This Destruction Is Your Revolution | Just Be You | Amber Hawken | Dip.Mindfulness CBT

Yo, ma people who are feeling as though their emotions and mind are upside down and inside out right now – listen up!

Yes I’m talking to you; The brave ones, courageously trying to unravel whatever the hell is going on inside of them..

What is happening in this very moment is not you taking 1 million steps backwards, falling apart, realising you are a failure, wasting your time doing work on yourself or any such things. This, my loves, is a time for you to peel back a very deep layer of crap you’ve been pushing down for a long time.

I’m talking, your entire life long. The kind of stuff coming out of people at the moment is nuts. My entire week of private client work has been like the exorcism of demons from the darkest most well-locked up places of their minds, hearts and past. I’m talking, things people didn’t even know were things, but when we looked at what was coming up and opened that gateway, a whole lotta of everything was explored and excavated.

Now if you don’t have an Amber of sorts to guide you through and remind you that this time is in fact, not your destruction but more so, an opportunity, then it can be pretty fucking scary, chaotic and shit could hit the damn fan. So here is a reminder that life is meant to be like this. Growth, chaos, consciousness, falling apart, burning in the hell of your fears, feeling as though you will never be able to shake this – thing. Wrong.

This is another layer. Let me break it down for you.

What you are going through is an opening up, a deepening of sorts. Whatever you have ignored in the past is making its presence heard, not so that you fall apart, but so you can listen.

If you want to move through this and let it go, fighting it, going into fear, shame, blame or distraction is NOT going to help. The more you resist this the more that fucker is going to tear you apart and shred your self esteem and confidence within yourself and life.

STOP. Please goodness me, pause. We’ve got this. I promise.

Most of the chaos in your heart, head and emotions right now is because you are losing your shit that there is chaos. Resistance and repression of chaos creates more chaos. When you judge your pain, the pain grows and suffocates the light that could have potentially guided you out.

STOP. Stop criticising, freaking out, judging, wanting it to go away, resenting, resisting and most of all, stop running.

Literally do the following:

Get to a quiet space for a moment. If you are at work – bathroom. If you are in a strange home – outside in a park. If you have kids running around, use the beauty of technology and sit them down in front of David Attenborough or Moana and go to a quiet place. You need space for five minutes.

I don’t care if you think this is dumb. You want out? Then keep going. We are particles of vibrating energy, so deal with it. When we repress pain, trauma or discomfort, it stays in our systems, and we just need to let it flow out. Imagine that your emotions are water and your thoughts are the wind. What is rising up and trying to get out can be moved if you let the water flow. Often the wind of our thoughts create a hurricane as we naturally pull away from pain and thus we run from emotions.

They stay put or get buried under food, our mental noise, sex, drugs, alcohol, work, cleaning and even yoga and other practices that can present as empowering but can sometimes be distractions.

Sit down comfortably, sit up straight and open your chest up and relax your shoulders.

Take five very big, slow, deep breaths and close your eyes. This will take you out of your head. You may want to break down at this point, go for it, but do not dive into story in your head. Just let the build up flow out and then settle and come back to your breath.

Now; Find the centre of the chaos in your body. Find the belly of the emotion, Go on, find it, where is it? Chest? Throat? Heart? Belly? Legs? Gut? Go to it.

Release all judgment. What I mean by that is, stop wanting it to go somewhere, stop believing that thoughts that say ‘this is wrong’ or a sign of your complete failure as a human being are truthful. They’re not. That’s just fear resisting imperfection.

This is brave, normal, courageous and enlightening. Be present with the energy of the emotion and simply relax into it, surrender to it being there. Surrender as in: ‘Im stuck in the mud, I’m going to stop complaining, accept that I’m here and now do what is in my power to move out’. Surrender. Do this until you feel a little more safe in the emotion, like, “Hey demon of shame, I see you, it’s cool you are here”.

The anxiety or fear about the emotion will settle a little as you relax. Now, if you had anxiety and now it’s shifted, you might find that another emotion rises up that was underneath. Or if it was anger, you now might find sadness or confusion. Or if it was jealousy, you might find guilt. Or if it was depression, you may have found fear. Generally speaking there are many layers of emotions and we hide from our primary discomfort underneath one of the four of depression, anxiety, sadness and anger.

Our emotions affect our thoughts and vice versa and together change the chemistry in our body and can cause all sorts of hormonal, digestive, reproductive, immune and neurological issues if left unattended. Eg. the belief “I have so much to do” on repeat, rises cortisol and adrenaline – most people today live in adrenal fatigue because of this excessive “on” mode. Moving on.

You’ve surrendered into one layer and through this surrender things will settle a little. Once you get to the most uncomfortable and acute emotion, sit there. Imagine it is a child, a part of you that is screaming to be listened to. If you like, you can even imagine this as a younger version of you; just roll with what intuitively pops up. Maybe nothing at all, maybe you just want to go with the emotions you feel, that’s totally sweet, whatever floats your boat.

Let’s continue into the feeling part. Now, you are about to feel your emotion. If you’ve been reading you have probably been thinking a million miles an hour so place down your phone now and go back to your emotion to feel it. Mmmmhhmmm, that’s right, I said feeeeeeel. No, not analyse, not try and figure out, not judge or resist, just feel. We rarely feel anything except short fabricated highs or pleasure.

