Once it was published there, I realised it really should be in all the places. And while it’s taking me a while to create the processes to share the same one helpful idea across multiple platforms, I’m starting by re-sharing things as I realise/remember.

I took that IG post and shared it here as a ‘Note’. (If you’re new to Substack, Notes are like micro posts that show up in your Feed, similar to people’s posts on Facebook.)

A longtime follower of my work commented on that Note and asked me to dive deeper into this topic. So, without further ado, the very next chunk of text is what I said. Directly below that, you’ll see the essence of what he asked. And after that, you’ll see my (long) response. I hope you find it helpful.

Here’s what my Note said:

Your Not-Self Theme is not the only emotion you should pay attention to.

Let me explain…

You probably already know your Not-Self Theme for your Human Design Type:

Anger / Manifestors

Frustration / Generators

Anger & Frustration / MGs

Bitterness / Projectors

Disappointment / Reflectors

But if you’ve accidentally fallen into the trap of thinking your Not-Self Theme is the only ‘negative’* emotion you should be watching out for, you’re missing out on GOLD!

(*There are no such things as ‘negative’ emotions, but sometimes we label them that way.)

I’ve seen:

Manifestors who are extremely bitter,

Reflectors who are angry as hell,

Projectors who are deeply frustrated,

Generators who are very disappointed,

and MGs who express all these emotions in a single session!

And if they had fallen into the trap of thinking that only their specific Not-Self Theme emotion was worth paying attention to, they would have missed out on the vitally important message the emotion they were ACTUALLY feeling was trying to tell them.

PSA:

All emotions are relevant.

All emotions are valuable.

All emotions deserve to be listened to.

Please repeat after me:

All emotions are relevant.

All emotions are valuable.

All emotions deserve to be listened to.

So YES, please DO pay attention to your Not-Self Theme AND remember to pay attention to any OTHER emotion that’s arising within you, asking to be expressed.

It has something important to say.

Here was the essence of what this subscriber asked/said (restructured for ease of reading/understanding):

How do you discover the range of emotions that can arise in a person?

How do you learn where frustration ends and disappointment begins?

If the goal is to identify the message the emotions are bringing to my attention, how do I do that?

Or, say in a child, when you see emotions rise in them, but it’s not clear if it’s excitement, frustration or sadness.

Or what seems more common is when a sibling of theirs seems to be pushing out an emotion, and they don’t notice until the emotional climate in the room is volatile.

It’s apparent to me that emotional literacy is not available to all of our society.

I feel that space is not well represented in the authentic voices competing with the loud voices of opinion and social commentary.

Your note feels like an invitation to discuss this topic more deeply.

Here is my response:

Let’s start with this question:

How do you discover the range of emotions that can arise in a person?

Unless you’re a sociopath (which you’re probably not, if you’re attracted to my work) or you’ve experienced repeated horrific trauma that caused you to shut down so much you just feel numb, then you, like most people will, at times, feel all the emotions.

Anger, frustration, bitterness

Fear, nervousness, worry

Sadness, grief, regret

Powerlessness, hopelessness, despair

and

Optimism, willingness

Happiness, joy

Delight, surprise

Appreciation, love

Peace, bliss

and every other emotion you can think of.

But if, as a child, you had parents who struggled to understand their emotions (and this is extremely common in our so-called ‘civilised’ societies), then they sure as heck could teach you about yours.

How many people do you know who genuinely feel safe to express all the emotions that I’ve listed above?

I’d be lucky to count on one hand the number of people I know who can get anywhere near this goal, and I have surrounded myself with the most conscious, emotionally intelligent people I can find for more than a decade.

If we don’t feel safe to feel certain emotions, we won’t feel safe to express them either.

If we don’t feel safe to feel or express them, we certainly can’t understand them well enough to teach about anything about each of these different emotions to anyone else.

So, how do you discover the range of emotions that can arise in a person?

Start by noticing anything that arises within you and, instead of judging it or trying to suppress it, get curious. Notice how it feels in your body. What sensations do you notice? Where is it in your body? If it could talk, what would it say?

Just working with those three prompts will tell you sooooooo much. So much.

Next question:

How do you learn where frustration ends and disappointment begins?

Once you’ve had a play with the prompts I shared above, you’ll start to realise that two emotions such as frustration and disappointment feel quite different. In a moment, I’m going to explain what I notice in my body when I feel several different emotions, but for now, just know that when you start to become curious about the sensations you’re feeling in your body, you’ll learn first-hand what frustration feels like vs disappointment or any other emotion.

It seems worth highlighting something at this point, and that is what emotions actually are. A lot of people will say emotions are simply ‘energy in motion’, and while that’s true on some level, it’s not that helpful in truly understanding what’s going on.

A definition I find far more helpful is:

Emotions are the names or labels we give to a collection of sensations.

(Shout out to Irene Lyon for this definition.)

So, as I explain what these seven different challenging emotions feel like in my body as I feel them, notice that what I’m doing is telling you a lot about what I’m perceiving inside my body rather than what I’m thinking about what an emotion means intellectually.

I only know what to call the experience I’m having because I learned, over time, the appropriate name in English for each of these.

And for those of you who struggle to identify what you’re feeling, please know that while my parents were loving and tried to teach me useful things about emotions, it wasn’t their strong point; most of what I’m sharing here I’ve actually learned through observation, conversations and deliberate study as an adult.

To answer the next question this subscriber asked - If the goal is to identify the message the emotions are bringing to my attention, how do I do that?

Let’s talk about some of the common challenging emotions a person might feel:

In no particular order… let’s just work through some of the ones I listed above. Please know, as I describe these, your brain will naturally create a similar feeling inside you. So, if it feels too much for you, just take a break or skip to the next one.

Anger

As I think of something that makes me angry, I feel my heart beat faster and a flood of energy to my arms and legs. I feel the desire to move forward, towards the person who is making me angry. I feel energy swirling around inside my mouth, like I want to yell or scream or bite the person.

I am hyper alert, on guard, ready to hurt them, ready to defend myself or those whom I perceive are being hurt. I feel stronger than usual, and I notice a willingness to get hurt fighting the person if that is necessary.

If I ask this feeling what it wants to say, it swears before I can even finish asking. This collection of sensations I’m calling ‘anger’ tells me it wants to “rip their head off”. And when I ask it why, it says, “because they’re hurting us and they need to know it is NOT okay.”

…

It’s all too common to think that anger is a ‘negative’ emotion. But every single emotion has a reason for existing. They all have a job. And anger’s job is to protect you and other people from harm. No other emotion will create that same physiological response that allows you to attack or defend when harm is coming at you or at someone who cannot defend themselves.

Therefore, anger is not negative; it is not bad, and it is not ‘inappropriate’. If you’re feeling angry, it means someone or something has trodden on your boundaries and anger has shown up to help you assert that boundary.

Frustration

As I tune into something recently that caused me to feel frustrated, I notice a restless, irritated feeling. Energy is stirring in my body, like it wants to get out, like it's trapped and banging against the internal walls of my body. It’s not as powerful as anger, but it’s a similar feeling - like a smaller cranky cousin that’s about to yell out loud but probably won’t punch anyone.

I can feel my jaw clenching, and all this extra energy bouncing around my body is being funnelled towards that one thing that’s driving me nuts. It’s hard for me to take in anything good around me; I just want to growl. If someone were to hug me right now, I would throw their arms off me as if to say, “get off me, get out of my way, I want to solve this effing problem”.

It’s destructive energy. It makes me want to do things like throw my computer across the room (if that’s the source of the problem) or yell at my partner (if I feel like he’s not listening to me) or tell people to “shut up already” (if they’re bitching about meaningless crap that doesn’t help anyone).

While Generators and Manifesting Generators will probably know this feeling all too well, the rest of us experience it too - whether we realise it or not. While frustration feels bad, it doesn’t make it bad. It’s just an emotion, trying to do a job, just like all the others.

Frustration’s job is to tell us that what we’re doing isn’t working. It gives us energy to try something different. And while frustration left unchecked can hurt people (including ourselves), and we can do silly things with it (like bang our heads against a brick wall - metaphorically or literally!), when you know what it’s trying to tell you, then you can use that energy to change direction or try a new tactic to solve the problem.

Bitterness

Since I talk so much about Human Design, it seems sensible to keep moving through the Not-Self Themes, and as many of you will know, ‘bitterness’ is the challenging emotion that we Projectors feel when we haven’t been ignored or dismissed (instead of recognised and invited).

When I search within me for a time in which I felt bitter, I find this kind of passive-aggressive quality inside my chest. I can feel a wall in front of my heart that feels like it’s trying to protect me from the hurt, but there’s another sensation occurring simultaneously. It’s reaching out to try to attack the person who got the invite I wanted. This feeling is nasty, bitey, mean, cruel.

If bitterness were a character inside of me, you’d see she has her body behind the wall but one long arm reaching waaaaaaaay out into the world, with a sword in her hand, ready to slay the person she feels is causing her pain.

If I ask her how she’s feeling, she’ll say, “It’s not fair. I should have been picked. They didn’t deserve that good thing. I should have got it. Why can’t I get things like that?”

This sensation feels something like if anger and sadness had a baby, it would feel like this. The anger makes her reach out and try to hurt those she feels hurt her. The sadness makes her protect her heart with that strong wall.

It makes this emotion of bitterness feel far more contained, and also far more bitchy and whiny than anger. Bitterness will complain to anyone who will listen, but she won’t do anything about it. She’ll just keep waving her sword around, barely able to touch anyone or anything in any kind of meaningful way because she knows she has to stay behind that wall.

…

Bitterness, also known as resentment, is there - like frustration - to tell us that the thing we were trying to do didn’t work and we need to try something different next time. It also tells us very clearly what we want. We wanted that person to invite us out on a date. We wanted the book deal. We wanted the opportunity to make that kind of cash doing something we love.

The solution when bitterness shows up is to not judge it, not dismiss it, but realise it’s showing you clearly what you want, and that, if you can value yourself, your knowledge and your skills more, next time the invite is more likely to come to you.

Sadness

Since I just shared a bit about sadness, let’s feel into that one now.

For me personally, as I go within to find sadness, I already feel a sense of dread like I don’t want to go there. I know the heaviness that comes with sadness. I feel my chest dropping and my shoulders sagging forward as if someone has put a heavy weight across my shoulders, and my whole torso immediately compresses as a result. But I can tell it’s just my body trying to protect my heart that hurts so damn much.

I feel my face change. My eyes want to look down. If I were to look in the mirror, I would see the face that comes just before I cry. I feel heavy, closed, collapsed, like I just want to collapse to the floor and be held by the wall or a person or a heavy blanket. I want to feel contained. To feel this heaviness without feeling contained leaves me feeling exposed.

There’s a sense of despair present. Like all hope is lost. Like the world around me suddenly feels darker. And I feel small. It feels like this feeling is never going to end.

…

Ah, it feels like a relief to shrug that one off! But sadness, of course, has its place. It is telling us that we lost something or someone that was important to us. It shows us what we value, what’s truly important to us. Our heart hurts because of the pain of being separated from that person, pet or thing that matters (or did matter) to us.

‘Matter’ is a good word to find myself using here. It’s a reminder that we experience sadness because we are in these bodies, living a human experience, where we feel like we are made of physical matter. And because the game of life is so compelling and our physicality feels so real, it means separation and loss also feel so real.

Disappointment

This emotion feels like a cousin of sadness to me. But let’s tune into her now and see what she tells us.

I feel my shoulders sag again, like I did with sadness. It feels less heavy than the sadness did, less overwhelming. I have more capacity to think about how I’m feeling with this emotion. I can feel my eyes drop, my head drop, things feel downcast. There is mild hopelessness associated with this feeling.

This part of me wanted the thing, and she didn’t get it. She says, “What’s the point in trying? Things don’t work out for me so why bother even trying? You know?”

She’s willing to connect, unlike with some of the other emotions. She wants to talk about it, but she doesn’t know if it can change, if it can get any better. She’s kind of afraid to try again because disappointment feels bad enough that she’d prefer to avoid it, if at all possible. And the only way to avoid it is by not going after what she wants, by not hoping, not dreaming, not trying again.

Disappointment feels bad, but like all our other emotions that get labelled as ‘bad’, it isn’t. It’s just an experience. When we are disappointed about a result or someone’s behaviour (two of the most common reasons I can think of that disappointment might arise), it’s telling us that we were attached to something being a particular way.

We’re allowed to dream and hope and want certain things, and disappointment clearly communicates to us that we didn’t get what we wanted. When we feel this way, it’s our opportunity to notice what’s important to us and also consider any attachments we might have to things being exactly the way we want them. Sometimes, when we sit with our disappointment, a funny thing can happen: we might suddenly realise that not getting what we wanted is actually the exact thing we needed.

