am a fiercely optimistic , positive person, and I felt like I wanted more of that in my business. I want to both inspire and transform, but from a place of joy.
From a place of touching on the vulnerability we have in all of us, our joy , our pleasure, our ability to give and receive love. We say that our shame and guilt is something that is a sensitive place to touch on, and it is. But our society tends to connect within our pain. With in all the bad, annoying, painful, anger producing experiences that we all have, so often when we meet up with friends we begin to rattle off all of the painful or frustrating things we have going on in our lives. How often do you meet up with your friends and celebrate all the goodness in your life?
Can you even see the goodness in your life? If you can’t, you aren’t alone, and that is where I come in.
My bio now says “Helping you connect with your joy”
and the phrase in the training was this..
” Are you be willing to connect in the vulnerability of sharing your joy?”
They say the greatest investment is in yourself, tell that to Anna a few months ago and she would have said “the greatest investment is a trip, a beautiful place to stay, or an experience”. Tell that to Anna 5 years ago and she would have said “the greatest investment is in your wardrobe”. Which TBH I still enjoy all of those things today!
What this shows me is my slow evolution from spending money on physical things, to experiences to currently, straight up investing in energy and knowledge to move the dial on my soul growth and evolution. Which TBH I am still wrapping my head around. Sometimes it feel my like brain is so slow to absorb some things, and others it clicks immediately. But I digress….
Spending money on physical things has always been a source of immediately gratification. Yes I spend the money but look at this thing I have to show for it. Now I can wear this thing around and feel happy. But yet, that’s not really how it ever worked for me, maybe I got a bit of temporary joy, but honestly when I spend money on things, it just made we want more things, and then I hyper focused on all things I didn’t have , instead of enjoying what I did.
Then more recently, I started spending on experiences. I spend a year abroad, with a very limited income coming in, I drained a loan that I took out from the equity on my house. Yes, I did feel a bit guilty. But at the end of the day, what happened with the loan was exactly what I said would happen.
When I got the loan, I said to myself ” I am not paying this back, I am going to spend it all and then pay it back when I pay the house off”…. and I did just that. That loaned enabled me to have a life changing year abroad and then supported me when I returned to the states during COVID, when I could not work.
The experience I got out of that money is worth so much more then an extra 10k I would have got on my house if it sold with an extra bathroom, which was what the money was originally ear marked for.
The experience I will hold as sacred forever, yes there was a physical piece to it, food, shelter , transportation tickets, but it is all wrapped up in the experience. But yet there is a niggling of shame hanging around…. “Anna you should have spent it on the responsble thing of putting a bathroom in” says my inner critic. Well that is more grist for the mill, the processing emotional mill.
But now, what I am spending my money on is primarily, resources to support my growth, mental, physical, spiritual and business. Most of it is access to people that have been where I am going. It’s talking, it’s video’s, it’s courses and it’s all fodder for my inner critic …
“are you really spending that much money on listening to someone TALK”
“this is just a video, are you serious ?”
” you will get nothing out of this, go buy some clothes instead”
But what you are really paying for is to calibrate to someone who has been in your shoes. So your subconscious gets the message, “look this is attainable”, and that is everything. If your subconscious sees it happening to someone else, it has a much easier time, accepting that it can happen for you.
Also I think society has more trouble putting a price tag on someone’s energy, experience and voice. It is easier to spend your money on a physical thing that you what you are getting out of it.
What I have gotten from my investments in myself, has been priceless. It has given me such personal growth that a new wardrobe could never. It could not even come close. And the next trip, with all it’s amazing experiences, will be experienced to an even more full level as I incorporate more of practices that I have been learning by investing in myself.
Investing in yourself really is worth it. It makes everything else you do , buy, or have amplified to a higher level, you feel it more, sense it more and enjoy it more.
One where I realized on a cellular level, that it was indeed my own beliefs, at the source of my struggle with money. Now I know we always say that, at least in the online self help community, most of us intellectually have the knowledge that we have a big part in creating our reality, and if we keep seeing a pattern in our lives, we need to do the deeper work to look into it. But when you have that realization in the moment, as you are doing the thing, and you feel it coming from somewhere in your deep inner knowing, that something that you have thought is one way for so long, then come to find out, it’s a totally different way, THAT is the true embodiment of a realization.
