When you’re even sick of yourself. . .
AAA magic through your nervous system
and onto the page ✨
Good morning, sunshine! I hope you are reading this message somewhere warm and cozy 🥶🕯️📖
I just have to tell you that I am SO IMPRESSED with all of you this month participating in the Start the Year with Intention initiative 🙌💓💥
I can’t believe there’s only one more week to go, and I’m so proud of everybody for taking the 5 minutes after their care to slow down, sit, and “get related” through journaling.
There are so many reasons why I was moved to have every client in this practice doing this process every week for the whole month of January.
The benefits of slowing down, self-reflection, using your higher brain to give words to an experience, and anchoring it in through your own handwriting are huge (and well documented!)
Many of you have reported renewed clarity, focus, and useful realizations. Awareness is always the first step to change, in any process, and this little 5 minute pause is helping many of you have even more of that 🙌
If slowing down and journaling is so great, then why is it that for so many of us, even just the thought of writing can feel so. . . cringey? 😬
For one thing, when we are in our fight-or-flight based, stress-based physiology, slowing down does NOT seem like a safe or viable option.
We have to keep going because it’s the only thing. . . keeping us going! The thought of slowing down and losing our low Energy Neutral train of thought first annoys us, and then strikes survival-based fear deep within 🙏
Forcing ourselves to break out of this pattern (which can even sometimes suddenly re-emerge right after an adjustment! It runs deep!) is a huge opportunity to get even more out of your care with me 💓
But there is something else about writing, besides just the slowing down part of it, that can really bring on the “ick.”
As some of you know, before I was a chiropractor I was in school for like a million years 😂
First college, then a graduate program, then pre-requisites to get into chriopractic school, and then finally 4 years of chiropractic school 😰😱🙏
So I have a looooonng history with writing.
In those days you would actually type out your 5, 10, 20 page paper that you wrote, print it at the school library, and then hand it in to the professor.
A week or two later, the papers would re-emerge, graded, the professor setting them down in a messy pile at the front of the lecture hall for you to pick up at the end of class.
(I always typed my papers in Arial, instead of the more common Times New Roman, to allow me to more quickly identify and grab my graded paper from the pile! Same thing with using a blue-ink pen. . . #alwaysgottabedifferent 😂)
After grabbing my paper, I would then hurry to a corner somewhere to rapidly flip through it, looking for written comments from my professor, before landing on the final page to see the grade 🙏
After that, assuming the grade was what I wanted it to be, I would tuck the paper into my backpack where I hoped to never to look at it again 😂
My writing experiences weren’t experiences of a writing process so much as a series writing events (I was also famous for writing most of my papers the night before they were due!). They were a means to an end.
But when we write in a process, over the course of weeks such as we are doing this month at New Day, we actually have the opportunity to get to know ourselves differently.
If and when you glance back at what you’ve written over past weeks, you are going to get a sense of the you that’s been doing life during this time 💥✨😬🌀
And it can be uncomfortable.
It’s this feeling that I was avoiding when I would cram those graded papers into my backpack, not wanting the discomfort of re-reading what I wrote.
I wasn’t so much worried about seeing a typo or a sentence I would have liked to have re-written. It would be more of a sense of becoming ickily, eye-rollingly aware of my limited perspective.
It would be almost like in reading it I could hear my own voice, and the very tone of it was a tone that I was uncomfortable with, would have liked to change, but didn’t know how. Can you relate?? 🙋♀️
This bit of an “ick” that can even make us roll our eyes and feel sick of ourselves, THIS is the gift of Stage 3 in the the 12 Stages of Healing 🎁😬✨💥
It’s a potential breakthrough moment that most of us deprive ourselves of by either completely avoiding it (like I did with the backpack-cramming), or we intellectualize it instead of FEELING it (AAA– Donny’s Awareness, Acknowledgement, and Acceptance will crash upon you like a wave if you allow it!) 🌊💥✨😊
The 12 Stages is THE big picture, the road map, from Donny Epstein for EVERYTHING in your feeling, functioning, and experiencing through this care at New Day and beyond 🌍💥💓🌀
For those of you in the super Energy Rich small group with me starting February 1st, you will get all the benefits of this experience and more, discovering, transforming, and awakening through the weeks by bringing even more awareness to yourself during your care with me, and during the rest of your week outside New Day 👯♀️✨
(There is still time to sign up! If you have questions or you know that you want to add the 12 Stages in 12 Weeks to your care reach out now so that I can order a workbook for you!)
And for all of the rest of you who are finishing out the month of journaling, I am so glad for the benefits you have experienced and I know you will take them with you into the future ☀️