Fear

Firstly, I want to tell you that fear is one of the emotions that I struggle to feel and express cleanly. Most of us who have been doing deep healing work for many years usually have at least one emotion that makes them pretty uncomfortable. At the moment, this is mine.

If I look at less intense versions of fear: worry, nervousness, etc, they don’t feel nearly as scary. I feel those more often than I’d like to admit, and they feel fairly familiar to me. But fear… well, it scares me enough that I’ve now written two paragraphs as I try to procrastinate having to feel it :P

Okay, Caroline, deep breath. You can do this. Fear hasn’t killed you yet. Let’s just feel it for two or three paragraphs. Then we can go back to analysing the emotion instead of feeling it.

I’m instantly hyper-alert. There is danger. I feel my eyes wanting to dart around to see where the danger is so I can run away. I need to know, right now, so I know which way to run and think about the best place to hide.

I can feel my heart beating fast, energy in my legs, and my brain is on overdrive, ready to think about possible solutions to keep me safe. I feel small but fast. While there’s so much energy inside of me ready to be used to move me to safety, I feel no need to say a thing or make a sound. I just have to get out of here.

…

Big deep, audible breath out.

The first thing I notice is that I had no distance from the emotion. In the previous descriptions, I was able to feel the sensations and notice the way my body was reacting almost as if I was separate from it, being the observer. But with fear, can you see how I was in it?

While this is a tangent from the main point of this article, I wanted to point it out as it’s SUCH a good example of how we can get swallowed by our own emotional experiences. If this happens to you - with any emotion - as soon as you realise it has happened, that is the moment you can step back and start to make a clearer, more self-aware decision about what to do next.

Now, back to the purpose of fear.

If you have a healthy relationship with fear, it will be obvious: fear is there to help you get away from a threatening or dangerous situation. It’s there to protect you and your body, and in many cases, your loved ones as well. It gives you the energy to escape to somewhere safer.

If you have an unhealthy relationship with fear, where you feel like you’ve been plagued with fear your whole life, it might show up unexpectedly in all sorts of situations where it’s not actually that useful. Like you might be terrified when you get any kind of critical feedback. Or you might be really afraid that your partner might cheat on you when they’ve never done anything remotely suspicious the whole time you’ve known them. Or it might scare the living hell out of you to speak in front of an audience that is full of your peers who are actually interested in what you have to say!

If yours is the latter experience, the solution is to do some active deconditioning work to change your relationship with fear. As you may know, I do this work using my trauma-informed version of Tapping, and you can use any method that you find genuinely helpful for reducing the amount of fear you’re feeling in situations that logically shouldn’t be that scary.

Shame

I left the best for last, right? Ha! Shame is such a doozy; it makes people want to run away just thinking about having to talk about it. I’ll talk about that more soon, but first, let’s feel this bad boy.

Immediate collapse. My chest caves. My shoulders hunch. I see the shameful part of me stare straight at the ground. I’d like the floor to swallow me. I cannot possibly look the person in the eye.

She says, “I am bad”. She feels like she deserves to be hit. She’s feeling like there is no option but to disappear, withdraw, disconnect entirely. She cannot possibly be loved because whatever the ‘bad’ thing is that she did makes her a ‘bad’ person who cannot, should not, must not receive love.

This feels like death. It’s intolerable. I wish the ground would just swallow me whole; then this pain would disappear, and I wouldn’t need to feel so vulnerable; my whole body would no longer feel like it’s on fire with the acute pain of feeling not worthy.

…

Fun, hey? So much fun. That’s why no one, I mean no one, likes feeling shame.

It. Feels. Horrific.

Why? Well, when we as humans do something that harms another person, it’s supposed to feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad. Really bad.

There is a part of us that knows that if we harm another person badly enough, we can get kicked out of the tribe. And while our conscious mind knows that in 2026 most of the world’s population do not live in tribes where our actual survival depends on a small handful of other people, our bodies don’t know that.

Our bodies still think if we feel shame we’re gonna die.

Shame is important. Very important. Having an inability to feel shame is what makes psychopaths so freakin’ dangerous - they have lost their inbuilt shame response. Without shame, we humans simply hurt other people to get what we want without any kind of remorse.

But too many of us feel shame about stupid shit that is of no consequence to others. You’re not supposed to feel ashamed when you record a YouTube video and trip over your words as you try to explain a new concept to your audience. You’re not supposed to feel ashamed when you read the book you’ve just had published, and you spot a spelling error, even though you and several others went over it countless times. And you’re not supposed to feel ashamed when you put on a dress to go on a date and realise you can see the shape of your squishy curves where someone, somewhere, at some point told you that part of your body should look different.

None of these things hurt anyone else; that’s why having a shame response is not ideal. But having an awareness that you’re beating yourself up, ready to withdraw from the people who love you, is a great opportunity to heal some of that pain.

Because the only time I want you to feel shame is if you do something that hurts someone else, so it feels bad enough that you never do that particular thing again. Everything else should be tapped, cleared or let go.

How does all of this relate to working with or parenting children?

The last couple of questions/comments were these:

Or, say in a child, when you see emotions rise in them, but it’s not clear if it’s excitement, frustration or sadness.

Or what seems more common is when a sibling of theirs seems to be pushing out an emotion, and they don’t notice until the emotional climate in the room is volatile.

What I believe this person is trying to ask is this:

“Sometimes, I look at my children/grandchildren/kids I work with, and I’m not sure what emotion they’re feeling. How can I tell what they’re feeling if they don’t understand their emotions enough yet to be able to tell me?

And if I can’t tell what they’re feeling, how do I know what to do in order to support them?

Also, what if one child is having really big emotions and their emotions are affecting their siblings and/or the other children around them? How do I help that child understand what they’re feeling so they can do something more constructive and less destructive with their powerful emotions?”

Based on my understanding of what was asked, this is what I want to say to you who asked this, and to all parents, grandparents, and adults who work with little people in any way, shape or form.

While I have not given birth to my own children, here is what I have learned and observed from working with and watching many, many children over the years, and looking for ways to apply everything I have learned about emotions and emotional regulation:

1. The better you understand your own emotions, the more you’ll be able to understand your kiddos’ emotions.

2. The more skillfully you can feel and appropriately express your own emotions, the more skillfully you’ll be able to demonstrate, teach or coach the children around you to express their emotions in appropriate ways.

3. We cannot just intellectually learn about emotions in a book and then teach this stuff to children; we have to be the embodied example. We have to know what it feels like to ‘feel the thing’ and work through the discomfort of ‘working with’ or ‘being with’ the thing, to have any chance of helping the children in our care do the same.

I’ve covered a lot in this post. I could add in more about some of the so-called positive emotions, what they look and feel like in the body, and how to spot them in the wild (i.e. in real life, in those around you), but this post is already very, very long. So I’m going to leave it here.

I trust that you were able to take something valuable from these 4,000+ words. If something in particular stood out to you that you’d like to share, please tell me in a comment below (on Substack) or reply to this email (if this landed in your inbox).

Caroline x

P.S. And if this article sparked more questions for you that you feel fit in the intersection of Human Design, Tapping, deconditioning, nervous system education and becoming more of your wonderful self, I’d love to read those as well.

Historically, I have been answering such questions via videos on my YouTube Channel; I’m going to start sharing some of these lessons in writing here as well.

Here was her question:

How do I cope/deal with a manifesting generator partner that resents my “lack” of energy?

He talks about it as if there is something wrong with me, often suggesting that maybe I have long covid or a nutrient deficiency. He feels that I do not contribute equally to the relationship, but I honestly don’t know how I could contribute more.

P.S. I have spoken to him about human design, and he thinks that it is woowoo.

If this question resonates with you at all, regardless of your Human Design Type, then this article will probably be helpful for you.

When I first read this question, it hurt my heart. I immediately felt compassion for this woman and how this must feel to have a partner say, essentially, “You’re not good enough as you are.”

Ouch.

Of course, there is so much about this person and their relationship I do not know. I don’t have her chart. I don’t have her partner’s chart. I don’t know what she went through in childhood, nor do I know what he’s been through. And I don’t know how all of these things are playing out in their day-to-day lives beyond the one paragraph she wrote in her email.

For me to do this question justice, all of these things matter because they impact their way of being, what they’re doing, and the results they’re experiencing in their lives and their relationship.

With that said, there are some questions I can ask you, the reader, to ponder.

Some of these might cause gentle shifts in understanding. Others might be a dramatic wake-up call. None of them is intended to hurt; however, sometimes the exact truth we need to hear does hurt and realising a question or statement hurts is a great entry point into resolving something that’s been keeping you stuck.

And, if you don’t like something I’ve asked or shared, or you simply don’t have the capacity today to think about it, feel free to skip it and see if there’s something else in this post that you can work with today.

First question (and it might surprise you, but bear with me. Remember, the aim is to solve the problem and for you to feel better. So let’s journey through these together):

Is it possible that they’re right?

As in, is there an underlying health condition that needs addressing?

Now, if this question made you super cranky, remember I’m here to help. I’m not making you the bad guy; we’re solving a problem here. So yell at the screen if you have to and then, when you’re ready, keep reading.

Many, many of my Projector clients (as well as many of my clients with a lot of open/undefined centres of all HD Types) have chronic health conditions. Your chart is not a life sentence. Certain energetic configurations do not need to be expressed as a ‘lack’ of energy.

Example: I will never forget the first Reflector I ever met in real life. (I’m using a Reflector as an example here because, by definition, they have no motors defined and have even less to rely on to get through their day-to-day than any Projector does.)

It was 11 years ago, when I was living on the island of Bali, and this kind, gentle, sensitive man was vitally healthy. He went to the gym for 2 hours every day, was a published author and ran a successful company remotely from whichever island he happened to be on that month.

Did he have his limits when it came to being around people? Sure.

Did he choose his personal company carefully? For sure.

Did he deliberately create a lifestyle that suited his design? He sure did.

Now, back to you and your design…

If you’ve been living in a way that runs counter to how you’re designed, eventually that’s going to express itself in the body.

We cannot ignore our innate design forever; at some point something will break.

So, maybe, if you haven’t already, consider if your partner could be right. (Also, feel free to yell at your screen some more if it makes you feel better. But then keep reading…)

This perceived ‘lack’ of energy might be something that your body is telling you: something is out of whack. Maybe there is a nutrient deficiency, or a parasite, or a condition expressing because of nervous system dysfunction.

Or maybe you’ve already gone down all those rabbit holes, and you’ve figured out,

“Actually, there is nothing f*cking wrong with me. My partner just needs to stop expecting me to be like him and I’ll be just fine.”

Which brings me to my next question…

If you feel generally healthy and you think you’re actually doing just fine for your Human Design configuration and you’re in a relationship with someone who is subtly suggesting, or even outright declaring, that there must be something wrong with you, my next question is:

Is there some part of you that still believes them?

That is, do you think, deep down, that there is something wrong with you as a person?

If you’ve been tolerating this idea for any real length of time, my guess is that the answer is ‘yes’. Maybe you’ve not been conscious of this belief. Maybe it was hidden waaaaaaay down inside of you.

But here’s what I can tell you about a person who has a really robust self-esteem: if someone tells them there is something wrong with them, they either laugh at the ridiculousness of it, or they look at the person like they’re crazy.

Because the other person’s statement doesn’t land in their system; there is no place for it. It simply doesn’t fit.

Now, if you’ve just realised that ‘yes’, actually deep down you do believe there’s something wrong with you - this is great news.

Uncomfortable? Painful? Confronting?

Sure.

But also really, really good news. Because now you’ve found it, you can do something about it.

We can’t heal what we can’t see.

For the record, you didn’t put that shitty belief there. Someone else put it there when you were a wee child without asking your permission first. (How rude!)

But now that you’re an adult, it’s your job to clean it up. (Annoying. I know. But that’s life.)

While it will take a bit of time, the process is actually fairly simple: take your deconditioning tool of choice and use it regularly until you no longer believe the stupid lie that something there is wrong with you.

(As far as deconditioning tools go, I like the Trauma Informed Tapping process I created over the last decade, but you pick any one you like, as long as it works!)

While you might be carrying shitty beliefs, dysfunctional patterns, and/or unhelpful ways of behaving, I know that at the core of who you are is an incredible, magical, fucking amazing human.

And if you don’t also believe that, then please prioritise your deconditioning until you can say, out loud, “I’m an incredible, magical, fucking amazing human” (or words to that effect)… and mean it ;-)

Next question!

You mentioned that he feels that you don’t contribute equally to the relationship, and that you don’t know how you could contribute more.

Do you feel like you’re contributing enough?

Does it feel fair to you?

If I were a fly on the wall in your home, do you think what I would see would look reasonable to me?

This one can be tricky because not only are you dealing with two very different energetic designs, where one person is built to do more work, but also every single relationship is different in terms of how much a man wants to provide for his woman (as it is in this case).