It happened to me today after one of my many, many online money courses I. have taken, but this one “hit” a bit different. The women who leads it comes from a nervous system/trauma sensitive approach, she leads it from a body based way vs. a mindset way. I have take a few courses with her prior and one this she always says is “story follows state”, meaning its your nervous system and emotions that create your “story” aka your thoughts about a certain situation, yourself, or life in general. So in order to heal your relationship around money, you need to address the state of your nervous system.
But here is the breakthrough moment…. towards the end of the training, we started discussing attachment styles, and she said something that went a little like this.. “money is always trying to support you, it is always trying to be there for you, we attach so much of our own baggage to money but really it is an innocent bystander… ” yes I agree with this, money is neutral… but then….
“Think of all the times you have had no money, like zero, and then you get more, think of all the times you have spent everything, then more comes, think of all the times you have wasted your money on silly things, but yet , it still keeps coming back… money may be your most secure attachment relationship you have in your life, but you don’t realize it”
Hmmm money is my most secure attached relationship? Well that seems impossible…. but yet I leaned into it. Yes I have always made more money, job or no job. Yes money has always come back to me, after I spent it, yes money does just show up to be a resource to me with no real strings attached. The strings come from people’s views on money , not so much on money itself. Money is neutral, and money is always showing up for me, even when I talk badly about it, treat is badly, don’t honor it, spend it all carelessly,…. it keeps showing up for me.
Then I looked down at my coffee, money allows me to buy these coffees. I usually will get a coffee in the afternoon every day. The pattern started after college when I moved across the country and had no friends in my new city. I would make it my primary outing of the day some days, sit in a nice cafe, chat with the barista, it started to fill a void of loneliness and offered me connection. These coffees at times have been a life ring, a point I could rally myself for when times were tough. So many coffees, so many cafes, so much loneliness, so much sadness, so few people I could count on, so much shame and guilt for just being me, so much fear and anxiety around relationships with people, so much feeling unsafe in my body….. but yet, always enough money for a coffee, a connection, a sense of warmth and belonging.
I burst into tears. I use money to get these coffees, for all these years, money has been showing up for me, whether I saw it or not. It has been aiding me in buying these simple coffees, this simple pleasure that brought me connection and love all these years. Money has been behind it. Money does love me. I’m the one that doesn’t love money. I’m the one that thinks money is not enough, that money just comes and goes, that money doesn’t stick around when I need it, that money doesn’t want to be in my life. and that I just somehow don’t really deserve money. Those are all my believes that I have put on money, when the reality is, money is just always showing up for me, with a warm coffee in hand, saying “here you go, I know this helps you through you day, so I got it for you”. Even after all my abuse, trash talking and mistrust, money is still here.
They say money in a relationship, and the energy you put into it is just like any other relationship, it needs to be reciprocal, loving and secure. An important thing about a breakthrough is the integration period afterwards, an “AH HA” moment only gets you so far.
So stay tuned to see where my relationship with money goes…..
This meme has been doing around the instagram world lately, and it makes me laugh.
“Universe, send me a sign.
A sign comes.
I don’t like that sign, I want a signier sign”
But I mean, can’t we all relate!
Basically we want a better sign, not the actual sign that came.
I know I can, I often would ask for a sign and do the following:
Not listen for an answer.
Not like the answer when I got it.
Ask for a different sign.
Bemoan that no sign ever comes….
Just be mad at the universe, myself and everyone else, and feel stuck.
I did this for a long, long time basically until a few months ago. When I started to actually listen to what was going on.
Basically… the universe wants what’s best for you, not what is comfortable, usually not what you already have and usually it is thinking on a bigger scale then you are.
If you say you want something that you currently don’t have, this current version of you is going to have to do some shifting, expanding and changing of your energy and nervous system, to be able to vibrationally and physically have this new thing you want.
Ie… I want a beautiful, sacred union full of passion, connection and deep soul union. But if I have never had this, my body would not know what to do with such a person if it came tomorrow.
So the universe gives you opportunities to step into this version of you, so you can hold the new energies of love, connection, passion and receiving.
Receiving is a big one, no love of your life is going to come to you only to be swatted away by your “Oh no, I couldn’t, don’t , can’t ,deserve that”…
So when you ask or a sign, be open to ways it can come in.
Also ask from an empowered, open place of willingness to see the sign and act on it, even if it doesn’t make sense or you really don’t want to.
Your willingness is everything, you must be willing to see things a different way, you must be open to a sign coming in the form of a text message, a friend calling, and invitation, a new opportunity , or a falling apart of something you planned on happening.
