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5 Tips to Heal from an Abusive Relationship

Nikki Sapp
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5 Tips to Heal from an Abusive Relationship

“Until you heal the wounds of your past you are going to bleed. You can bandage the wound with food; with work; with alcohol; with drugs; with cigarettes; with sex; But eventually it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds. Stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories and make peace with them.” ~ Iyanla Vanzant

If you’re lucky you will never need this article. However, most at some point or another, will come to the end of some sort of traumatic, dysfunctional, or abusive relationship. Dysfunctional relationships come in all forms, it may be a romantic relationship, a work relationship or even a familial relationship.

Anytime we have dealt with months or years upon years of emotional hurts, verbal abuse, pent up resentment, or mental manipulation we can be sure that some sort of healing will be required in order to become ourselves again.

Every person deals with pain in their own unique way. Some people withdraw and try to hide inside of themselves, others become angry and begin to be defensive at any perceived threat, and others try to find someone else to take out their pain on, which only perpetuates the abuse.

Below are five things anyone coming out of a traumatic relationship should take into consideration for their healing process to be effective. Ultimately until wounds are healed they will always be there and will ruin every relationship therein until we take the time to tend to our wounded hearts.

5 Ways to Heal from a Traumatic or Abusive Relationship

1) Don’t try and fill the void

“When you are willing to feel it you can heal it.” ~ Unknown

It’s completely understandable that in the face of healing our pain we would run from it at all costs. Often we turn to a new relationship, drugs or alcohol, or even casual sex in order to run from the pain. And while this may work short term, we must know that it will never work in the long run.

We must at some point, feel the pain. Running from it, sends abandonment or judgment messages to our inner child (innocence), which will only make it act out worse in the future. Facing all feelings head on and allowing ourselves to breathe through and feel the pain is how healing ultimately occurs.woundedimage3

2) Don’t put a time limit on your healing process

“Dont listen to those people who suggest you should be ‘over it’ by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, soul-crushingly life altering.

Some of these people believe they are being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your hurt so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love but they are not the people that will be helpful when it comes to healing the pain.” ~ Cheryl Strayed

There is no time limit on when you should just be ‘over’ something. In fact, the irony is, the more our heart feels rushed into just getting over something, the more it won’t be able to get over it, because we are sending it messages that it is not ok to feel however it does.

And this is never the energy of healing. Acceptance, unconditional love, compassion and patience are the emotional responses we must give our hurting heart that will allow it to feel confident and safe again.

3) Take some time to get to know yourself

Most people who have been a part of a long and dysfunctional relationship know the feeling of losing themselves into someone else. Often our identities become so intertwined with the other person that we forget who we were before we met said person.

And even worse, in a family relationship, we may have never felt safe enough to cultivate an identity or sense of self that doesn’t involve the pain we have been caused by the manipulative person. Either way, the most important thing we can do is celebrate ourselves again, get to know who we really are, and feel good about this person.

A sense of self-worth and confidence in our being, will translate into a higher self-esteem and ability to make decisions based on self-love rather than fear in the future.

4) Self-Reflect, ask yourself “Where did I play a part in this?”

We must always assess our lives and ask ourselves if there was any part in the dysfunction that we played a part of. A child who was abused by a family member must make peace with the fact that nothing was their fault. Whereas those who have chosen a romantic relationship in which they were mistreated must be brutally honest and ask themselves, where they may have played a part.

Often we are scared of our own power, or we have self-esteem issues that make staying in a dysfunctional partnership easier than not, but we must always try and ask ourselves, “why?” “Why did I stay so long?” “Why didn’t I feel worthy enough to demand respect & love?” “Why was I attracted to someone who treated me so terribly?” These are all questions that will assist in our healing process.woundedimage4

Knowing the reason why behind our actions is just another way that we get to know ourselves better and our inner child feels heard and supported by us.

5) Be supportive and kind to yourself

You’re going to hurt. You’re going to feel emotional, mental or even physical pain at points in the healing process, and it is at these times that our hearts deserve MORE love and attention, not less. This is the absolute most important and effective step.

Becoming our own best friend, advocate, and cheerleader is how we ultimately come into our own worthiness and how in future relationships we feel confident enough to walk away from someone who isn’t treating us kindly.

When we are kind to our own hearts firstly, anyone who comes along and treats us in a manner that is less than the way we treat ourselves are walked away from easily and effortlessly. Self-love and worthiness attracts the same to it. Healing will absolutely never be lasting and effective if we don’t take the time to support our innocent hearts through all heartbreak and healing.

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Art by Patricia Ariel

4 Ways How Death Can Guide Your Life

Lauren
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4 Ways How Death Can Guide Your Life

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” ~ Mark Twain

There’s nothing like death to put life into perspective. I recently listened to a series of videos, which triggered a huge amount of changes in me as their basic message (as we came into a new year) was This is it. This is your time, take it! No need to procrastinate, this year is the year you were born for.