Not that long ago, it was completely normal for the man to work and the woman to stay home. For the man to provide and protect and the woman to nurture and receive. Our cultures and societies have changed immensely in only a few generations, but our human biology hasn’t.

So, as Ra would say, “What to do?”

I’d suggest pondering the questions I raised a moment ago:

Do you think it’s fair what your partner is asking of you? And if you do, but you already feel maxed out, then what would allow you to contribute more without having to sacrifice your health or sanity?

If you feel like you’re contributing enough already, and therefore him asking for more doesn’t feel fair—assuming you’ve shared your perspective with him and he hasn’t changed his tune—then what do you want to do about that?

Let’s continue…

Let’s say you’ve pondered all these previous questions and you:

• Are quite healthy and have no reason to believe you have any underlying health conditions,

• Don’t actually believe there is anything wrong with you as a person, and are actually wondering why you’ve been tolerating this accusation all this time,

• Have worked out that you are contributing as much as you’re physically able to and cannot give any more

Then, my next question is:

Do you want to stay with them?

Or do you want to let this person go to make space for something better?

If this idea scares the bejesus out of you, take a moment to feel your bum on the chair or your feet on the ground. Anchor into a sense of safety, however you need to do that. Reminder: My goal here is not to see you leave your partner, per se. It’s to help you find the root of the problem you came here with and see if there’s a solution amongst these (far too) many words. If staying with your partner is the order of the day, then please know there are ‘ways to cope’ coming very soon.

Now, if you’re ready, keep reading.

There are really only three things that would stop a person from leaving a partner who insists there is something wrong with them:

1. You don’t feel safe to leave (either because you can’t afford to support yourself financially or they would threaten to harm you if you left),

2. You can’t handle the impact it would have on your other relationships (especially if you have small children, but you may have other relationships with friends or neighbours who you love that you know would shift or end if you left your partner), and/or

3. You don’t believe that anything better exists or that you can attract anything better into your life than you already have.

Let’s tackle these one at a time:

• If you don’t feel safe to leave because you can’t afford it, your number one job is to decondition your beliefs about money so that, over time, you have the freedom to leave if you still choose to do so.

• If you don’t feel safe to leave because your partner would threaten to harm you, then your number one job is to look up local organisations that support people in domestic violence situations and get their expert help to safely get the fuck out of there asap.

• If you can’t handle the idea of the impact you think this would have on your children’s lives or the other relationships in your life, this is where you point your deconditioning efforts. I’ve put ‘idea’ and ‘think’ in italics here because you don’t know for sure what kind of impact this change might make to their lives. It will make a change, for sure. But it might be the best change of their entire lives, and you’ll never know if you’re being controlled by the fear of ‘making the wrong decision’ or ‘being a bad mum’ or ‘upsetting people who like/love you’.

• If you don’t believe that better exists in the world, then I invite you to ask ‘God’ (The Universe/Source/insert your preferred name for that higher power) to show you examples of people with better relationships than you have. For us to see something that contradicts our unconscious beliefs, we have to directly ask for that experience. Otherwise, we will keep seeing what we’ve always seen. And sometimes just seeing that something better exists is enough to help us take a leap of faith in our own lives.

• Finally, if you don’t believe it’s possible for you, this is also something that deconditioning can help with. Use the tools you have, or learn a tool like Tapping, and spend a bit of time each day breaking that belief into pieces until it no longer has any power over you. Reminder: Just because it feels true for you, and you have lots of evidence of why it must be true, doesn’t mean it is actually ‘The Truth’. And anything that is not The Truth can be broken apart or dissolved and replaced with another belief that is actually far more freakin’ helpful…

Like believing that you are worthy of love, exactly the way you are.

Final thoughts:

The question that was actually asked was ‘how do I cope with this situation’?

And while it felt immensely important to spend 2,000 words to address some of the potential elephants in the room first, if you’ve gotten this far, I’m going to assume you’ve decided that you are actually going to stay in that relationship.

You know what’s best for you. I’ve poked and prodded, and hopefully you have pondered the questions I’ve raised. And maybe, for any number of reasons, you have to or want to stay with your partner.

Heck, maybe you love them so darn much that despite how painful it is, you believe it can get better and you think the relationship is worth fighting for.

Or perhaps you know that you need to stay with them for now, and you need some ways to cope until it’s time for you to end things.

Either way, here are some practical things that will help:

1. Connect with other people whom you enjoy

Whether it’s friends or just friendly acquaintances, people at your favourite gym class, or members of your church or place of worship… spending time with people who like you and accept you for who you are will be comforting for your body, mind and soul.

(Note: If you do want to leave your partner, this is also going to show you that there are other people in the world and that maybe you can have a relationship with someone who treats you better.)

2. Create time alone

If you don’t feel like you have sufficient time on your own, away from your partner and/or children, carve it out somehow. Even five minutes in the car before you start the grocery shopping, or sitting on the toilet longer than you actually need to. However, you need to fit it in. It will help you think more clearly, give you a break and give you a chance to process how you’re feeling.

(Note: If you think you might want to leave your partner, it will also allow you to think about what you might need to do, in a practical sense, to leave this relationship at some point, if that’s what you choose.)

3. Take up Tapping

If you haven’t got a way to actually process how you’re feeling, then tapping is a really easy way to start doing bite-sized chunks of it. You can learn really tailored, beautiful, easy Tapping with me, the way I teach my clients in a 1:1 session, AND if you don’t have the time or money to do that, then look up tapping videos on YouTube.

If you choose this route, pick a person who feels ‘good enough’ to you, and tap along to any video where they’re tapping on stuff that seems relevant to your situation. If you feel better after tapping along with them, then keep looking for more of their videos and make tapping a daily habit, if possible.

(Note: And if you’re trying to cope while waiting ‘til it’s the right time to leave, tapping will help you process the emotions you’re experiencing during this time. To make a big change requires courage and clear thinking; regularly processing your emotional reactions will help to make more space for both of these.)

4. Find the good

If your partner isn’t abusive or even ‘that bad’ and you can’t leave anytime soon, or you just don’t want to, you can look for the things in them and in your relationship that are good.

Where are they helpful? Where are they kind? Do they make you laugh? What things do they do that make you love them?

While it can be a trap to just ‘focus on the positive’ and keep ignoring the elephant in the room (if that elephant is slowly swallowing you whole), if you can not leave at all or you can’t leave yet, then this is an excellent way to cope.

My hope in sharing this very long post is that you, the person who feels disempowered, unappreciated or somewhat unloved in your current relationship, now feel a little more hopeful. I trust that at least one of these questions gave you something to seriously ponder, and please know if any of them felt like you were punched in the gut, that’s going to be the one where you can unlock the most power.

5. Read stories from people who have transformed their relationships

Sometimes, to make a big, scary change, we need to see other people who have done the same. Listening to or reading stories from other people who have gone from where you are to where you want to be can be the very thing we need. Sometimes, we just need to find a way to access hope; to know that things can get better, even if it feels impossible right now.

There are countless stories of people who have transformed their existing relationships, making their relationships with their own partner better than it was months or years ago.

There are also plenty of stories from people who have transformed their relationship patterns after leaving one partner and before attracting someone who was a much better match for them.

My hope in sharing this very long post is that you, the person who feels disempowered, unappreciated or somewhat unloved in your current relationship, now feel a little more hopeful. I trust that at least one of these questions gave you something to seriously ponder, and please know if any of them felt like you were punched in the gut, that’s going to be the one where you can unlock the most power.

Whether this post causes you to leave your relationship to create something better, or rework your relationship with yourself and them from the inside out, either outcome is excellent as far as I’m concerned. You do you.

Hopefully, you’ve seen that the Human Design configurations of each person in the partnership have little to do with how healthy it is. Any Human Design Type can work with any other Type, but there has to be love, respect and acceptance of the other.

Our partners do not need to be into Human Design for our relationships to be healthy. (Though it’s nice when they are!) But they sure as heck need to be willing to see and accept our natural human limits and not expect us to be like them.

We are all different. And the more we can love and accept each other for the immense and magical differences we each have, the better the world will work.

Caroline x

P.S. Phew! That was longer than I expected. But there was a lot to say! If you feel like this post applies to you and your relationship—and you read the entire thing—what was the one thing that stood out to you that you most needed to hear?

He was sitting on the ground, with just a couple of things nearby and a small collection of coins in front of him. I felt the surprise, the unease, and the additional alertness that comes from something unexpected; I’d never seen someone begging outside our local supermarket before.

I rolled my trolley into the store, and as soon as I saw the fruit, I had the impulse to buy him something. I tried my luck against the one-way doors, backing out again far enough to talk to him.

I made eye contact, “Do you want me to buy you some fruit?” I asked in a kind but direct way.

He was quick to reply, “Can I have a bag of chips?”

After thinking that this wasn’t the healthiest option, but asking him which kind he’d like, I noticed the warmth that exuded from his whole being as if I was his best friend taking him out to lunch.

“Plain, please.” I nodded that I’d got it and went back into the store. But before I got the whole way in, he called out with a big smile on his face, “And an iced coffee?”

I heard an internal voice that said, “Ha! The audacity!” but externally, I simply indicated that I could get that as well.

As I started to shop for our week’s worth of groceries, I heard another voice pipe up, “Ha! The audacity!” Same words, completely different feeling. This voice wasn’t angry or annoyed. This one was inspired. “What courage that must have taken,” she said.

I couldn’t help but agree.

It’s rare for me to give money or food to people who are begging or appear to be homeless. There are a multitude of reasons for this that are another story for another day. But on this day, I knew that I was supposed to buy him food.

I trusted my impulse and did what I was told.

I didn’t do it to “be a good person”. I did it because that’s what I was being led to do, and the instructions were so darn clear and easy to follow.

If you’ve ever been to an Aldi, you’ll know that the easiest way to get out is after you’ve been through the checkouts and go out the double, automatic doors. So, the easiest way for me to get him these two items was at the same time as I did my giant shop. That meant he had to wait a good 20-30 minutes, on the concrete, in the cold wind, surrounded by the coins that other shoppers had presumably given him.

I found the plain chips next to the corn chips I needed to buy anyway. There was only one size, and it was pretty big. “That’ll have to do.” Then I needed to search for the iced coffee; having never bought one in Aldi before, I didn’t know where they would be.

It didn’t take me long to find the only iced coffee in the store. A giant double espresso bottle was located next to my overpriced coconut yoghurt. I wasn’t sure how he was going to feel getting such big items from me, but that was what they had, so that’s what he was going to get.

Once my weekly shopping was done—to the tune of $200.45—I somewhat cautiously exited the building, unsure as to how he would react. He looked up at my trolley from the ground, where his coin collection had grown a little since I last saw him, and in my nervousness, I blurted out “presents!” with a smile on my face, as I handed him the chips and the coffee.

He took them and immediately looked away. There was no “thank you” and no eye contact whatsoever.

For a split second, I was surprised, and then I immediately got it:

This is what shame does.

Shame says, “I don’t deserve this good thing.” Shame causes us to lose our words. Shame causes us to fold in on ourselves, to withdraw, to disconnect.

So, I said goodbye and walked to my car with my week’s worth of food, while I pondered if that was the only food he would get that day.

Not that long ago, I would have been angry if this same situation had occurred and I hadn’t received at least a brief “thank you” in return. But for the longest time, I would have done the deed in order to “be that good person” I was supposed to be.

Now, I just felt compassion.

I recognised that this man, just like every single one of us, is doing the best he can. I have no idea what his story is. I don’t know what he endured in childhood or what made him stop working and start living on the street. I don’t know if he has children or any lovers he’s left behind to live the way he now does.

What I do know is that he was grateful as heck for a packet of chips and a giant iced coffee that cost me the princely sum of $7.18. While he avoided eye contact with me once he had them, as I returned my trolley, I noticed that he was eating each chip as if it would be his last and drank that coffee like it was the elixir of life.

Somewhere in the world, there is at least one person, if not a few, who was born within a minute of this man. If I were to pull up their Human Design chart, I would see exactly the same thing as I would if I looked at his. But if I were to look at their life, I would probably see something very, very different.

If the other person was lucky enough to be born into a stable, loving family where they felt seen, and safe, and valued, and were encouraged to be themselves, their life story would have played out totally differently.

A lean, strong, good-looking 40-something-year-old man does not end up begging for other people’s loose change just because he is lazy or unwilling to help himself.

Any person who ends up living rough had a childhood that did not set them up for success. We know this through the ACE Study—Adverse Childhood Experiences Study—which has now surveyed tens of thousands of people and been repeated in multiple countries, showing that the more ‘adverse’ experiences people had in childhood, the more likely they are to experience significant mental and/or physical health issues. These, of course, then lead to issues in all manner of relationships, including a person’s ability to gain and keep employment.

