Episode 23 - Steps to Clear the Trees Blocking Your Flow

How do we identify and uproot old fears, angers, and beliefs that are like the trees that are blocking the flow of miracles to our lives? So if you're feeling stuck in some area in your life, this is the episode for you. Welcome to Super Connections. I am your host, Jennifer K. Hill, helping you with the Golden Triangle of Connection, where you will super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Join me each week as I will share from some of my favorite tips and tools for super connecting, and I'll bring in some of my favorite friends and thought leaders to help support you on your journey to super connecting to the life of your dreams. Hello friends, and welcome back to episode 23 of Super Connections Podcast. I am Jennifer Cahill, and I love getting to drop in with you and share some of my favorite tools, resources, and other amazing humans with their tools and resources for how to superconnect to yourself, others, and your purpose. As we dive into today's episode, I wanted to spend a little bit of time on the idea of fear and anger. I'm not sure if any of you have ever been through that. Maybe some of you are already enlightened, but I think many of us at some point or another in our lives, go through feelings of anger, betrayal, fear of things not working out. And when these things happen, it can cause us to really disconnect from ourselves, disconnect from our higher selves and the divine. And it's almost like an interference pattern that doesn't allow us to hear or see what direction we're meant to go next. So how do we begin to dance with play with our fear and our anger when it happens. Step 1 is to notice when you're feeling this way. For me, because I was diagnosed as autistic, high-functioning on the spectrum later in life, I found that most of my younger adult life, I couldn't even tell if I was angry until it was too late. Sometimes I might blow up in an explosion, but really a lot of the time it was all of these little micro moments of anger building up. And not being aware of them until it exploded like a volcano over everybody and everything. Have you ever had something like that happen? Okay, so maybe you have. And if we do have anger, then what can we do? Number one, it's not necessarily a good or a bad thing. The minute— one of my teachers used to say this— is the minute we label something as good or bad, it becomes this. So what if instead of looking at anger as you are bad, you're wrong, you shouldn't have that happen, What if you gave yourself a little bit of compassion or what HeartMath calls compassionate latitude for the fact that sometimes no matter how much prayer, meditation, personal development, spiritual development you've done, there are going to be times where you might feel triggered. Maybe you didn't sleep well the night before. Maybe you're going through a tough time in your life. And could you extend a little bit of grace and compassion to yourself? So step 1, allow for the fact that there are gonna be times where you're gonna feel angry, triggered, upset, betrayed, and allow that's part of life. Step 2, when those emotions come up, could you allow yourself to feel the emotion rather than suppressing it or not even being aware and going unconscious about it like I did for the first several decades of my life? When you start to notice that feeling in your body, maybe it's a sense of tension or angst or whatever that feels like. Could you pause? Could you pause and get curious about it? And then coming back to dancing with these emotions rather than resisting them, could you get curious about it? Sometimes to this day, that's why I love doing inner child work, which I think we did a whole episode on that earlier in the show. That's why I love doing my inner child work every day is I ask the little girl within me. Hey sweetheart, how are you feeling today? And I have to tell you, sometimes I'm surprised. I didn't even know I was angry or sad. So whether it's inner child work or just pausing throughout the day to take a snapshot of what emotions are you feeling in this moment, and then begin to get curious, maybe even make a note. I do this every morning as part of my journaling practice. I'll journal about how well I slept, how I'm feeling that day. Am I noticing I'm feeling energized or depleted? And then I might even reflect on who or what in my life is happening that might be contributing to this. And what can I do? Not in a way of blaming anybody else, but in a way of radical accountability. How can I sit with whatever this feeling or emotion is? Years ago, I had a great guy named Lion Goodman on another show I did called Regarding Consciousness. And I'll give you a fun little trick that Lion gave us. I'll see if I can get him on this show as well. And Lion had a beautiful way that he would say, you want to just go into your body and feel in your body where you feel the anger or the sadness or the judgment or betrayal, and almost imagine giving it a color and a texture. And then dialoguing with whatever that part of your body is holding onto that emotion. So can you, number one, have compassion for yourself that you're not perfect? None of us are perfect. If we're still alive and breathing, it means we have more work to do. Number 2, once you've given yourself compassion, also see if you can extend it to others when they're in a similar situation of being triggered. Number 3, when you start to notice that some emotion is percolating in your body, Can you identify the emotion, get curious about the emotion, talk to the emotion, maybe give it a size, a shape, or color, or journal with it and ask, what is the lesson? Because everything in our life, whether it's pain, whether it's anger, whether it's an emotion or something physical, it's here just trying to gently knock on our door and say, I have a message for you. Please let me get this message through to you. And until we learn it, then the pain, the anger, the sadness, the fear, it has to get bigger and bigger. So let's go back now to fear. Since I just brought that one up, I wanted to focus today on how we dance with anger and with fear. It was my teacher, David Guillaume, who many of you, I think I've referenced his podcast many times on the show. I love David. He was an instrumental teacher for me. And one of my favorite techniques that David taught me to do When it comes to fear is to talk out loud to your fear. The way I do it every morning is I go into my normal