Now I’m not sure if these ‘channelled’ messages were designed to shift us into the right gear through false statements, kind of like an affirmation might, or if they were accurate. Either way, they had an incredible effect on me.

Vanitas20via20Google20images

Mystic Osho believed that the reason Prophet Muhammad preached was that this was the only life there was to wake others up. As soon as we learn about reincarnation, the temptation is to add it to another long list of excuses we have not to act. And it’s true – as much as truth is in the eye of the beholder – what we perceive becomes reality.

This is also why many attribute cancer and other life threatening diseases to us manifesting a reason to sit up and pay attention. Becoming alert when we are so anesthetized to the realities of reality and our vulnerability requires explosive terms; something that shocks the system and yells wake up! until we have no choice but to wholeheartedly respond.

As someone who has had first hand experience of death (and by the way I apologize for sounding flippant in my first statement, but as someone who has had first hand experience of death, you get to recognize the funny side of our fragile existence), I have been given a unique insight into the realities of it.

I experienced my own mother’s death at the age of three, and let me tell you, it was quite different from any associations we might have with this inevitable ‘end’ to life.

As a three year old, and a sensitive one at that, I believe I experienced a lot of what my mother did as she continued on. I felt her fear and her childlike panic, wondering where the safety net was, grasping desperately for it and not having anything to hold on to, but also everything else that followed.

How Death Can Guide Your Life

I believe a fragment of me continued to travel with her as she left her body. This wasn’t an instantaneous thing, but a series of extremely vivid dreams and sensations that I was being protected and watched, especially in the garden where we lived for months after she died.

The memories have mostly faded now but these experiences have allowed me to appreciate people’s inner child and vulnerabilities; their fragile mortality that I may have otherwise been disconnected from throughout the rest of my life.

Here are 4 ways how death can guide your life

Removing Procrastination

Since then, I have been drawn to death as an enlightening subject to meditate on. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is an excellent book to read on the subject for anyone who’d like to take this subject a little bit further.

We can also integrate many of the meditations suggested within the book and those slightly more westernized ones as described in the video below into our daily practices to ensure we’re living each day to its (and our) fullest potential.

Contemplating Your Own Death - To Stay Motivated For Life

Removing The Pettiness

Meditating on death can take many forms: Imagining yourself being a fish caught in the fisherman’s net or lining up for some public execution as I believe the TBOLAD suggests. Sounds morbid doesn’t it?

But if you haven’t done so already, you will find that after the initial panic and sorrow bubbles up inside you, overwhelming appreciation and love for life and all those around you (yes, even your enemies!) swiftly follows.

As Leo points out in the video, it also removes a lot of the pettiness we can get caught in as we go through life. Gossip, worrying about what others think of us – and yes, that is another perspective death helps us slot into its rightful place. If we only have a little bit of time left, why burn up valuable energy and life force on worrying?!

This, being another subject I’m expert on (!) is often a repercussion of trauma, otherwise known as the fear of something ‘bad’ happening again. Meditating on death can help with this. Putting things into perspective, every single day, every single time you wake up in the morning allows you to shift your focus.

Addressing the fact that you might only have thirty years left (adjust accordingly) helps you to get a move on. If you are still holding back you can study why you are doing so.

Removing Guilt

death art wallpaper

Do you really need to care what your father/mother/friends/siblings/peers reactions to you living the life you came to live would be? Removing connections by visualizing, cutting or dissolving invisible cords will aid this process, but death will remind you that we live and die alone, and so we should really adjust the direction we take ourselves in the same way.

Death helps us realize that loved ones are a bonus. It fills up our cup with self compassion. You are able to see your inner child with a distinct clarity and appreciate your true nature like never before.

Meditating on what others reactions to your imaginary death might also put into perspective whether you’ve achieved your true value and potential. As a fun game; try it. You will see that no-one can ever truly see your inner world and know your truth unless you express it.

Removing Ego

And speaking of expressing yourself, meditating on death and the fact we are all as common as mud when it comes to our ‘final’ destination, allows you to take the subject with a pinch of salt.

Not taking ourselves so seriously, combined with those ambitious and wonderfully unique dreams is the perfect recipe for success. If you look to those you admire; people who have achieved something similar to what you’d like to do, you will find that as well as being in touch with their truth and privy, to the fact we create our own realities they probably have a heavy dose of humility to their names.

In Western societies there is more focus on the individual and a certain narcissist competition that elevates one individual over another. While hard to shake on an intellectual scale, meditating on death gives you the experience of being equal to others. As cultural narrative and archetype reveal (think Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol), money, status and property mean nothing to the grim reaper.

And finally, our perspective of death needs to be realized for what it is. If we recognize that we are currently existing in the 3rd dimension and our soul is seeking to expand further than that, then death is only part of the ascension process.