Whatever they endured may have led them to drug use, or had them drop out of school too early to get the education they needed, or caused them to leave home before they were old enough to take care of themselves.

When I look at a person’s Human Design chart, all I’m seeing is someone’s potential. I’m not seeing their life. I’m not seeing all the things—good and bad—that they’ve been through. I’m simply seeing how they were energetically wired during and at their birth when billions (or trillions) of teeny, tiny neutrinos (think: star dust) rushed into their body.

This is why Human Design is really only part of the picture when it comes to helping someone make their life work better. And while there’s a good chance that you, the reader, are fortunate enough to have a roof over your head and food in the fridge, I’d be willing to bet there are parts of your life that aren’t as smooth sailing as you’d like.

But know that there’s hope. There is a lot of hope. We have access to more information than ever before in the history of humanity. You can learn about your Human Design, but also learn how to untangle the sh*tty patterns that are sneakily running your nervous system in ways you wish they didn’t.

The former is fascinating and helpful in a myriad of ways; I wouldn’t be without HD in my toolkit. But, or rather, and the latter has changed my life in ways I’m only now starting to realise. Not the least of which is having become aware enough, compassionate enough and graceful enough to navigate this unexpected adventure on my weekly shopping trip.

With love,

Caroline.

P.S. If someone in your world needed to read this today, feel free to pass it on. New here? You can subscribe below to get posts like this straight to your inbox.

Joan said this in a tone of voice that suggested that a young person might finally understand how difficult her life was. And while I get and have always been able to see how challenging she finds life in her 80’s, her comment didn’t land for me because I didn’t feel incapacitated.

incapacitated:

lacking in or deprived of strength or power

synonyms: helpless, powerless

(https://www.vocabulary.com)

Yes, I had smashed my arm (connected to my dominant hand, no less) only 28 hours earlier, but I had already discovered a huge number of things I still could do with the many body parts I still had working well.

Instead of focusing on the fact that I couldn’t drive, open tight jar lids, or write email newsletters, I was focused on discovering what things I could do:

Brush my shoulder-length hair (awkwardly), get dressed (if I picked loose enough clothes), do things on the computer (as long as they only required single-finger typing), weed the garden (sitting on the ground, with one hand), and go for walks (in crocs!)

But when I went to visit Joan, she immediately did what so many people do: she fussed and carried on like it was the end of the world.

She wanted me to sit down, do nothing and let her do everything.

She objected when I got up to get myself a snack, retrieve something from my handbag, and clean up after myself.

It’s like some part of her wanted me to feel powerless, perhaps so she could have a moment of feeling powerful again.

But no part of me was interested in playing that game. Yes, I lacked the amount of capacity I usually have, but that didn’t mean I had no capacity, strength or power, just less than two days earlier.

And while I hadn’t had an incident or illness this severe in years, I intuitively knew that if I stayed focused on what I could do, I would feel better while my body healed, and I would probably heal faster because I was feeling emotionally hopeful.

Doing things that made me feel better while my right arm was still out of action helped me do more of the right things to support my body in healing: using ice appropriately, keeping it bandaged up and out of the way, and trying small things periodically to test the range of pain-free movement.

Within three days, I was convinced I hadn’t broken a bone (thank God!) and felt safe to take the bandage off. Within four days, I could type a long email newsletter. Within six days, I could drive without any pain or any worry about my ability to do so safely.

While it sucked to hurt myself so badly and have to go through the drama of it all, it was an amazing opportunity to see how far I’d come in shifting out of old patterns. In years past, when I had a severe injury or serious illness, I had felt incapacitated. I thought I was powerless and that things were hopeless, and that I needed others to do everything for me.

Those who were good at playing the rescuer would swoop in to help. Meanwhile, those who thought I should figure out what I could do would resentfully help me as I whinged and whined about how much pain I was in.

To be fair, there were times when I was in a lot of pain—breaking my wrist in two places as a teenager, getting Dengue Fever in my thirties, and having period pain so bad I considered going to the hospital only a few years ago—but whinging about it was never going to make the pain go away.

And that’s what was so incredible to notice this time: I had changed. My automatic reactions to how I dealt with this physically, emotionally and relationally were very, very different to all previous experiences with serious, scary pain.

While I don’t wish for you to have a serious incident in order to see how far you’ve come in healing your own (unhelpful childhood) patterns, if you do ever find yourself in this situation, then please see it for what it is:

An opportunity to see how far you’ve come.

With love,

Caroline.

So, there I was, standing at the front of the property with a big branch and a big tool on the ground near my feet, and my right arm screaming at me. Despite feeling pretty overwhelmed, I remembered that one of the most important things I could do was actually feel what I was feeling.

I felt pretty embarrassed at the thought that these guys on the roof might have seen my rookie mistake, and so before processing anything, I checked to see if they could see me.

No one in sight. Phew.

So, with no physical threat looming and no fear of being judged, I let myself feel the sensations in my right arm. It was not happy! I let myself breathe the way my breath wanted to emerge. I let my face screw up as it felt all that pain. And I braved a look at my arm.

It was swollen, red, and deformed. No wonder it hurt so much!

Another childhood part of me spoke up from inside of me and said, “See! We weren’t being dramatic. This is bad! Look at it. Of course it hurts!”

The stubborn part that had cut the branch down wanted to finish the job. She picked up the secateurs with my left hand, and slowly, awkwardly cut the big branch into half a dozen smaller pieces. My right hand had to support each branch to do this, and my arm cried out in protest.

In less than a minute, I reined her in. She was hurting us, and now that I could see what was happening, I wasn’t having a bar of it. With my left hand, I chucked the last of the branches off the footpath, picked up the tools, and slowly walked back into the house.

By feeling the sensations as fully as I had before cutting up the branch, I had noticeably reduced the severity of the physical pain. But I couldn’t just ‘magic’ the pain away entirely.

As my right arm continued to yell (more softly) at me, I noticed the emotions rise to the surface. The strongest was the anger; a part of me was so angry and was calling me ‘stupid’.

I tapped.

While I could have put things down and tapped with my left hand, I’ve now done so much tapping over the years that I can do the entire process effectively inside my own mind. So I did.

“Even though I’m angry at myself…”

“Even though I think that was stupid…”

“Even though I should have known better…”

It didn’t take long before a new voice piped up and said, “You would never speak this way to a friend if they had made this mistake.”

I felt compassion arise. I felt my nervous system calm down a little. I started to think more clearly.

My next step was to figure out how serious the injury was.

Since I don’t love going to doctors unless absolutely necessary, I started thinking about how else I could figure it out.

I talked out loud to Claude AI; my message was accidentally deleted.

I used Facebook Messenger to call a running friend who has a long history of all manner of physical injuries; he didn’t answer.

I called a long-time friend of mine who used to be an ED nurse; it diverted to voicemail.

Recognising that seeing a doctor might be the most sensible way to take care of myself if I couldn’t accurately assess the damage I’d done, I looked up available appointments at the two medical centres I’d visited in the last 7 years; there were none at all for the whole weekend.

If I had tried to ‘be strong’ and ignored the pain in my arm, these setbacks would have crippled me.

If I had tried to ‘be brave’ and ignored my emotions, these setbacks would have seen me falling into a crying heap.

But because I had allowed what had happened and how I was feeling to be there, there was no part of me that wanted to cry or collapse in a heap.

This was a very different experience from the last time I experienced something this painful, and, even in between the pain and uncertainty, I was present enough to see it and say to myself: “Oh, look at how well you’re coping with this!”

Right around that time, my partner walked in the door. Despite feeling somewhat sheepish about doing something he would have vetoed had he seen what I was attempting, I told him what had happened.

He was ready to help. And the first thing he did was hand me an ice pack.

Even though I still didn’t know if I had broken a bone or just damaged the soft tissue badly enough for it to swell up to a scary size, I was calm enough to feel my body’s response to the idea: Yes. Yes, to putting an ice pack on it.

We talked about me visiting a doctor, and he assured me that either he or his son could come off the roof to drive me and that I should come and get him if that’s what I decided to do.

With my brain still firing well, I remembered that we have a medical service that we can call here in Australia to work out how serious a problem is. With my left hand doing most of the work, I dialled the number and was connected with a nurse.

I was able to answer her questions quickly, clearly and easily, despite having no clue how bad my arm was.

Less than 10 minutes later, I had a recommendation to visit an urgent care clinic that was only a short drive away. Meanwhile, my partner had talked to his son about it, and they’d come to the conclusion that, on a Saturday, I would sit there all day before being seen.

I went looking again for local doctors where I could actually book an appointment and get in at a set time, even if I had to pay extra for what, for the longest time, had been covered under Medicare. I found one appointment left at the closest clinic to us. I rang and asked if I could come as a new patient and what it would require.

15 minutes later, I was sitting in the clinic with my partner, as he filled in the long new-patient form.

Before long, I was sitting in the office of a doctor with reports up to her armpits, who printed me a referral for an X-ray and fussed over bandages to wrap up my arm. But before she did either of those things, she lightly pressed on the bones in my right arm, on either side of the (very sore) impact site, and neither of them hurt. That is to say, it seemed extremely unlikely I had broken either my wrist or my arm.

Hooray!

Despite having a hand and wrist that I could barely move, which still hurt enough that it felt like something was broken, I was able to feel grateful. This was only because:

• I had felt the physical pain and let myself express what wanted to come out,

• I had felt my emotional reactions and tapped with the parts of me that were feeling all the things, and

• I had actively taken a bunch of sensible steps to take care of myself

For the rest of the weekend, I alternated between having it slung up around my neck and letting it hang by my side. I used the ice pack on and off during the day, and left the bandage on for a full 48 hours.

I noticed small improvements every handful of hours, and by Monday morning (2 days after the ‘accident’), I was able to keep the bandage off and write two long posts on Substack ;-)

While I don’t want to suggest that just ‘feeling your feelings and sensations’ will magically solve all your problems, I do want to say that doing so will go a helluva long way to help you:

• Cope better during a challenging situation

• Make better decisions to improve the situation, and

• Figure out why this whole schmoozle might have happened in the first place.

With love,

Caroline.

P.S. If you enjoyed this post, feel free to share it with a friend who also wants to navigate difficult things better. My posts usually hover around the intersection of Tapping, deconditioning, nervous system education and Human Design. It’s free to subscribe and free to share ;-)

I showered after my morning run and then asked my partner, a recently retired electrician, to let me know if I could help in any way.

It’s so easy for the Projector to want to help.

He pointed to his son, who is also an electrician and said, “I think we’re good.” I immediately felt adrift: What was I going to do all day while surrounded by all this Sacral energy and additional noise?

I had known that my quiet, private sanctuary was going to be temporarily shattered, but I was finding it far more disconcerting than I expected. I had to do something with all this energy and tension I felt, but I didn’t want to leave the house in case my partner realised they needed another pair of hands after all.

So, I threw on a work shirt, grabbed some tools and headed out into the garden. There were some more high branches I’d been meaning to cut down, and now seemed like the perfect time.

The first one came down easily. No sweat. I’d used this extendable cutter numerous times over the last month since we bought it, so I felt confident.

I tackled another branch. It was too big and refused to cut. But I’d had this problem before and knew that if I just approached the same branch from another angle, I’d get through it.

If you’d been inside my head at that moment, you would have heard a voice saying things like, “I will get through this branch. I won’t stop until I get this branch down. I can do this. I’m going to do this.”

What’s helpful to know is that I’m not strong-willed by design. My heart (will/ego) centre is undefined, therefore anytime I’m being particularly stubborn and trying to will something to happen through force, I’m not being true to myself.

This is the power of conditioning. This part of me—that doesn’t get activated very often these days—was trying to prove that she was capable. She secretly wanted to prove that she was ‘good enough’, ‘strong enough’, ‘capable enough’ to help the guys on the roof.

She is not the truth of who I am. She is a split-off, wounded part of me that still thinks she has something to prove.

We all have parts like this; parts that we created out of necessity in childhood to survive our family unit and/or the traumatic experiences we endured.

When you find these parts in you, they’re not the truth of you either. Instead, they’re like a small child that needs your love and attention so they can heal. They certainly shouldn’t be running the show. Yet, most people are walking around behaving exactly like their wounded child parts without even realising it. It’s so common, it’s absurd.

And I’m not perfect either. I don’t always catch it when a part of me is running the show, although these days I’m better at it than I’ve ever been, thanks to a decade of tapping my way through the ‘stuff’ that’s shown up.

On this particular morning, I didn’t catch her in time. She pushed, and pulled, and forced the tool to do the job at hand, and it came crashing down on me.

The hardest, heaviest part of the tool landed on my lower right arm in almost exactly the same place I had broken it when I was 15. It was painful as hell, and I knew I had to take the injury seriously.

In part two of this story, I’ll share what I did next.