Be open and willing to see things from a different perspective.
This year I claim the most authentic version of myself yet.
This is the year that I step out of victim consciousness and into my own empowerment once and for all.
This year I follow my heart’s desires vs my ego’s fears.
This is the year I shed all relationships that don’t serve my highest path.
Because this is the year I begin to live for myself.
I decide what means something to me.
I decide where I put my time, money and energy.
Because at the end of this short time I have here on earth, I do not want to look back and see all the things I didn’t do because of “another’s” views on it…
My view is what matters, my word is my law and my energy is sacred.
I am creating a beautiful life for myself.
To inspire you to do the same.
And I’m taking you with me! Yup, if you are here reading this, you are coming. You may not want to, you may like where you are, you may think you are powerless to change, you may be just reading this to fuel your fire of doubts, you may be reading this because you have an interest in this type of content but never see yourself really stepping into it… but I am here to tell you , if you are here, even reading this words. You are shifting. These words are planting seeds in your subconscious, seeds of change, growth and evolution. You don’t realize it, but these seeds may pop up as little sprouts when you least them. What you do with them, is ultimately up to you, but I want you to really hear these next words…
If you desire to change, you can. It takes work, but it is worth it.
That is, if you can be with the discomfort, not immediately numb it out with your favorite distraction methods, and let yourself softened into it.
Your pain can teach you things your joy simply will never be able to. And the up side to that? You increase your capacity for joy, as well as your tolerance for pain. For joy and pain are connected, as all emotions are, you can not have more joy in life with out pain, because without knowing what pain is, you will never know true joy. You will walk through life avoiding both, it will be boring, and you will become numb to the real and raw experience of life going on around you. You will be up in your head, worrying about things that will probably never effect you, being depressed about your past and anxious about your future, instead of experiencing the present moment, in all it’s joy, pain, beauty and love.
Yes, I can hear you already! I can hear your protests, your “how do you do thats” your eye rolls, your ” well that isn’t me” your scrolling over this post, your avoidance, your unwillingness to see things a different way …. your basic disbelief that anything good could come from discomfort.
I hear you because I had all of those same thoughts. It is just recently that I have started to embody this knowledge on a deep cellular level. Meaning this isn’t just conscious knowledge floating around in my brain, it’s body based wisdom that has come from the last two months of being thrust into discomfort and unknown territories, and realizing that if I don’t run from it, if I sit with it and let it teach me it’s lesson, I come out wiser, stronger and with more clarity of my soul’s true path.
Our society has an aversion to discomfort. We run from it, we run from our big emotions, we numb out with TV, social media, food, exercise, alcohol, sex etc etc etc….we project our issues on to others so we can cause flights, we avoid confrontations, we avoid things that could even turn into confrontations, we assume things instead of asking, we always make someone else “bad” so we can focus on their badness and not take any responsibility for our actions, we fixtate of fears that are so out of our control or things that we know will never happen to us, so we can avoid our real fears….we basically will do anything to not leave our comfort zones, even if those zones really don’t serve us.
But what I want you to know, that this is all ok AND we are ultimately in control of if we do these actions or not. These are all learned coping mechanisms that have turned into patterns that shape how we see ourselves and the world. They have immensely served us as children, but now it is time to let them go. It is time to take responsibility for our lives and the events in them, even if we don’t like them….well really ESPECIALLY if we don’t like them.
Our subconscious beliefs create our reality, a direct route to our subconscious is through our pain, and our discomfort. If you feel like if you were to start sitting with your pain, you will become the pain and be swallowed up by it? Well, that is probably already happening on a subconscious level. Our subconscious runs the show, if you are denying you pain, it is being stored in your body, and ultimately driving all that you do.
Let’s take our power back. Let’s become the captain of our ship, the co creator of our world. Victim consciousness is something we can leave behind, but it does take work.
It takes committing to live in your truth and aiming towards your highest good more often then not. It takes sitting with discomfort that comes up and transmuting into wisdom.
Take this slowly, one small action a day, one small step in the direction of your desires.
Astrology has been around for thousands of years, people from all over the globe have looked to the stars for guidance, for hope and for clarity about our life’s circumstances. There are literally so many common archetypal patterns of human consciousness being shown in the sky, and yet when I speak of it today, people seem to be in two separate camps, the first being…
” Astrology? that is so common place and I don’t even resonate with my sun sign at all”
OR
“Astrology? all that stuff is too complex for me”.
