Tag: stress

HEALING through CEREMONY, healing, ceremony, healing ceremony, shamanism, past history, past relationship, pain, past relationship pain be gone, Michele fire-river heart, medicine woman, Gabriola island, British Columbia, Canada, focus, perspective, attention

Ever had one of THOSE days …..

by Michele Fire-River Heart, posted in Uncategorized

Ever had one of those days that by the end of it, you are feeling like these guys look?

“Hell yeh’ I can hear you say, or perhaps, ‘yup’, ‘yes’, ‘oh my yes’!  Whichever way you say it, we all know it sucked! Didn’t go our way, was challenging, etc.

Now the question is, how did you handle it? Were things thrown, did you yell, did you pound the life out of a pillow, how about a primal scream? Or did you breathe deeply and use patience?

Today was a day like that for me. I awoke to the sound of rain, checked the weather forecast sent my working partner an IM cancelling our gardening work for the day and rolled over to go back to sleep. Well hello …… now I’m awake. Okay up I get and have a number of business things to do on my agenda now that I have at home work day. Great I think to myself I’m going to get a lot accomplished, that’s going to feel good.

Hmmmmm I think the metaphorical Gods were playing with me today. Let’s see how long Michele can keep her cool! Anger used to be a number one issue for me, and not that I am free and clear of it, but I have made huge strides in learning to use patience and yes deep breaths to calm myself down before I spiral into a volcanic display to match my medicine name. (Fire-River = lava flow)

I needed to buy some supplies online that I hadn’t purchased before and when I got to the checkout noticed that there was an area for a coupon number. The shipping was a hefty $20 and so I thought ooooooh let’s see if I can get a coupon. Well yes I could halve my shipping with a coupon I found, but first I needed to make an account with the coupon company. Okay that done I try to redeem my coupon. However I got the dreaded “Site is not responding” page…… I breathed deeply and tried again, and again and again. Okay I am no longer breathing deeply I am irritated, I fire off a question to the company asking what the problem is, and go and do some other work.

I am now back to calm and a while later yay an email response, the coupon site is for American coupons only. Okay I get it, but I really try to not have my info out there willy nilly so I decide to cancel the coupon website membership …. I look, and look and look and there is no info on cancelling the membership and the only contact to answer that question seems to be snail mail. Well that’s not happening. So ……. I breathed deeply unsubscribe from emails and hoped for the best. So not discount, suck it up Michele just pay the full shipping cost.

So back to my ‘cart of supplies’. All looks good and there are lots of payment options. I choose MasterCard but it will not go through, I know my card is good, so I try again, and again and again, persistence is a good trait ya know! Finally I give up as I figure out my MC wouldn’t work because it wasn’t 3-D whatever the heck that means …… I breathed deeply and chose a different payment method. 2 choices Interact or eTransfer. I tried to log into my bank account and it didn’t work, I get those awful words ‘Incorrect user name or password’ in red, like that’s helpful when a person is already irritated, let’s make them see RED, someone isn’t thinking. How about calming blue, or green or aqua? I breathed deeply and ……. well you know persistence. Okay, let’s try a different tack I know my numbers and password are correct, but they’ve just updated their website, so for shits and giggles perhaps changing my password will make everything okay. …… NO! Right I’m phoning the bank now, I’m on hold of course and just by the way “We may use voice identifying software”, yup like I want anyone to have a voiceprint of mine, next I’ll have to give blood to access my account. (Okay I have been reading a vampire series I admit it) I get a patient young man and figure out the problem. Yay I’m over the moon, this purchase is getting done today come hell or high water.

I’m in to my bank account, but now because I’ve never made apayment to this company before I have to add them to my bill payments list. I do so, but when I go to the next section to pay …… fu_ k_ _g    h_ll    the company is still not on the bill payments list. I breathed deeply and tried again, and again and again. Okay never mind I tell myself I will try an eTransfer I use them all the time, this is a no brainer. I add them to my eTransfer list, and go to send one …… fu_ k_ _g    h_ll    the company is not on the eTransfer recipient payments list. I breathed deeply and tried again, and again and again. Nope, nada, no joy.

I get up and go into the kitchen …… kaboom did you feel the M8 earthquake at around 1:30 pm today, ya that was me, the Fire-River Heart volcano just blew along with a primal scream.