Expect it to be super helpful the next time you have an accident (which I do not wish for you, but, you know, you’re human too). And whether you see that it was unconsciously created by a wounded part like mine was or an accident that involves other people and/or was completely outside your control, the ‘next steps’ will help you to take care of yourself once the damage has been done.

With love,

Caroline.

P.S. In case you’re worried, please know that my arm is now okay! It’s still tender and not quite ready to tackle a set of push-ups, but I managed to write this entire email/post with both hands. Yay for having full use of two hands. What a blessing!

If you are seeing a therapist who is genuinely helping you gain insight, supporting you to work through blind spots, identifying and clearing limiting beliefs and growing compassion for yourself and others - fantastic. I’m delighted to hear it.

But if your therapist is not doing these things with and for you, then it might be time to ask yourself if you’re actually moving forward towards the person you long to become and the life you wish to lead.

Over the years, I’ve seen ‘helping professionals’ of all kinds. I’ve also served clients who have spent a loooooong time in the office of counsellors, psychologists, therapists… people who listen for a living.

Therapy, like coaching and any other kind of ‘healing’ work, can be incredibly life-changing. Unless it’s not.

If you’re seeing a person by any title who takes your time and money (or insurance money) and listens to you talk endlessly about your problems, worries, fears, etc but doesn’t help you to effectively shift these, they may be keeping you stuck.

It’s probably not intentional. It’s probably not conscious on their part. They probably believe they’re helping.

But if after months or years of regular visits to see a helping professional, you have not been helped, it might be time to move on.

It can be addictive to spend time with someone who listens to you if no one else around you does. I understand how desperately hard it can feel if you are surrounded by friends and family who don’t really get you, or ask you how you are, or ever see you as deeply as you are able to do for them.

In this case, it’s easy to understand why you might find yourself in a therapist’s office and be relieved that, for once, someone listens.

At last, you have the precious, undivided attention of another person who cares for your well-being.

You finally feel seen and understood.

It feels like a soothing balm for your tired, hurting heart that finds the rest of the world so hard to deal with.

So, you keep going back to this same person, as often as your finances and schedule will allow. But years later, you have barely changed. You love your therapist, but you still don’t have deep friendships where you can have these kinds of conversations. You still don’t have the kind of love life you want, or relationship with your kids that you want, or the kind of work life that you want.

You convince yourself and others that things have changed, and perhaps they have. Perhaps you’ve started going to that pottery class that you’d always been meaning to try out. Or perhaps you’ve started dating again after a nasty divorce. Or maybe you spend less time bitching about your kids in session than you used to because they’re more tolerable (read: you cope better with them) now.

But is the change you’ve experienced commensurate with the amount of time and money you’ve spent in session?

For so many people I speak with, their answer is ‘no’. And that is because endlessly talking about and through your problems is not going to solve the underlying cause that created them in the first place. And staying focused on the problems from your past won’t allow you to create a better future.

You need a person who is skilled and trained in getting to the root of the pattern that caused the issues in the first place, and someone who will continue to redirect you back to the life you want to create.

These people exist. And you deserve to have this kind of support. Please don’t waste your time working with (well-meaning but ineffective) therapists who can’t help you create a better life.

You deserve better.

With love,

From your Ranty Writer,

Caroline x

P.S. More than once, I’ve had clients tell me they’ve made way more progress with me in a single session than months (or years) in talk therapy. If you are familiar with my work with Human Design and already have a deconditioning tool but wish to make it more effective, then one or more sessions with me might be a delightful addition to your own brave healing work. You can check out more about me to see if I might be what you’re looking for here.

“His whole family is so generous. They’re such good people. I don’t understand how a good man like this gets cancer, and some of the bad guys in prison (who he works with) seem to be fine.”

He continued.

“That’s why I struggle when religious people try to tell me about God and God’s plan. It doesn’t make sense.”

It immediately struck me that my friend was facing two battles: one of sadness at the thought of losing a “good man” from the community, and one of confusion and anger, “because bad things shouldn’t happen to good people”.

It also occurred to me that there’s some part of me, deep down, that still holds this belief. (Otherwise, I would not have attracted this conversation.)

And there’s a good chance that some part of you also holds this belief. (Or you wouldn’t find yourself drawn to reading this.)

So let’s talk about this and the harm caused by holding a belief such as this one, so we can decide if we want to let it go.

When we grow up in an environment where the big people around us (parents, preachers and/or teachers) are telling us that we need to be “good boys and girls” (“or else…”), we create neural wiring that says,

“If I’m good, then I’ll get rewarded and good things will happen to me. If I’m bad, then I’ll get punished and bad things will happen to me.”

Of course, life is not that simple. Things that feel good and things that feel bad happen to all of us. Sometimes, wonderful things happen for people who have repeatedly harmed others. And sometimes awful things happen to people who have repeatedly been good to others.

When we learn to believe the lie of “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people”, it sets us up for immense suffering down the track, as it did for my running mate, who is probably going to lose his friend sooner rather than later.

My personal view is that God is a neutral concept. It is the energy of all things, binding us all. It is not a ‘man in the sky’ doling out punishment or rewards. It is everything, the space between all of us, the ocean of all living things as One.

When we look at God (or “The Universe” or “Source” or “The Creator”, etc) this way, it’s easier to see that Life Just Is. Things just happen. Some of them are in our control, and some of them are not.

The benefit of seeing God (by any name) through this lens is that it frees us up to look for other possible reasons that cancer may have come to live in my mate’s friend’s body. There is an inordinate amount of scientific research showing that our lifestyle (i.e. regular daily habits over time) plays a huge role in the creation or destruction of cancer cells.

There is also a huge amount of evidence pointing to a correlation (if not causation) between repeatedly suppressing our emotions over time and the creation of cancer cells.

These two ideas point to something very different from “God is punishing me”: they remind us that we have more power than we might realise.

And while I’m unlikely to ever try and share this concept with a person whose body is ravaged with cancer (because for most people it would be received as both unkind and probably unhelpful) I think it’s a useful idea to consider if you are someone who is still reasonably healthy but also believes that “bad things shouldn’t happen to good people'“.

Because if you can loosen your grip on that belief, you can get on with the important work of creating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle (i.e. looking after yourself), of learning or relearning how to express your emotions in a healthy and appropriate way (which is another way you can look after yourself) and focus on being the most genuine version of you that you can be.

Because there’s every chance that a physically, mentally and emotionally healthy you, who feels safe to be themselves, is probably also a pretty kind, loving human anyway.

And that’s what we need more of.

With love,
Caroline.

P.S. If you are someone who happens to have cancer living in your body, you’ve lost someone to cancer, or this post is in any way triggering for you because of the mention of cancer, even though reading this might have hurt, please know I do not mean to hurt you. (This is very important. Keep reading.)

When you find a trigger due to something you read, see or hear, that’s a very good time to give the hurting part of you a giant hug.

If you’ve never heard of this idea before and you don’t know how to do that, just find the place in your body that’s yelling or crying, sad or angry, and listen to it.

Be with it. Move with it. Do what it needs you to do. Often, it might be as simple as you imagining that you’re giving this part of you a hug the same way you would a child in distress. Because, despite what we might have been taught, all people, and all parts of us, deserve to be loved. Even and especially the parts of us that are hurting.

Many, many moons ago at the tender age of just 27, I had an experience that changed my life.

I was working as an outdoor education instructor with children as young as 9 or 10 all the way through to their final year of school. On this particular trip, we had an all-girls school. Privileged, wealthy, 16-17 year old girls. Some of them snobby, several of them bitchy, and the occasional full-on brat.

I knew I had my work cut out for me.

After a few challenging sessions (like one where I was supposed to use a low-ropes obstacle session to teach team building skills but the most I could do was stop them from breaking their ankles with all their over-the-top misbehaviour), I found myself allocated with a “masks” session.

I’d never run this kind of session before. But the brief was simple. The instructions were clear. And all the materials were there.

So we found a quiet spot in the bush, away from the prying eyes of other (misbehaving) groups of teenage girls who also didn’t want to be on camp, and we settled into the process of making ourselves a mask each.

Before long, it started to rain. So we hightailed it back to the camp proper and found a room that was empty except for about 30 stacked school chairs. We piled in and shut the door behind us.

With the circle we’d formed and our masks mostly finished, I encouraged the girls to begin sharing about the masks they’d made. With a small period of awkward hesitation, one very polite girl went first. She shared some simple things about herself that she felt like she used as a mask to protect herself from the world.

I gently thanked her and asked for the next share.

An outspoken young woman from across the room said, “Well if no one else is going to, I guess I have to start this.” From there she launched into a vulnerable share about what was happening in her family and how stressful it was. And how she puts on a mask every day to pretend that everything is okay for the sake of her parents.

The outpouring had begun.

More than an hour later, every girl-woman in the room had shared something about themselves, with varying degrees of vulnerability bar one. While the two teachers I had with me had managed to keep their cool (though I could tell they were finding it as hard as I was), all but two of the girls had tears running down their faces.

Well after our session was due to finish, my supervisor knocked on the door, looking concerned that we weren’t following our activity schedule. I begged for another ten minutes and found a way to wrap up the session, reminding these young women that they did not have to carry all these worries and burdens alone. That they were allowed to ask for help and that, indeed, they should.

As we broke out of the room and headed towards another trivial outdoor team-building exercise, the school principal who was with us for most of the session shook his head in disbelief at what he’d heard. He offered to look into more counselling opportunities for his students, which I was pleased to hear, knowing that in 24 hours I would say goodbye and never see these brave young women ever again.

He also commented that it was “the most powerful session I’ve ever seen in 20 years of education”.

I was humbled and grateful but also sad that there weren’t more opportunities for stressed-out teenagers to work through their stuff. No wonder they’d presented as misbehaving, snobby brats - they were stressed out of their brains.

From that point on and for the rest of camp my group was transformed. They were kind to each other. They listened to me without me having to raise my voice once. I was even able to direct a boisterous night activity while sitting on the floor, well below all of them, and they happily came to me for instructions while I rested.

And when it came time for them to leave, they begged me to go with them.

I watched the bus pull away, waving vigorously to ‘my girls’ until they were out of sight, and then I spontaneously burst into tears. I knew I’d had an important influence on these girl-women but I also knew that there was only so much I could do with children when my influence was on the children alone.

I have always loved children. Always. But that day I understood that if I was to work only with minors without also teaching their parents, their teachers and the other adults that influence them then my work would have very limited reach.

As I reflect on this experience, more than 15 years later, I’m in awe of the woman I was able to be that day. It was prior to my Saturn Return. It was prior to my knowing anything about Human Design or EFT (tapping) or trauma resolution.

Heck, I didn’t even know what the term “space holding” meant.

But somehow I did it anyway. Somehow, with the help of a brave, ‘outspoken’ young woman named Sally who led her peers into a deeper conversation than any of us expected, I got to have an experience that taught me so very much.

One day my work will circle back around to working with children again. But until then, my work with adults continues. Because until we have more parents, teachers and preachers who understand themselves, who know how to be with themselves, and who are willing and able to love themselves, then any work I do with children will be fleeting at best.

So here’s the opportunity for you:

Look at the children who you either directly or indirectly influence. Whether you have one or more offspring, one or more nieces or nephews, one or more kids in your street that know your name, or you’re a teacher, support worker, child therapist, or you work in a pet store where kids who love puppies come in every week pining over their next best friend, know this:

What you do matters.

Who you are being matters.

How much you prioritise speaking your truth, acknowledging your feelings, and trying your damned hardest to live your best life matters.

Because the children are watching.

And they deserve the very best that you have.

With love,

Caroline.

It was in one of our many sessions last year that this client told me about a behaviour he wanted to change.

He’d tried so many times and was getting nowhere.

Even though it was something that a lot of people struggle with he felt embarrassed, ashamed and frustrated that he couldn’t just decide to change this habit and then follow through.

He’d identified the behaviour and he didn’t like this part of himself that carried on this way.

He saw that it hurt his relationships and he wanted to change.

He’d read far more books than most people ever will. He was very highly educated will multiple degrees and certificates. And he’d been an active participant in the personal development industry longer than I’d even known such a thing existed.

But even with all this education and experimenting, he just couldn’t make this change.

Here’s what I taught this client that I want you to understand if you don’t already.

Enter stage left, the “Be > Do > Have” Model

(Courtesy of Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

In short, here’s how it works:

We’ve been trained to think, “If I want to have this result, then I need to do this particular action. (The end).”

But if it was that simple then everyone would have what they wanted!

And I bet you, like me, have sometimes struggled to get what you want, right?

Here’s what’s missing:

Who you are being directly affects what you do…

• in your relationships

• in your business

• with your physical and mental health

• with your finances, and

• in all other areas of your life.

Despite what you might think, you’re not lazy or stupid or broken.

And you don’t need another guru to tell you what to do.