When really I believe astrology can offer us these three things…
Clarity
Curoisity
Choice
Let’s start with clarity.
Clarity.
Everyone is looking for clarity, everyone wants to know what path they should pursue, whether it’s in money, career, love, friendships or life long destiny. We all seem to be asking questions and looking to everything outside of ourselves for answers.
But the answers we seek are all within. As I like to say “the inner game is the only game”, and what is a way to access the inner game? By gaining knowledge of your personal astrology, one way is. by looking at the formation of the sky at the exact moment of your birth, other wise known as your natal chart. It holds keys to your personal struggles, strengths and when and where they may show up. If you haven’t had a natal chart reading done I recommend it.
But let’s take that further. We might not want to sit through a reading, or have the funds to pay for it, or it could be a bunch of jibber jabber and we get frustrated with it so we put it down and forget about it.
I offer you another way. Each one of us has every single sign, planet and luminary (sun and moon) in our chart somewhere and depending on their placement, they could be influencing our lives to a great degree.
I’ll use myself as an example, I have my moon in Sagittarius in the 5th or 6th house, depends on which house placement I use.
Your moon sign is pretty well known as a beacon of your internal world. Ok no big deal, my internal world is fiery, optimistic, free spirited with a love for all things international.
Then I got my chart read and discovered the Uranus sits pretty much on top of my natal moon …
What does this mean?
It means that my emotional world is, in the balanced state, innovative, exciting, individual, lots of interesting opportunities seem to come out of no where, and unique. AND in the unbalanced state, I feel rebellious, flighty, non committal, unpredictable and unbalanced.
Yup, that story checks out, and it’s why the traditional Sadge moon info seemed a bit lacking for me.
When I found this out I breathed a sign of relief. WOW so much makes sense now, I’m not someone that is emotional unbalanced and unpredictable, wanting to do something one day and not the next because something is wrong with me, I simply have a strong energy of unique individualism, influencing my internal world.
It really cleared up a lot of self flagulation I would do when I thought I was messing up again, by starting something new and ditching the old.
What I turned that into was this….
” it’s ok to change your mind”
“It’s ok to feel a lot of feelings, you don’t need to act on all of them”
“Every path leads you to where you need to be”
” A “no” is just as important as a “yes”, it’s all fine tuning the path you are on”
“It’s exciting to be interested in all different kinds of things, you don’t need to limit yourself”
This knowledge was key, as was accepting these traits, and learning to work with them for my highest good.
And it all start with clarity. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that is ok.
Learning to work with all the pieces of the puzzle in your natal chart can bring this clarity.
But it is up to us to accept it and learn to work with it.
xoxox
P.S we will dive into the other two traits, choice and curiosity the next blog posts 🙂
This! Is a mouthful. Even as I type that I am like laughing in my head. YOU! Who do you think you are that could offer this to others, you have struggled with this your whole life. HELL you didn’t even believe in anything highest power associated until like 2 years ago, and you still question every nudge your intuition gives you, that is when you even let yourself hear it.
Brain says…not qualified.
But isn’t that exactly what makes someone qualified? That they went from total non believe to total believe? and it’s envidenced in their daily lives, in how they show up and who they aim to be on the reg? Or is it having intellect knowledge but zero integration of it in their lives?
As I ponder the above statement more and more, it seems to make more and more sense. Who do people trust to lead them? People that have been in their shoes, someone that they can relate to and that they can see a piece of themselves in. Being relatable is big. Sure we see lots of people making big moves, doing the thing, breaking the mold, making the money… but can we relate to them? Usually not. Usually our minds tell us that they are way separate from us, those people are “over there” because of any and all reasons we come up with, more successful, more beautiful, more connected, smarter, funnier etc etc etc.
When in reality they are human as well, and humans come with the same set of feelings/sensations/ability to doubt themselves and an ego that wants to keep them in a familiar role. People are just all on different paths.
And the other day, when I was literally walking on a path, and this download dropped it, it made me stop short, laugh, and then immediately text someone to tell them because I knew that it was important to my overall path.
Sometimes the things we struggle with most are signs that there is a gift in there somewhere , usually one that you tend to ignore. Because the thing about natural talents is that we tend to take them for granted. They are always with us, we tend to forget that other humans may still be struggling with that same thing and your words could greatly aid them on their path.
