I am constantly hard on myself and I’m getting tired of it.

It’s one thing I’m remarkably good at – those thought forms flowing as if they’re designed to hit me as their target.

Since they are coming from me, they rarely miss. It’s quite well-designed, if I think about it. A constant barrage designed to… designed to what?

On one side, it seems as though this stream of relentless hardness is trying to beat me down. Perhaps designed to keep me in place? Keep me small?

On the other side, I am reminded that this is my way of assuming control. I turn all energy inward because I can control just how angry or upset or disappointed I feel with myself. I can control how hard I am on myself. It feels safer than to express it to or towards somewhere else.

It lets me believe I’m taking it all on at the same time as it feels like I become pinned down.

The more it starts to zero in on the target, pinning me down, the more I typically have let the thoughts win, escalating often into a more manic energy or a depressed one, depending on the thoughts coming. Until now… now something is different.

It’s interesting because right now is the most free I’ve ever been in my life in many ways. I’m constantly moving with my nomadic lifestyle (I’ve been lucky enough to stay in 44 places in five countries in nearly 7 months). I’m always meeting new people and deepening relationships with people I’ve known for a long time. I’m accepting support more than I ever have before and, a lot of the time, I’m feeling quite full and happy (something not all that long ago I didn’t believe was possible).

In this constant movement, I’m also seeing some of my dreams come true. For years and years, I said I didn’t have any dreams. I didn’t believe in them. When people asked me what they were, my mind was blank. Empty – nothing came up except for a deep feeling of a knot tied from my throat to my root. I felt like I needed to defend myself and created the lack of belief in having dreams.

Now, I see that my dreams have always been of becoming a healer, and living a nomadic life. I just never thought they were possible or things one “could” be or do. People who are constantly on the move are never really valued in history. I see now how many of my decisions come down to feeling valued by others. I never felt secure enough internally to live that life even though I yearned for it (until, one day, I felt rooted within myself and off I went).

So, imagine my surprise as I laid down in shavasana to listen to a yoga nidra a couple of days ago that happened to do with the theme of feeling stuck. I immediately understood all this inner chaos as surfacing areas where I feel stuck in my life (and have been for what feels like ages).

Huh… I didn’t see that coming at all!

With all of the physical moving I’m doing right now, all of the new experiences, all of the things I adore, I didn’t realize I have also been feeling incredibly stuck and that stuckness has been rising to the surface in a relentless barrage of thoughts about what I’m doing and not doing with my life. I give myself a hard time about choosing this path of being a healer. I give myself a hard time about not having a “job” and traveling so much without a steady income. I hear the voices of what I “should” be doing. These are the tip of the avalanche of thought that then cascades down zeroing in, repeating, expanding, growing stronger and (for the past week or so in particular) the thoughts have been constant, loud, and so frustrating to sit with.

In my Way of the Wise Healer training a few weeks ago we were asked to make a commitment. Mine came up in an earlier healing session and as I said the words, “I commit to loving my womb,” out loud I felt a swell of emotion spring up from the depths of my being.

This area for me has been a main point of storing weakness. Storing trauma. Storing stories that aren’t even mine – stories and beliefs I’ve inherited. Storing experiences and emotions.

My womb been treated as a storage unit.

In the yoga chakra tradition, this area of the physical and energetic bodies is associated with the element of water. It’s an area that needs to be constantly moving in order to stay healthy. Constantly in flow. In my past, this area has received massive blows physically and emotionally. It has retained and held on to so much. I’m used to it holding on to so much.

A few years ago, I received my first Mayan Abdominal massage and as I was nearly levitating off the table as the practitioner did her work, she said to me with a strong and caring voice at the end “you need to let go”. It took me a year and a half to have another treatment because so much was stirred up from that first one. I’ve been taught how to do it myself and have, intermittently.