You just need to find and change the “code” that’s causing you to be the sort of person who does this shitty thing you don’t like about yourself.

Whether it’s spending more money than you make, or attracting nasty partners, or eating crapping food, or endlessly complaining about things, all of these behaviours can be changed.

But very few people can change them through willpower alone. And even then, I’ve watched the strongest-willed people I know change some behaviours successfully, only to have other changes elude them for decades.

Stop trying to force yourself to change behaviours.

It’s a waste of your precious time, energy and attention.

Instead, learn how to find the unhelpful beliefs, the stuck energy and/or the unresolved emotion from that traumatic incident you never dealt with that are causing you to continue to be someone who does the behaviour, that then has the result you do not want.

Then, and only then, will your life magically transform.

With love,

Caroline.

P.S. In case you are someone who has no idea how to make a change at this being level (as in, changing beliefs, shifting stuck energy and resolving old emotional baggage sounds like a kind of witchery you’re not at all skilled in), then please know there are a lot of different ways this can be done.

I do this work with clients using a method I call Trauma-Informed Tapping. (If you’ve heard of EFT, it’s similar to that but about 100 iterations better since I first began studying it more than a decade ago.) You can book sessions with me here or if you’re a paid subscriber here on Substack you can ask me any question you like about the elements needed to make a ‘change tool’ truly effective.

Here’s to creating the life you want.

[In case you’ve never heard of it, “parkrun” (all one word, all lowercase) is a free, weekly, timed community event that happens in over 500 locations around Australia and is currently in about 20 countries around the world.]

I was jogging along incredibly slowly. I am currently committed to low-heart-rate training, which means I’m lucky if I can run faster than 10 minutes per kilometre. If you’re not a runner this will mean nothing to you, so imagine this:

I was so slow that many fast walkers were overtaking me.

One of these was a man at least 20 years my senior. I made a lighthearted, passing remark (that I’ve since forgotten) and he replied in a way that made little sense for the flow of the conversation but a lot of sense to a fellow parkrunner like myself:

“This is my 50th location!”

[Translation for non-parkrunners: “This is the 50th different place that holds a parkrun that I have walked, run or volunteered at since I started my parkrunning journey. And I’m so excited I have to tell someone!”]

He used a tone of voice and a language pattern I’ve heard several times over the last handful of years I’ve been parkrunning. I don’t know how to describe it exactly but it somehow conveys that the person telling me their news thinks that their achievement is amazing and must be more amazing than anything I’ve ever dreamt of achieving through parkrun.

It used to really irk me.

They would tell me about their amazing achievement like they were better than me, failing to realise I had already far exceeded that goal.

I would usually correct these people.

Sometimes bluntly. Sometimes in a lighthearted way. Sometimes by trying to lead them into actually asking me about my parkrun experience instead of carrying on about themselves with no regard for me beyond seeing me as a person to brag to.

But on this day? With this fast-walking older man who blurted out his latest (nearly completed) achievement?

This time I heard something different come out of my own mouth:

“Wow! That’s exciting!”

And I meant it.

My genuine first response was one of empathy. That is, I was able to, spontaneously, be with him in his excitement.

I really got that it wasn’t about me.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t thought to ask me about the number of parkrun locations I’d been to.

In fact, it was only after he moved passed me that my mind wanted to butt in and remind me, “I’ve done more than three times the number that he has!” And even with my mind pushing its way in, it still felt easier than ever before to just let him have his win.

This is what happens as we heal our past trauma.

In the past, I clung so tightly to my achievements to bolster my flailing self-confidence. But the more I heal the wounds of the past, the more my genuine, innate self-confidence emerges, and the less I cling to the things I’ve achieved.

There are little signs of this everywhere in my life but here are two other examples from parkrun:

• While I still regularly attend parkruns I can’t tell you off the top of my head how many I’ve now done.

• While we still regularly seek out new parkrun locations to visit, we go more for the fun of it than the bragging rights. In fact, if this grey-haired man had asked me how many locations I’d been to I couldn’t have told him an exact number.

These things are no longer as important to me. I now know, deep in my bones, that I’m amazing whether I’ve been to one parkrun location or a thousand.

In fact, if I’m proud of any achievement at all it is noticing how much I have changed.

It is in seeing the real-life effect of all these silent reps I’ve been doing while no one has been watching.

And if you’ve been doing trauma resolution work of any kind, whether it’s silent repetitions at home on your own when “stuff” arises or working through your pain with the support of a practitioner, therapist or healer of some kind, (or both) then kudos to you.

May you be gifted with unexpected interactions with strangers who show you have far you’ve come.

A lean, barefoot runner and enthusiastic guy, we often spoke of how we wished to see him at parkruns more often. And here he was.

But he seemed to be in the middle of something. With a concentrated stare, his eyes were tracking the steps of an even leaner man who was also running barefoot along the beach carpark road.

I went to change and my Mister went to see if he could jump in on the action, given that both these men were his age and clearly love running just as much as he does.

Cleaner, drier and with less sand stuck to my skin, I found them standing at the back of an open van with various thin-soled shoes scattered around, talking in animated voices about all things running-related.

I introduced myself to the man I didn’t know while our friend, let’s call him Danny, continued talking with my Mister.

After briefly swapping names with, let’s call him Terry, I asked this lean, strong-looking man about his experience running in Five Fingers.

(Vibram Five Fingers are a very minimalist type of shoe with individual slots for the toes, the way gloves do for the fingers. There was a massive craze for them after the book, “Born to Run” came out and endless people thought they were the solution to all their running problems until they started to break lower-body parts, that is.

I approached my transition to minimalist shoes far more slowly and sensibly and was able to complete multiple very long-distance events in them, making my feet and calves stronger and stronger over time. I still wear something similar when I run today, 15 years later.)

I was curious to hear how Terry dealt with the endless questions and comments that people seem to have when anyone wears these Five Fingers in public nowadays as this is the number one reason I haven’t gone back to wearing these particular shoes.

I immediately realised that Terry was nothing like our friend Danny when I found myself being talked to like a little girl who knew nothing.

Condescending, patronising, mansplaining. Frankly, I was kind of shocked.

You’d think I was a 12-year-old runner who had asked a very old uncle how to navigate the world of critical adults, rather than a very capable, highly experienced woman in my mid-forties seeking to have a light, friendly conversation.

I quickly switched gears.

I wasn’t interested in being schooled on how to do life. I was interested in having an interesting, intelligent conversation with our friend Danny and if Terry wasn’t on this wavelength, well, a different approach was needed.

As soon as there was a tiny break in the conversation, I turned to face Danny and asked him what he’d been up to. The friendly guy’s face lit up with the cheeky, intellect I knew him for and before I’d even realised it the Mister had switched places with me so he could chat with Terry instead.

While they talked about running injuries and dealing with aging bodies and how to get into marathons based on age-grade percentages, I continued to focus my attention squarely on Danny. I had an enjoyable, easy, enlightening conversation with him about everything from new running events, to changes with hiking permits in Nepal, to how he’s dealing with his highly nomadic life. It was delightful.

When I sensed it was a good time to stop, I made subtle moves in that direction and the Mister got the hint. I gave Danny a big hug and politely said goodbye to Terry, and walked bare foot back to the car.

As I reflected on the conversation, I was happy the Mister saw Danny in the distance and pursued a conversation with them both. Not only because it’s such a delight to chat with the clever and kind barefoot runner but also because being around men his own age who are as serious about running as he is, is so good for my Mister.

But the best thing that came out of that conversation was realising, yet again, how much progress I’ve made.

In the past when I would run into people like Terry, I either would have submitted to his authoritarian way of being and let him carry on about crap that didn’t interest me, pretending to agree. Or I would have got offended by his condescenion and ended up in something of an argument, trying to defend my honour and prove how clever and capable I am.

This time, I tried a quick retort to see if I could establish myself as his equal and when it immediately and obviously failed, I decided the conversation was not a good use of my time or energy.

I was only able to access this realisation because I’ve done so much healing around anger.

I now know I deserve better.

I now know I don’t need to tolerate bullshit.

I now know I don’t need to engage with people who don’t see or respect or understand me. I can just walk away.

Or, in this case, talk to someone else.

As I wrap up this post, there is a part of me that is tempted to say to you that you also deserve better if you’re being talked to in a way that makes you feel any kind of ‘bad’.

And it’s true, you do.

If you’re on the rare people who is able to read this story and take new actions when faced with patronising human beings, then great, please do that. If my story was enough ‘permission’ to step back from interactions that feel like rubbish, then that is excellent.

But I know that, if you’re like most people, you’ll be like me: you won’t just be able to hear (read) a story from someone else and then model your behaviour off theirs.

It helps, definitely. As human beings, we’re designed to learn from the role modelling of others. So role model and story tell I shall continue to do.

But I know that what I also needed was to heal my relationship with anger.

Not so I could tell him he’s a *#&%^)! but rather so I could recognise within myself:

“I don’t like being talked to this way. I deserve better. I am not going to tolerate this. I am stepping away from this person right now.”

It is anger that lets us do this. Being able to feel and access our anger—that is intimately tied to our life force energy—is what gives us the power to make different choices.

And I’m proud of myself that I’ve now done enough of the sometimes scary, almost-never-fun work of reconnecting with my anger during all those times when I could have continued doing what I always did.

Because that is what led to me being able to have the conversation I wanted to have and walk away when it was time to say ‘no’.

“I deserve to feel safe.”

It was the first time I’d ever said that out loud.

I watched his hands go up in the air to celebrate, as is customary when I share breakthroughs in these sessions.

As my long-time therapist and space holder he knew some of the horrific things I’d lived through.

He knew what it meant for me to spontaneously and organically say these words.

For the casual observer, it would be easy to write this off as nothing. Because everyone deserves to feel safe, right?

Right.

Of course.

We all deserve to feel safe.

We all deserve to feel like we can make our way through our days and our lives feeling safe.

Physically safe.

Psychologically safe.

Emotionally, spiritually and in all the ways.

But so few of us actually do feel deeply safe.

And so many of us carry the shame of things we “think we did wrong” and therefore don’t feel like we deserve things—like safety—that are, in fact, a fundamental necessity as a human being.

Shame. It’s such a sticky, tricky thing to work with.

See most of us are walking around with long-held, unprocessed shame for things we never deserved to be punished for in the first place.

Let me explain:

When someone hurts us and we cannot defend ourselves—maybe it’s because we are very little compared to the big person hurting us, or maybe we are an adult but the other person has more power than us—then the anger we want to express outwardly towards the other person to stop them from hurting us gets locked inside us.

So instead of saying to them:

“You are doing a bad thing by hurting me and you should stop right now…”

(which is one polite way to say what our body might want to say if it could string together actual words while being attacked)

because we can’t get the words out and we can’t get the physical actions out to defend ourselves (for fear of being hurt even more badly) then we end up internalising that “bad” feeling that creates a thought and then a belief that sounds something like this:

“I must have done something bad to deserve this.”

If, as you read this, you realise that you resonate with that last sentence then it’s likely that you too have had one or more experiences as I have where someone did something to hurt you and you—for whatever reason—could not use your words or your body to stop them.

Let me pause at this point and say, “That totally sucks. And you deserve better.”

It’s true, you deserve better.

You deserve to feel safe.

But what I want to know is, do you believe you deserve to feel safe?

See that breakthrough I had in therapy last week had been a long time coming. I’d been working on healing the pain from the experiences that had contributed to that for many years.

So if you can’t answer that question in the affirmative, as in, if you can’t easily and confidently say:

“I deserve to feel safe.”

Then it’s okay.

It’s okay.

Just notice.

Notice that it’s too hard. Notice that it doesn’t feel true. Notice that there are perhaps layers and layers of “stuff” between you and your ability to know the truth, that you too deserve to feel safe.

And the way you get to that place of knowing is by healing

one

tiny

drop

of

pain

and

shame

each time it shows up in your daily life.

It doesn’t matter how you do it:

With tapping or journalling or therapy or hugging giant trees or going for long runs or punching pillows or dancing to music that speaks to your soul.

But please speak with, move with, sit with, be with the part of you that feels the shame.

Because then, one day, you’ll get to be the person who says out loud:

“I deserve to feel safe.”

And you’ll mean it.

I’d guess, looking back, that he was probably in his mid-forties. All I remember is that he seemed like a solid, reliable, mature adult.

This is why it surprised me when, during the middle of a lecture, he was balanced on a tree root.

To be fair, we were doing an outdoor leadership course. And all our teachers were qualified and capable rock climbers. (It was part of the job description.)

So there we were a group of ‘kids’ ranging from 18 to 40-something, with me the third eldest in the class at 25, sitting, listening and watching whatever it was we were learning that day about rigging an abseil.

By the end of that class, we would all have chosen the right ropes, tied the right knots, attached metal devices in the right places, and successfully scaled down the side of a cliff or helped one of our classmates do so.