So in short, don’t take anything about your amazing self for granted, your struggles can be turned into our greatest wisdom. We are only gifted with so many years here in this body, let’s spend them living as fully as we can.
This is a topic I have struggled with big time. I’m struggling right now as I type these words. But here I go…
So I, much like everyone want to be right. I want to hold the moral high ground of “what I am doing is right, and if you aren’t doing/believing/thinking the same you are wrong. But what if the concept of “right” and “wrong” are not real. What if they are illusions made up by our small selves in order to organize our own belief systems and give a sense of control to a world that we don’t have control over.
Which is another topic for a different day, we actually are very powerful and have the power to create our realities AND we don’t have control over anything but how we choose to respond to ourselves which in turns creates our life experience. But again, different topic for a different day.
For the sake of this post we are keeping it simple, humans like control because we were not taught how to use our power so basically it scares us. Our nervous systems freak out, we start to self doubt and worry what others will think, and we self abandon because we feel unsafe being different then those around us.
But let’s put down these stories for a moment, don’t worry you can pick them back up after this post, I know how much the story of who you believe you are is rooted in your ego identity and setting it aside momentarily can cause a bit of anxiety. But I invite you to have an open mind when you are reading this. How ever that looks to you.
What if we didn’t categorize our thoughts/beliefs/feelings on what is right or wrong? On what ones feel good and what feels bad? What if we could let go of our need to be right, and just let whatever is coming up, come up?
Because at our core, we are love. And whatever is coming up, is ultimately false, it is conditioning from this life or a past one, it is an agreement of your soul and something bigger, something we humans have a hard time grasping because no one really knows and we won’t ever really know. So why don’t we relax into the not knowing and just experience the sensations in our body? as neutral. Yes there are ones that are more pleasurable then others, but what if we didn’t make these unpleaserable feeling so bad? so wrong, so “not right”. I think we would feel like we were bad people if we did that. Like if we aren’t doing and being the “right” ways… we must in turn, be wrong. And we have made it a crime against humanity to be wrong.
Yes there are societal things that are considered wrong, and for good reason. That is more of a moral code of conduct that our society has adopted. But can you see flaws in this moral code of conduct ? How are so many people out there left to starve and we don’t put a stop to it? There are whole countries of people being tortured, evicted from their lands, treated as less then human, and the majority of us don’t really give it a second thought. We tend to look the other way making excuses about how we can’t do anything about it, but isn’t that wrong? Whatever our excuses are , it doesn’t take away from the reality that people are still suffering. But excuses and blaming the “other in charge” are allowed in today’s society. You might not agree that it is allowed, but it is.
How do we know it’s allowed? Because it is currently going on, and has been going on for years. If it wasn’t allowed, there would be actual forces trying to stop it. But instead there is just division, saying how wrong and bad the “other ” is, or weakly enforced regulations, laws, and platitudes to attempt to show the people that indeed we are doing something for these people in these unfortunate circumstances. But let’s drop the act. People are suffering and nothing real of sustainable measures is being done.
So I ask you, what can be done?
You can stop focusing all your power on the external and turn inwards. To where you can really make change. You can stop with your moral regulation of your right and wrong sensations, and just accept them as part of the many layered being you are. You can realize your ego is the source of your doubts, judgments and fears and you can lovingly tell it to pipe down. Your ego wants to keep us afraid and small, so we don’t rock the boat and be seen as “wrong”, and be cast out by our peers and loved ones. The more we succumb to the ego, therefore keeping us afraid and small, the more we think we have no power, and the more we succumb to external circumstances keeping us powerless…ie. news, media, government etc etc.
Take. your. power. back.
You feel deeply that our society is wrong?
Do your inner work, that is the only way you will have any power to create any lasting change. Anything else is lip service, you want to be seen as right and righteous, disliking all the people hurting others, but you don’t do much about it besides talk about how wrong they are.
That will do nothing but create more of a divide. More righteousness, more fear, more separateness, more of the same conditions we have now.
The only way things will change is if everyone realizing how powerful they are on an individual basis, that we are manifesting our reality all the time based on our subconscious beliefs systems. You want a new reality? Go in an look where you don’t want to look, at your so called “wrong” feelings and sensations.
If everyone did that, we would have a new earth. Just like Eckhart Tolle talks about.
How will we get everyone to do that? By doing it for yourself and stopping the obsessive worrying about how right and wrong everyone else is.
Focus on you. Let yourself out of this god forsaken box we have all put ourselves in.
The Soul Coach 