We barely feel joy or happiness because as soon as we are there we so badly want it to stay that we go into an uncomfortable, attached, desperate and on edge kind of happiness. We’re afraid to lose it and thus we lose it. And then you know what happens when we feel uncomfortable emotions come up – we fucking bail. Run into stories in our mind, most commonly. “Why is this happening to me”, “what am I doing wrong”, “I’m a failure”, “this sucks”, “I have to fix this”, “where did I go wrong”. And this dive into secondary emotions and the wind turns the water into a destructive tornado which you are now in.

However if this tornado isn’t from something that happened now, or if you are going into a much heavier space than you’ve been in for a long time; an old pattern, a toxic behaviour, then it’s old and you have to go a little deeper than surrender. Normally I’d take people to revisit its origin. That first time you ever felt like this. Not right now; now just feel and naturally as you go through this time, if you practice complete acceptance of that’s coming up, if you choose to let it go and return back to love, it will move through and out. This is much easier with someone guiding you because I can address resistance and fears and thoughts that come up in the person but I will try to guide you now in a general sense, to balance.

This deeper work is the deep state repatterning, NLP and CBT training i’ve done as a practitioner in this field, but in a sense, it’s not rocket science, so you can do this feeling part now, I promise.

Feeling emotions and re-writing some past stories. It’s the pinnacle of the work that gives people the greatest sense of spaciousness, inner calm, resilience, trust, confidence, connection and opening up to embody their sense of self and purpose….ya. Why? Because when we have this gunk in our trunk, we have beliefs and energies bouncing off each other driving us into toxic patterns that were once protective and defensive mechanisms we learnt when we were little, that as an adult, become destructive.

Essentially, we experience pain and learn our own unique way of running from it. We have to go to the source of these moments and unwind them and by pulling this string, we unravel and release a lot of destruction in ourselves and life. We come back to our centre and from their can transform our lives. If we don’t, then we are just running. Most of us are fucking sprinting. When we are living a life like this it’s chaotic – might be busy and “successful” but either emotionally turbulent or shut down at extremes and we live for pleasure (happiness) and running from pain (sadness) – we are never centred in our mind or energy and thus we tend to just survive in this space. Never quite balanced, in ourselves. Just all emotion or all head. Anyway, that’s for another time. Essentially, we can track all current disempowering or undesirable behaviours in someone’s adult life, including our inability to resist urges and give into addictions, back to repression and protective mechanism we formed before our teens. Thank gosh I am teaching this in schools now, eh..

Rabbit hole, sorry, back to feeling…

Go to the belly of the energy/emotion, breathe deeply into the emotion, allow it to be there, invite it in, almost validating and imagining you are welcoming it, holding space in your centre. Now, feel it. If it gets more intense you are likely going into marination as I call it – feeding the pain with thoughts. Stay out of your head as that’s what got you here in the first place.

So, staying out of the noise of the mind, feel, just feel the emotion fully. No holding back, no analysing it, just feel it fully. Stay there, completely present. Your presence, surrender and awareness will allow you to move through this time and allow whatever is coming up to come up. Stay until you have felt through all the layers and get to what might feel like, “nothing”. Then you are done for now. Once you hit that almost overwhelming space inside of yourself, not happy, not inspired, just still. Space.

People often say it’s just space and it’s a foreign experience for a lot of people because there is usually always stimulation going on, some kind of built up emotion or they’re in their head. This space is called being connected, calm, present. If you are visual, you might find a bright yellow in the centre of your body. If you do, stay there for some time and hang out. This is the energetic centre of your soul and wisdom. The more time you spend here the more familiar you get with yourself and being connection and can listen to this rather than your mind.

You are now in the space of love. Unconditional presence. Yessss. I just said that.

One on one, I would dive into the origin of this emotion and initial creation of it, where a belief was formed at some point and explore the thoughts around it, such as the being in trouble because it wasn’t perfect, being wrong or unloveable or unwanted, being alone or abandoned, being objectified or used. This is the darkness we have going on inside, all of us have our own version of this from our personal experience, environment and perspective about it. If you think you don’t, think again. People with “perfect” families often have trauma via omission of trauma and have the weight of the world on their shoulders to always be the best, be okay or show up perfect.

In many ways, it’s our personal trauma that becomes our spiritual freedom lesson. Actually, always. I’m just a bit scared to say that because it all sounds quite esoteric and woo woo and I don’t want this to be misunderstood as something disregarded as bullshitty and useless. This work is THE work. Tim Ferris interviewed Dr Gabo Mate recently about this exact topic. Mate work parallels with the message in my book. Our unfelt emotions/repressed or undiscovered trauma and a lack of spiritual connection drive our addictive behaviours and suffering. For reals.

Ya, serious, I am. All “healing” in a sense is a shift in perspective, a change in beliefs, a simultaneous release of energy and boom, the body energetically returns to homeostasis, your consciousness rises through this awareness and release.

This is healing, this is evolution. This is life.

And guess what, you got this.

This beautiful chaotic dark mess right now is an opportunity for you to extract it and move on. Don’t fight it. Don’t blame, don’t run. Don’t clean the house, over work, ring old lovers, take it out on your partner’s, eat your way through it.

Feel it. Surrender. It is necessary.

Just be kind to yourself. Be gentle. Be loving. This is not your destruction my love, it is your revolution.

All my love.