And while I know I must have done all the necessary things to stay safe that day and complete the practical assignments given, I don’t remember a word of what was said.

All I remember is the feeling of disbelief I had that Lucas was balancing on a root while the (other) teacher was talking.

I think at first my ‘good student’ part must have kicked up a fuss, thinking he was being a distraction. And to me, the right-brained, taking-every-detail-in student, he was.

But when I realised he was being completely silent and unobtrusive, that part of me quietened down. And in her place arose a part of me that was astounded by the realisation that adults could play.

Surely only kids balanced on things for fun?

Surely a sensible, mature adult such as Lucas would only do more serious adult things, right?

He might balance on a small protrusion on a rock face to teach us how to climb better but then he would be working. That would be acceptable. Because that’s what adults do, right?

“Adults work. Kids play.”

That was the belief I had right up until that day. It had been a solid belief I could rely on that helped me make sense of the world. But on that day—distracted from whatever was being said—as I stared at Lucas, fixated on his silent act of play, that belief started to crumble.

…

In the years since then, I’ve had many beliefs pushed, poked and occasionally shattered. The frequency with which these transformational experiences have happened has sped up.

In the early days, it was incidental. Unexpected. Unplanned.

By my mid 30’s I was finding and deliberately challenging beliefs that no longer served me.

Now, perhaps a similar age to Lucas all those years ago, it’s now a standard practice and a highly practised skill to spot beliefs that are invisible to most people, and immediately begin to cause the unwanted ones to crumble.

My life is all the better for it.

And while I haven’t seen Lucas for close to 20 years, I have a feeling that, if he were to read this story the wise, humble part of him would be grateful for the impact he had… and his childlike part would smile.

“Make no mistake about it – enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the façade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” (Adyashanti)

More than once, during a challenging moment, as I attempt to deepen into a greater aspect of my true self, I have found myself mentally replacing the word ‘enlightenment’ with ‘becoming yourself’:

“Make no mistake about it – becoming yourself is a destructive process...”

And while I do think that becoming yourself does lead to becoming a better human and can cause us to be happier more often, I also think that becoming yourself does require “the crumbling away of untruth”. That it demands of us to see “through the façade of pretense” and that, for some people, it will lead to the near- ”complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

For those of you who are actively playing with Human Design and wish to actually live your design as opposed to just learn about the system, you too will have likely had ‘challenging’ moments along the way.

Whether you notice your unproductive behaviours or unhelpful beliefs or are simply trying to maintain your existing relationships with loved ones when you’re changing so much, it can be tough, and I just want to acknowledge that.

I think it is so easy to get wowed by the Human Design system and see all the shiny possibilities of what it could be like to ‘live into your potential’. But not enough people are talking about the ‘how’:

How the hell do you actually live this stuff?

How do you navigate the emotions that rapidly rise to the surface, often without any warning, announcing how impossibly difficult this can be?

How do you change lifetimes of beliefs and behaviours that form the very identity you are known for?

This is what I’ve been obsessed with understanding for the last decade. That’s why I know that it’s essential to pair Human Design with an effective deconditioning tool because we each hold several decades of our own ‘stuff’ that, oftentimes, is not aligned with our (energetic) design.

Another quote springs to mind as I go to wrap up this post:

If you're going through hell, keep going. (Winston Churchill)

Hopefully, you have some tools to help you when your emotions feel hellishly hard. (If you don’t, comment on this post or reply to this email—if you have one of those options—and ask me what I recommend.)

But as long as you have a way to ‘feel the feelings’ and move through them, make sure you do. Because the way through it is through it.

And it gets easier the more you practise.

With love,

Caroline.

What if nothing I ever do will ever make a difference…?

It wasn’t a hopeless thought. It wasn’t a thought of self-pity, powerlessness or despair.

It was alive with curiosity.

I asked myself this question again and again with different challenges I’ve had that have not yet been fully resolved.

What if nothing I do will ever make a difference… to my sleep and I’ll spend the rest of my life somewhat sleep-deprived, depending on coffee to get things done?

My genuine answer? I guess I’d just see what I could do with the energy and brain power I have each day and decide that it was enough. And try to have fun within that limitation.

Then my thoughts switched to the next challenge:

What if nothing I do will ever make a difference… to my digestive system and I have to spend the rest of my life with varying levels of gastric distress, never sure if the food or drink I’m having will be a problem or not?

My genuine answer? If I knew it wasn’t going to change, I’d stop trying so hard to figure it out. I’d stop being so meticulous with my food, trying to find the perfect foods and supplements for my body. I’d focus on having a bit more fun within the limitations I had.

My mind liked this game and it flicked to the next one:

What if nothing I do will ever make a difference… to my menstrual cycle and I’ll have to keep going through these horrific, out-of-control mood swings that make me collapse on the floor in tears of utter despair every time my period rolls around?

My answer? I guess I’d find a way to cope. I guess I’d be even firmer with my calendar so there is no way anyone expects me to work or travel or visit with anyone during that time. I guess I’d give myself full permission to go deep into retreat to nurture my precious body the way women used to before we started expecting women to behave like men.

Next:

What if nothing I do will ever make a difference… to the health of my family members? What if they never take a single scrap of my advice and they keep running themselves into the ground until their messy, awful end?

My answer? I’d love them more fiercely. I’d be so present when I got to be with them in person and not waste a single moment. I’d remind myself that I have the skills to meet my own emotional experiences when things get hard so that I could get back to truly being with them while I had them.

And:

What if nothing I do will ever make a difference… to the endless wars, the political unrest, and the seemingly never-ending natural disasters that cause so many people to lose their lives? What if the truly scary storms, like the two we had this week that scared the living life out of me, keep happening?

I’d be more present with what I have, with the preciousness of my life, my family, my community, and with this chunk of bush I am walking in with these wallabies I get to watch hop away with extraordinarily large jumps given their little bodies. I’d spend even more time being here now.

As my walk continued I went through more scenarios in my head. I asked more questions. I pondered more challenges. Given my sleep-deprived state and my slow creep toward another of those crushingly difficult periods that seem to be a feature of my current peri-menopausal state, I was able to find a lot of problems.

On hopeful days, when I’ve slept better than not and ingested food is agreeing with me and I get any kind of happy news from any part of my family, then my mostly low-level problems seem to fade into the background. However, today they were loud and very much alive.

And this gave me the chance to explore this “what if?”

What if nothing, of all the many things I try to do on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day, week-by-week basis to try and solve each and every one of these challenges, will ever make a difference? What then?

And the answer I got every single time was some version of this:

I would accept things as they are. I would accept myself and others as they are. I would be more grateful for everything I do have and prioritise enjoying what I have.

I noticed a caveat though, as I thought about writing this post and sharing with you all:

If the dial was turned up on the level of discomfort—emotional or physical—with any one or more of these too high for me to handle every day then simply choosing to accept it might no longer be what I choose. Perhaps I would say I am done with this life. Perhaps I would say, “Without hope for a better future, I’m out. This is no life.”

I say that to highlight that this meditation helped me and may help many others gain acceptance of our current limitations but it may not apply to all situations.

Maybe there’s something in your life that is truly unbearable. Maybe there is something with your health, your loved ones, or the state of your home/town/city/country that is unimaginably horrific that I or others may never understand.

It is not for me or anyone else to tell you that you should just “accept what is” if what is truly too awful. However, there is every chance that if you’re lucky enough to have a phone or computer and enough internet access to read this, and you have the time to sift through thousands of words of the humble musings of a woman you’ve possibly never met, that your challenges may be as manageable as mine.

Whether your experiences are sometimes tolerable, sometimes bad, or sometimes challenging enough that you find creative outlets for the sheer amount of pain they cause you… I do hope that whatever you are enduring in your own life is within your capacity to navigate.

And when it feels too hard, can you ask yourself the question with whatever skerrick of curiosity you can muster:

What if nothing I do will ever make a difference to this problem that I feel like I’ve been trying to solve forever?

I hope that you find, as I did, some level of relief in realising there is still so much we can do, experience and enjoy within our individual limitations as long as we stop trying so damn hard and just let go.

With love,

Caroline.

P.S. If you find yourself thinking that letting go is just like giving up, I want to hover over that for a moment before you go off to the rest of your day or night. I think this idea that ”letting go is just like giving up” could be an entire masterclass on its own. Since a masterclass doesn’t fit conveniently into a P.S. here are my cliff notes on this:

I have found that when I have truly let go and surrendered the need to be the one to be in control, to find the answer, to solve the problem sheer and utter magic has happened. By having an intention that I wanted things to improve but not knowing how that would happen and recognising that perhaps I needed the help of forces beyond my one little body and mind, I was able to make the space for new solutions to show up.

Again and again, my experience has shown me that when I can’t solve a solution with my very clever mind and my very determined body it is time to get the heck out of the way and let “someone” else try. What doesn’t work is asking for support (of God/Source/Universe/angels/guides/etc) and then actively waiting for them to “deliver” the solution. Uh uh. Not at all.

I have to be willing to actually, truly, genuinely let go.

It’s like I say, “Ok God, I’ve tried. I have tried so many ways and so many times and so many different things. For the life of me, I cannot figure this out. I’d love to feel better, so if you have any suggestions let me know. Otherwise, I’m going to be fully absorbed in appreciating what I already have. See ya!”

It has only been when I have let go of finding a solution so entirely that I forgot I was even after a solution, that a solution has shown up. You literally need to let go so well that you actually forget. And you’ll know that you have because two things will happen:

1. When the solution shows up it will come in a different package than your mind ever expected, and

2. You’ll be somewhat surprised/shocked/not realise what in front of you straight away because you weren’t looking for it. That is, it will take you moments or minutes or hours to remember that you asked for a solution.

Masterclass in a P.S. over ;)

P.P.S. I wrote this post a few weeks ago and let it sit and simmer here in Substack before editing and scheduling. I find that when I’m in the middle of things I have a lot of insights but I also cannot communicate them as clearly or cleanly as I would like.

If you’re a writer/teacher/sharer of vulnerable messages I encourage you to do the same. Don’t hit “publish” when you’re in the thick of it and your emotions are trying to spill out of every possible orifice because you cannot think clearly. That’s what a personal journal is for. What you share with the world is your service to others, not your therapy. So pause before posting and make sure it’s something you’re proud to share and feels genuinely useful for someone else.

If you are trying to “live your design” that probably feels like it goes out the window as soon as you get really big, destabilising news. I’m writing this post because I have had so many friends from the U.S. who have been shocked by the recent election and don't know what to do.

They’re seeking wisdom and guidance from somebody outside of their current situation. They’re writing to me and saying various versions of “What the f*ck do we do?”

If you have experienced any sort of truly terrible, catastrophic or overwhelming experience then this post is probably going to be helpful for you.

Now, most of the people in my community—both personally and professionally—are not very happy about the recent U.S. election results. And when I say “not very happy” I mean stunned, shocked, angry, grieving, all the things.

They're wondering what the heck to do and they’re not new to navigating challenges well. These are really spiritually aware, emotionally intelligent humans who are just floored by the news; they simply do not know what to do.

So, the point of this post is for me to give some very tangible, very easy-to-follow suggestions to you if you’re in this boat. And I want you to know that the suggestions I’ll make here apply whether or not you are reading this soon after I’ve posted it or later down the track.

It will apply to you whether you're reeling from the impending change of government in the U.S. (like so many of my clients and friends) or you are really struggling with the ongoing insanity that is happening in Gaza, or have a personal connection that makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intolerable for you, or you have loved ones in tornado affected areas, flooded affected areas, Civil War affected areas, etc.

Given that there are things happening all over the world, all the time there may be any number of reasons for you to feel overwhelmed any time you read the news.

Or it may be something that’s happening within your own family that, while not catastrophic for the rest of the world, is heartbreaking for you.

So, if you are experiencing any sort of big, destabilising emotional reaction to anything at present my intention is this post will be helpful for you.

If you’re into Human Design, please recognise that you cannot live out the highest expression of your energetic design when you are having a massive stress response. Especially if it’s a situation that doesn’t resolve in a short period of time and you’re having to deal with it day after day after day, with no end in sight.

The highest priority when we're in a massive stress response is to work with what's happening in us, and for us, and to us in that moment. So regardless of the context of why you are feeling all of the things, if you are feeling something very big, like a lot of sadness, or a lot of anger, a lot of fear or a lot of shame (or maybe all of those things, all at once) then you have a whole lot of charge you can work with.

Now on the flip side, what happens when we have too much sympathetic charge (that's all the “fight-flight” energy) is that the system has a kind of “kill” switch to protect us from too much energy.

It’s like it says, “Whoop! Too much charge.”