With this commitment to love my womb, I started to treat myself to the abominal massages again. The physical attention to this area in a loving way is difficult for me. Even resting my hands over my womb and imagining love going to this area is challenging. It’s a huge block that has also softened. I’ve sensed this area as a weak spot energetically and also psychologically in the past. It makes so much of what has happened in my life make sense – to see the stories created around my womb. How I’ve treated it and not taken care of it well.  In a way, it’s a weakness that I’ve come to wear as a badge of identity and I’ve become attached the weakness. I’ve become attached to the story of that weakness because that means nothing needs to change. I can stay weak. I can keep holding onto a reason for that weakness and use the story as an excuse for so many things.

Only I no longer wish to remain in that story of weakness. It’s part of what I need to let go of.

I’m used to my womb contracting and holding onto so much. Perhaps that’s part of the weakness in this area too.

It’s been hard for me to even face this area of my physical body. It’s been a challenge to send love to that part of myself. For years I couldn’t have even considered that possibility. Now it’s more like a strong dissonance or disregard rather than a full on war of ignorance.

A few days ago, I stopped with the massage and I realized today that it’s what has stirred up all this energy and emotion and thoughts that are wildly working their way through. It can take a while for deeply held and stored patterns to shift and when they don’t want to, they start to scream out. No energy – not even the hard stuff – wants to give itself up. It doesn’t want to die.

And yet, I need that old energy to die so I can facilitate and give life to new energy here.

The block held here reaches into many parts of my life that I still have dreams of fulfilling. Finding a man to share my life with. Co-creating a family.

More dreams that I denied for a very long time. I used to say I never wanted to get married or to have children. I used to hold firm to beliefs about how I’d never find a guy. Now, I do want those things. In the past I would tell myself, painfully, all the reasons why that life wasn’t for me. All designed to keep me in the realm of impossibility. The belief of not being able to. Not having. Now, after all these years, I do believe they are possible. Now I see myself with love and being loved. Now… the energy that still feels stuck is the part that wraps me up in seeing what I don’t have or can’t have instead of all that I do.

I remind myself to see the abundance all around and that does often shift the thoughts. I’m constantly learning that when I get caught up in self-criticism and the vacuum of lack, I need to pause and see that nothing has been taken away from me. I need to pause and send those voices in my head love and compassion. I need to hear them and know that they are shifting. They’re screaming out for attention. They’re screaming out for love. They feel scared and are trying to find a way out of feeling that way. Even if it’s to remain stuck – that is at least something they know.

It’s almost as though part of myself gets to become the parent to these thoughts because I see them not as current thoughts or truths; they are old parts of me that were created for different purposes along the path of life. They aren’t right or wrong. They’re just no longer what I need. It’s time to thank them for serving their purpose and let them go too.

Now I can see that it’s from that stuck and stagnant energy that these thoughts start to form. Trying to keep it stuck, as it has been for years? Or trying to send me messages that it’s time to let go. Time to release?

The second chakra developmentally holds our likes and dislikes (which aren’t set – they can shift and something you’ve never liked can become liked). As those likes and dislikes are formed they start to inform a greater story and help create a system of beliefs or a lens through which to see the world. This area governs polarities of energy which for me have often been quite extreme. It’s one of the sources of creation and creativity (the other being the fifth chakra) and as it’s the element of water it is often associated with emotion, movement and how we move through life – with fluidity and ease or with rigidity and hardness?

The hard parts of me are maybe starting to erode and my go-to response and structure is to favour rigidity. My first tendency is to block flow, not allow it to move but to try to control it. I’ve had to find movement and continue to cultivate it. I’ve had to discover that I had a physical body and I’ve learned to be with the sensations and emotions that move through it instead of constantly trying to make them not move. I’ve learned that beliefs are just beliefs – they too can die and be reborn. With these new and evolving skills, there is still so much stored in the body yearning for release and there are dreams rising to the surface that I shoved aside for years (along with all the ways I discounted them).

It’s almost as if me being on the move so often distracted me from how stuck these parts of me really are. I can see now the illusion of movement. Even though parts of me are racing ahead and feeling great, other parts are now crying out and needing some time to be heard. It’s time to pay attention to this neglected part of myself. Time to heal.