Healthy expansion happens ONLY when we get out of our comfort zones.
Safety is not the absence of threat - it is the presence of connection.
The point when we first realise “I’m SO done with this'' is overwhelming, and we KNOW that we’ve GOT to make a change.
My parents fought to escape the poverty-mindset of industrialisation to become professionals. My grandparents fought to stay alive through starvation, natural disasters and war. They survived circumstances that more than 50 million other people did not survive. Going back further, my great-grandfathers all fought and survived the first world war. The very fact that they survived indicates that they inherited a warrior-archetype from their forefathers that allowed them to be in the less-than-2% that made it home.
I inherited that warrior-archetype from my masculine lines going back at least seven generations. As I started my corporate career, I thought being a warrior was normal, and I allowed my warrior-beliefs to get me to the point of complete burn-out.
In 2018 I reached the point of burn-out. So I quit my job to take a career break. But as I was soon to find out - the absence of a threat does not mean we feel safe. What I didn’t realise is that I was still trapped in the drama of the warrior-archetype.
After a year doing very little I realised that I KNEW that I could NOT go back to corporate life with the same attitude that I had left with that had got me burned-out.
But the money was running out. I had investments in Australian superannuation but I could not access those, they were locked away. What I really needed was to gain a new perspective by deeply connecting to my true self. And in doing so, to become integrated: to learn, to grow and adopt a new set of powerful positive beliefs.
Before I could start on getting myself from burned-out and broke to thriving, I needed to connect to the real me. But I didn’t know that. I was unconsciously incompetent in my own awareness.
After my second divorce in 2015, I had engaged with a coach, Peter, and I had a lot of fun relearning my NLP, and learning to skydive without feeling fear and adrenaline. And I met some wonderful amazing people. But there was something missing in what he was teaching.
What was missing was the connection-to-self. He wasn't a bad or wrong coach, it’s just that he just didn’t have it in himself, so he couldn’t teach it. His methods were great if you wanted to suppress, bypass or ignore your emotions. And I didn’t know I needed it, so I wasn’t looking for it. My own darkness was not visible. During my career break in 2019, I went for a session with my kinesiologist. The question that I asked was “why am I so angry?”
It was in this very session I first experienced making my own darkness visible, by using my body and muscle-testing to locate the emotional blocks that had me trapped and lost. What I found was my darkness. In connecting to my body to get that question answered, I realised that I had been hearing my mother’s words “you are a disappointment” for forty-seven years. It was an unconscious limiting-belief that I had been living with for decades but I was unaware of it. And, not only was I programmed to blame myself, I was angry about it too.
Learning this about myself gave me so much insight about how I was operating from a place of anger, fear and anxiety that had led me to burn-out in the first place. This was the drama that was fueling my warrior-archetype, and once I connected to myself I cleared the emotion and created healthy expansion.
Connecting to ourselves deeply to discover our darkness IS uncomfortable WORK. We don’t need to try sky-diving to try to scare ourselves into looking at our vulnerabilities. What we need is a safe space to be present to our unconscious emotions and make our darkness visible.
Once I knew that the limiting-belief that I had inherited from my family was no longer true, I could choose to replace it with a powerful positive new belief. But I had no idea what those new beliefs would be. I was still lost, and I didn’t even know just how deeply I was lost.
Again, let’s pause for a minute here and ask ourselves some deeper questions.
What personality archetypes have we inherited from our families that trigger us into drama?
From our family drama, what is the one most negative self-belief that we have about ourselves, that if we changed it then it would shift our entire perspective on our lives and stop us from creating repeating patterns of crises in our lives?
Who do we know that we can trust to hold the space for us to be uncomfortable with the emotions that we really don’t want to feel?
What I didn’t realise then was that I needed to do a LOT more of work building a much more deeper trusted connection to my unconscious using my body as a guide to deal with my inherited drama and make my own darkness visible.
So in 2018, I burned out. Again.