And then we go into freeze, numb, shock, or something similar. For example, all of the friends and clients who have said, “I'm stunned,” or “I'm floored,” or “I'm in shock,” are stuck in a freeze response because the sympathetic charge of the anger, the sadness, the whatever-was-too-big caused their nervous system to use a higher level of self-protection and shut down all the big feelings.

Neither of them is ideal as they're both full-on stress responses—though they might be appropriate for the context given the person’s history—but we need to be able to know how to move through it. So here's the crux of this post:

I want you to—if you're in this situation and you're feeling big things or are totally numb or whatever it is that you're experiencing that feels stressful for whatever reason—ask yourself these questions:

(1) Can I feel my feelings?

If you're numb, can you feel it or at least, become aware of it?

If you're stunned, can you feel that? If you're angry can you feel that? If you want to cry with sadness, can you feel that?

If you can, please, let yourself feel some of it. And when the body goes, “Wow. I've had enough!” then stop. You can do a bit more tomorrow, and the day after and the day after that.

Now if, when you ask yourself “Can I feel my feelings?” the answer is “No” then don't make yourself do something you don't have the capacity to do. Instead, go to question two:

(2) What would help me feel a tiny bit better right now?

There's a good chance it's going to be something that's within your control.

Do you want to make yourself a cup of tea?

Do you want to put on a funny show?

Do you want to cuddle your puppy dog, or go for a walk, or swim in the ocean?

What would help you feel a tiny bit better right now? And then each day or each moment that you realise that you're stuck in the big emotion or the overwhelm or the shocking feelings that feel like you can't move at all, keep repeating those two questions to yourself:

Can I feel my feelings right now?

And when you've had enough (or if you can't handle your emotions right now, there's no shame in that; it might be that the emotions are too big and that's okay, go to question two…)

What would help me feel a tiny bit better right now?

And you just keep repeating that each time you feel super stressed or super stuck. And you do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, until you realise that it feels less f*cked up and you realise that you're coping better.

Keep doing this practice of asking these two questions until you're functioning better and you can see some glimmers of hope and realise you’ve been experiencing some moments of joy (or at least, feeling okay more often). Keep doing those two things regardless of the situation that you're facing. Whether it's any of the current world events or any of the events that are happening in your own personal life.

Now, I do want to encourage you to avoid what we call “Spiritually Bypassing” which is bypassing the body in order to go up to look for a higher so-called “spiritual” meaning. Doing this is a way to bypass all of the stuff that's happening in our precious, overwhelmed, stressed-out body in order to get out of there.

We might do this because it feels so bad in our body and so asking ourselves “What's the meaning in the whole big picture?” allows us an escape from that pain. But all of that stress and overwhelm and all the things are still in the body. You don't get to avoid them. I mean you can avoid them temporarily but I want to encourage you to come back to your body as much as you safely can.

1. Can I feel my feelings?

2. What would help me feel a tiny bit better right now?

The other thing I want to encourage you to avoid—which is also very common, especially in achievement-driven cultures—is to “just soldier on” and get on with it. Now, if you are like one of my friends who is in Ukraine, where there is an ongoing physical threat to his well-being that he needs to be mindful of then, unfortunately, if you are in a situation like that then you may need to “soldier on” and you may need to squash your emotions down. You probably don't have the luxury of making yourself a cup of tea, or curling up on the couch, or watching something fun on TV. (And if you do, please do those things! It will give your nervous system a break from being on super high alert all the time.)

So maybe if you are in a situation where there is an ongoing, actual, real physical threat to your well-being you do need to “soldier on” (you know more about your current situation than anyone else does).

But if you are somebody who has a personal situation with a loved one who is dying or you are reeling from a major national or international event of some description and that comes with a big perceived threat but it doesn't come with something that is threatening your actual physical body right now then please notice if you're pushing to just get things done because it's another form of bypassing.

It is much better to:

1. Feel your feelings if you can, even just a little bit, and then

2. Ask yourself: What would help me feel a little bit better right now?

.

.

.

If there is somebody you know who is struggling right now who might find this post helpful, can you send it to them now? (This post is free to read for the first two weeks after publishing).

My intention is not to have any sort of political debate here but more to provide a resource for the overwhelming number of people I know in the U.S. and in other places around the world that have recently been affected by destabilising events. May this post prove to be a resource to help you and others cope when things get hard.

So much love,

Caroline.

You never told me I’d need to disappoint my friends to be true to myself. You never told me I’d drop balls and not reply to messages and not always do what I said I would.

Dear Self Love,

You never told me it would be hard. And that I’d need to find ways to communicate to my friends that I still love them even when I choose to ignore them in order to look after me.

Darling, Self Love,

It appears you really aren’t a state that’s reached by many, for the fear of letting the other down is so great, so persuasive, (and pervasive) that we’ve been so conditioned to try and avoid you.

So, Self Love,

Will you help me to re-educate and reach my friends? The ones I love deeply and who I truly do want to keep in my life? Will you help me to reach them what the newest version of Caroline looks like, sounds like, and behaves like?

That sometimes she won’t show up, because she wants to go to bed?

That sometimes she won’t show up because the company she craves is her own?

That sometimes she won’t show up at all, in any form, because the idea of studying the latest thing she’s found is absolutely the most enlivening thing she could do on a night when everyone else is out?

And Self Love, will you help me to keep making those choices, from day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment… for the rest of my life?

Oh, I do hope so.

With love, Caroline… (still) learning how to love herself one baby step at a time.

P.S. I found this piece in my personal writing archives. It appears I wrote it 8 years ago. While a lot has changed in that time, the essence of this still feels very relevant and useful. Nowadays, it’s learning how to love me when I might disappoint my partner, love me when I might disappoint family, love me when I might disappoint clients.

Am I better at caring for myself, choosing myself, not abandoning myself and my own needs than I was 8 years ago? Heck yes. Do I still have a way to go before this feels more fluent, easy, normal? Heck. Yes.

I get it. You are determined to grow.

You don’t want to give up, or back down, or walk away from a challenge.

There’s growth to be had and you figure you just need to be better!

Or smarter! Or work harder!

Surely then this relationship you have with…

that person,

this job,

your city or town or village

will get better.

Right?

Right…?

What if it doesn’t have to be that hard?

What if it doesn’t have to be that complicated?

What if you were allowed to enjoy yourself in your relationships with people and workspaces and lived-in places?

But. But. But! (I hear you say…)

You don’t know what the right decision is.

Should you stay or should you go now?

My question is, what is going to help you grow now?

Like really, really grow?

Is it staying in that home, that workplace, that relationship where you feel like you can’t be your fully expressed, amazing, awesome self?

Is it staying in a space, a role, a place where you have to protect yourself every day?

Is it staying in a relationship with anything or anyone where you have to be polite when you actually just want to swear loudly, shake violently or strangle things every day?

No matter how much practice you think you’re getting at…

being mindful,

being patient,

being tolerant,

I can almost guarantee that it’s not going to solve the problem.

See, here’s the thing:

You deserve to feel safe, good, happy,

held, loved, supported,

seen, heard, appreciated.

Yes, yes, sometimes relationships with people, places and spaces can be hard.

Yes, sometimes the right response is to stay,

work through things,

figure things out,

solve the problem,

change the system,

find your right place in it all.

But if the other person or people involved are not also doing the work to shift, resolve, change, improve, upgrade things then you’re fighting a losing battle.

You deserve all the good things.

And I bet, there is a person, a workplace, a home space that would adore having you there. Who would work with you when things got tough. Who would meet you in that challenge and remind you that you can figure it out together.

Should you stay or should you leave?

Well, if you could have anything, anything at all, what would you do?

So much love,

Caroline.

(If you also enjoy shows like this, especially about women doing epic things, and you haven’t watched this yet, then—spoiler alert—I’m going to share precise details from the movie. Do yourself a favour, watch it tonight then read this post tomorrow. Yeah? OK. Let’s do this.)

The movie follows Lhakpa, a Sherpa woman who loves climbing mountains. Born in Nepal and now residing on the East Coast of the U.S. she shares—in her beautiful, strong, broken English—about many aspects of her life, including her experience of submitting Mount Everest ten times over 22 years.

Climbing and safely descending the highest mountain in the world even once is profound; ten times is an insane achievement (one that has seen her gain and regain the Guinness World Record over time).

But that’s not why I wanted to write this post.

This post is less about how incredible she is (hopefully this is abundantly obvious) and more about what she endured at the hands of a man who was supposed to love her.

Several of her summits were done with her late ex-husband, Gheorghe a fellow mountaineer, who met her in Nepal while they were both on expeditions. After they met she moved across the world and within a year or so, they were married. Somewhere in all this change, he began to get very violent any time he drank.

Already a mother, and very much committed to her new life with him, Lhakpa’s almost non-existent education left her with very little power in the relationship. As I sat on my couch, watching the bind she was in I was reminded of how many women around the world must be in similar situations.

I knew all too well that the confluence of these factors—poor education, little financial control, motherhood and a controlling partner—leads to a predictable result again and again: domestic abuse.

As my body took in what I was watching and hearing, I found that I automatically started rubbing the finger points to shift the energy that was rising within me.

I’ve spent so much time in the last 8 years becoming extremely practised at meeting stress as it arises within me that sometimes I’ll start stimulating the meridian points before I even consciously realise what I’m doing.

{Simpler than actually tapping on the face or upper body, you can achieve similar results by rubbing the acupuncture points on the sides of your fingernails. Give it a try the next time you’re feeling stressed out. You can’t hurt yourself. And you may just feel a little or even a lot better.}

The movie continued and eventually came to an end. It was amazing: thought-provoking, inspiring, heart-opening. And while I had to “tap” through much of the second half of the film, overall I was happy to have watched it and grateful it had been made.

However, that night I struggled to calm down enough to sleep. I stressed about it in my dreams and I woke disgruntled.

I realised I’d been carrying Lhakpa’s pain all night.

I knew I needed to let it go.

So I went for a walk through the bush near our house before eating breakfast (as I do most mornings) and I talked myself through it.

It didn’t take long to realise that my dominant, unresolved emotion was anger. Yes, Gheorghe went through his own horrific trauma that led him to be so out of control. Yes, a part of me had empathy for everything he went through and a solid understanding of why he treated her the way he did.

But that didn’t negate the part of me that wanted to protect Lhakpa from a man I’d never met who had since already died.

When I did my EFT Certification many years ago we were taught to plug our problem into a specific template. If you’re familiar with Emotional Freedom Techniques, you’ll know this format:

Even though (I have this problem), I deeply and completely accept myself.

There are many limitations and potential pitfalls with this format. Some other time I might write more about them and flesh them out. But for now, let’s pretend that I had to start there so you can follow along with the process (in case you want to try it out for yourself the next time you feel super angry at something you witness). Here we go:

Even though I am angry that Gheorghe hit Lhakpa, I accept that this is how I feel.

{Note: It’s a rare situation where I can honestly say “I deeply and completely accept myself” while also being highly agitated about something. When I’m calm? No problem. When I want to tear someone’s head off? Not so much! So I encourage people to make their “acceptance statement”—the bit at the end—something that actually feels true for them. Now, back to that tapping statement…}

If you watch or have already watched this movie and you feel the same way about this violence towards Lhakpa (and how it might remind you of any similar situation you’re aware of or may have even endured yourself) then you could tap through the points and say the EFT statement above. (If you don’t know where the points are or need a refresher, check out one of these videos).

Of course, because I’ve now done so much tapping I could (almost) do it in my sleep, I didn’t need the whole long-form sentence or multiple rounds. All I needed to do was realise that (1) I was angry and (2) let myself say out loud what I was angry about. The statement I tapped on was very, very simple:

Gheorghe hit her.

That was all I needed. I said those three words. I felt my anger as much as I could. I tapped whichever points my angry hands wanted to tap. And I kept walking to let as much of that sympathetic energy move out of me as possible.

When we let them move, emotions come in waves. They might feel very big and very scary, like a wave in the ocean that we’re not sure we can jump over or dive under without getting tossed around like a powerless beach ball. But by practising with little waves we will become more and more skilled at dealing with the big waves when they come our way.

Anger is not an easy emotion to work with. It has a lot of power in it. And when we don’t know how to work with it skillfully? Well, we end up like Gheorghe: our anger bursts out of us and hurts other people.

If you’re still fairly new to feeling your emotions and finding a way to let them move through you, then be mindful if/when anger comes to the surface that you may well need to do more than just tap on three words as I did that morning.

If you need to go for a run

or stamp your feet (in the other room, away from your kids)

or punch a boxing bag

or put some heavy metal on your car radio on the highway and yell at the top of your lungs where no one can hear you…

do that.

Do whatever you need to do to safely get that poison out of your system.

Because every drop of anger we can safely transmute, the less violence there will be in the world. And the more space there will be for inspiring women to do epic things just because they want to.

Here’s to you and me and all of us feeling safe to do epic things.

With love,

Caroline.