So it’s now 7 pm ish and I’m writing this blog, and NO I still have not paid for my supplies. I fear for my computer it is the closest thing to whack, and now I’m in a whacking mood, the whole breathing and having patience thing is out the window for today.  I’ll leave it for another day when hopefully those naughty metaphorical Gods will be on my side.

 

HEALING through CEREMONY, healing, ceremony, healing ceremony, shamanism, past history, past relationship, pain, past relationship pain be gone, Michele fire-river heart, medicine woman, Gabriola island, British Columbia, Canada

Why Actions Surrender to Reactions when You’re under Stress. Is this an app.?

by Michele Fire-River Heart, posted in Past Relationship Pain Be Gone

Well most of you have heard of fight or flight,
it’s kind of like white noise at this point
if you’re anything like me.
In this post I’m looking at this human behaviour
from the perspective of
why when you’re under stress,
does your ability to take action
surrender to reaction?

Now I’m only talking about the places
where more healing needs to happen,
for in the places where you have healed, or never needed to,
your ability to take action will not be superseded by reaction.

A case in point in my life recently.
An unexpected crisis arose in my working life.
My problem-solving instinct kicked in,
and I dealt with things one after the other after the other.
Imagining after each problem solved, that this was the end of it.
I would breathe a sigh of relief go to bed and arise the next morning to ….
you guessed it, a new crisis.
(I’m sure this has never happened to you.)

This went on for weeks,
and because I was so reactive to the next crisis being problem solved,
I just kept going like a little energizer bunny.
(If you don’t get the reference, ask some old people.
Oh and by the by, it’s not like we’d had a cataclysmic disaster
and needed to put self care on hold
because self care at that point was trying to not die!)

Before I knew it, January was over and
I had worked 100 hours on this particular project
over and above other business.

Now knowing what I know about addiction and my own patterns of behaviour,
when I’m stressed out, I am usually blatantly aware of my moods,
of my timing, what I eat, how long I sleep, am I happy or sad.
This self-awareness is how I got to sobriety.
Well along with many, many healing ceremonies (Blatant plug.)
This crisis however had a client who was thousands of miles away,
was fighting cancer, and was just not able at that time here to deal with these crises.
(This is how I rationalized ignoring my self-care.
Again I’m sure you’ve never done that)

I had committed to a small project that went completely sideways,
and felt obligated to solve it as many people were involved,
and many people unhappy.
(It’s always important to make others happy
before yourself ….. NOT!)
I went back into addictive mode completely focused on only one need,
and that need was to get each new crisis solved.
I knew my eating habits have gone into the toilet,
I just didn’t have time to cook properly like I usually do.
I was grabbing things on-the-fly which for me is disastrous
as when I don’t feed myself with nourishing food that makes me feel satisfied
I get, well really, really, really cranky …..
I ignored it.
What I also know about myself
is that when I work over and above a certain amount of  hours in a day,
again it throws me completely out of whack.
I was so consumed with the problems I was juggling
that I was not sleeping well, which again is a very big red flag for me.
Yet I persevered until I started crying at some point every day,
and after three days of crying jags,
I had my very first panic attack.
In this moment the proverbial straw that broke the camels’ back happened
and my self preservation and self-care kicked in.
Within 24 hours I had new people hired and in place
to handle what I could no longer do.

That was five days ago
and now I am back into my regular routine
and feel sane again.

My actions had surrendered to re-action mode.
This was still my choice,
my lack of boundaries in this situation,
my attachment to problem-solving for someone I cared about,
at the cost of my own self-care.

The take away from all this was that I gained
a new level of self-awareness,
a new level of healing
a new level of being able to say no.
After the above story you may well think
‘A new level of being to say no?
You didn’t say no until you had a panic attack!’
but for me this was a new level of saying no.
In the past I would’ve carried on regardless,
through the tears through the panic attack.

We are all at choice in every moment,
however we all have an inner patterns and behaviours,
and they run just like computer apps.
Some of them are learned behaviours
some of them are adaptive behaviours
but once they are triggered they run.
So once you double-click that particular app.
until you quit that app.
it runs.

So the question is how to quit the apps. that you run permanently?

The only way that happens is through self-awareness.

How you get to your self-awareness has multiple pathways,
but unless you choose to look at who you are
and what apps. you run,
every single time an app. is double clicked
you will continue to run it, in the exact same way as you did before.

So what do you think?
Is it time for you to write any new apps?