meditative practice, followed by a little bit of heart-focused breathing. We covered that, I think, in episode 1 or 2 or 3 of the show. So I invite you to go back and check that out if you haven't checked it out already. So 1, meditation, 2, heart-focused breathing, 3, for me, it's inner child work. And then 4, the last step of my morning ritual and practice after I've done all the things I referenced, Is then I actually talk out loud to my higher self. Some people might call it the creator, the universe, whatever you want to talk to as your source of your inspiration, your life, your joie de vivre. You ask yourself, what is this here to teach me? Let's imagine that you have a fear that a deal is not going to go through or that you're not going to get the job offer that you want. When we have these fears, those fears are like a blockage. In fact, there's another great podcast I was listening to the other day that I listened to weekly called The Weekly Energy Boost, which is where David Guillaume got his start. And they gave a beautiful analogy of this. They said, you want to imagine that life is like a river. And when it's in a flow state, then miracles, blessings, all the joy, all the happiness we want can just flow through to our lives. Though what happens sometimes, you just feel like you're blocked. Something is not allowing you to move through this experience of the anger, the feeling, the fear, the sadness, whatever it is. The analogy they gave in Weekly Energy Boost is they said, imagine that you have this river and somewhere along the line, somebody betrayed you. And it's like a tree that falls in the river. And it blocks up the flow. So as much as the river wants to go through the tree, it can't. So you only now get this little trickle of the river going through and past that tree. And that's where perhaps you feel like your miracles are limited in your life. Maybe you're not having the joy, the happy relationship, the joyful job or family or travels or whatever it is that your heart desires. So one of the invitations is look at, in addition to the feelings of say anger or betrayal, that might be these trees that you have blocking the flow of your river. Also look at your fears because just a tree or an emotion can dam up the river. So too can our fears dam up the river and prevent us from moving forward with flow and with ease and with grace in our lives. So when you sit down in the mornings, whatever your morning ritual or practice looks like, even if you just do this for 2 minutes and you don't do any of the other things I've suggested, I invite you to ask yourself out loud or journal with yourself whatever your fear is. I'll be very frank with you. I'll give you a fear right now that came up recently. So I don't watch the news. I made a deal with the universe about over a decade ago. Where I said, universe, I'm going to stop reading the news, watching the news, and you're going to deliver anything I need to know through a trusted resource. So I don't go out of my way for news, but if my mom or husband or a teacher happens to mention something, then I get a little ping and go, oh, okay, that's helpful to know. So a fear that recently came up for me was I was listening to a friend, Jay Rosenzweig, who we'll have to have on the show. He was doing an interview with Sadhguru. And I was catching this interview they did on YouTube. Highly recommend checking it out. It was a beautiful little 16-minute interview they did. And in the interview, Sadhguru mentioned something in passing about, oh yeah, and with the reemergence of COVID masks really help. And in that moment, again, I don't watch the news. I don't read the news. I said, what? COVID's coming back? And then a friend of mine told me he and his wife, they just got it while they were in Scotland. So there was this tickle in the back of my mind of, oh, what if there is COVID and I have a speaking gig coming up in Bali and Other important trips and stuff coming up. So either one, you can resist it. 2, you can ignore it and stick your head in the sand like an ostrich. Or 3, what I would recommend doing, which is what I'm doing myself around this fear or any fear I have, is I talk out loud to that fear. I say, fear, fear of COVID reemerging, what are you here to teach me? And when I drop in right now and even say that as I'm recording this interview for you, What I hear is that, can I have certainty? This is something David Guillaume always talks about. We sometimes have a goal or a thing or something important that's on our calendar, and we have a fear we're not gonna get to do it, or we might get sick or something might happen. And can we pause? Can we just drop into it? Feel the sensation of that fear in our body, even do what Lion suggested in that other interview I mentioned, feel what the fear feels like as much as what the anchor feels like, give Give it a color, a texture, talk to it. And so when I'm doing my morning practices, I'll often talk to the fear and just say, fear, what are you here to teach me? What lessons am I not learning that I have an opportunity to learn? And then the next thing I ask for is the strength and certainty to transmute this fear into certainty beyond logic. I pray often every single morning and I just talk out loud. And this is something else David Guillaume taught me in our time that we studied together. By talking out loud to the Creator, you become more attuned with that inner wisdom, that inner intuitive alignment, that heart's inner knowing, and it helps us to make better choices. In completion of this episode, I invite you to ask yourself, where in my life do I have trees blocking the river to my flow? And who, what, when, and where are these trees? Are they a prior event in your life? Are they a fear you're aware of? Are they a subconscious fear that you're not aware of? Is it a sense of anger or betrayal? And how can you slowly but deeply, not all at once, take your time with this, extend that compassionate latitude and patience and grace to yourself? Be patient. Uproot one tree at a time, clearing out your river so all the miracles, all the joy, and all the blessings you've ever desired are gonna be able to flow freely into your life. I'm Jennifer Cahill. I invite you to check out a weekly newsletter I do as well called Inspired Living Tools. It's on LinkedIn. It comes out every Monday where I share tools like this and other tools that can help you to super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Thank you for your time.