When we have outgrown our bodies we step out of this vibration, of this dimension and go on to the next lesson. That we leave loved ones behind may be heartbreaking, but we most certainly go with love.

https://youtu.be/b65hEGLuYwI

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Death Illusion
Skull and Butterflies

5 Signs You are Neglecting Your Inner Child

Nikki Sapp
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5 Signs You are Neglecting Your Inner Child

“Your ego is a mask that your inner child wears. Underneath it all, your inner child is a costume of innocence decorating the highest self of all. This is the play of existence. The purpose is not to escape the play, but to learn how to play at full capacity for the well-being of all. This is the heart of realization.” ~ Matt Kahn

The concept of healing our inner child is one that has been discussed in self-help, therapy, and spirituality circles alike.

While many people may brush off the concept of healing our inner child as just another cocky self-help tactic for people that can’t seem to get over their past or their childhood, those more well versed in an awakening journey, know differently.

The process of healing our inner child is actually the process into wholeness, unity consciousness, and complete integration of our ego. What this means, is that any and everyone who is going through a spiritual awakening process will have to go through this aspect of it at some point or another.

The healing of our inner child is not reserved only for those who had an abusive or traumatic past. It is the process of first facing and then embracing our most vulnerable and deep-rooted aspects that we often try to hide from the world and sometimes even our own selves.

Until our most vulnerable parts feel accepted and loved we will find ourselves in situation after situation that is attempting to get us to not only be honest with ourselves about these deep vulnerabilities, but also trying to guide us into the deepest surrender, which is when our personal will, merges with divine will.

The fact of the matter is, our inner child is the one running the show. It is the part of us that feels everything in our heart, which is our direct connection with the divine.

And until it feels safe to be however it is, to feel however it does, without judgment, it will keep us from our dreams and desires for the mere fear that once we find them, we will abandon it again in order to chase happiness in the form of a person, place or thing outside of us.

A happy inner child means three very important things for our lives, an integrated ego (non-judged/accepted), it is the green light to the universe to start sending us those things that we deeply long to manifest (because it will see us as energetically ready to take on such things without being attached to them for our self-worth, and without fear that we will abandon our own hearts once we find happiness outside of ourselves), and a feeling of safety and confidence within our own being.

Neglecting Your Inner Child

So, how do you know if you are neglecting your inner child?

Below are 5 signs you are neglecting your inner child:

1) You keep making choices that go against your highest wisdom

What our inner child wants most from us is unconditional acceptance. It wants to know that no matter what, we will love and accept it. Often it “tests” us by opting to make decisions that we know aren’t in our best interest, (and usually it is something that we have judged ourselves for strongly in the past) just to see how we respond.

Being judgmental or critical of ourselves when we make decisions we know aren’t the best for us, is how our inner child continues to feel unaccepted. The most effective thing we can do in healing our inner child is to love ourselves no matter what!

2) You depend on your mind’s rationale to solve your ‘problems’ rather than just allowing yourself to feel

This is a tricky one that many people who are on a spiritual or self-improvement path often get stuck in. Instead of allowing their inner child to feel however it feels about something, let their heart pang in despair or heartbreak, they try to over-rationalize the “why” something happened in hopes that the feeling will go away.

For instance, we may be really heartbroken to have not gotten our dream job, but rather than just sitting in despair and allowing it to be, we may find ourselves saying things like, “everything happens for a reason, look on the bright side of this…”

And while this may feel true to a part of us, we must also honor the part of us that is actually really upset. When our inner child is treated like it doesn’t have a right to feel negative emotions, you can trust that it will find every way to manifest situations that those emotions are ignited in order to get your LOVING attention.

3) You seem to care or know more about how other people feel about something vs. how you feel about it

Here is another tricky one, especially for empaths. Many people who are energetically sensitive or in tune with other people’s emotions will often not speak their authentic truth out of fear that they might hurt someone else’s feelings.

For an empath, when someone else hurts, they hurt too, so it’s completely understandable to avoid situations like this. But one must cultivate the art of authenticity without judgment. It is imperative for our inner child to be able to speak its truth safely.

To do this, we must find a way to own our feelings without expecting that others will accept our “truth” as theirs. Standing up for our innocence is how we form trust with our inner child.

4) You stay in toxic or dysfunctional situations way too long

Imagine being a child whose parent forced them to be around a person who was mean or abusive to them. Imagine the resentment and mistrust that would form over time if that child continuously told their parent that this person made them feel scared, ‘less than’, or unworthy, and the parent did nothing.

This is exactly how our inner child feels when we continuously are around someone who treats us in a way that makes us feel like we don’t matter, or are not respected. We always have to be our own advocate of our own hearts first and foremost, and we do this by paying close attention to who or what makes us feel valued and who doesn’t.

5. Painful emotions are avoided, judged, or criticized

Just like a child who is taunted for crying about something, or avoided until they just “got over” something, our inner child feels completely abandoned when it is not supported by us. We need to provide a safe place for our innocent heart to process it’s natural and honest feelings without feeling criticized.

Our most vulnerable aspects are those that are the links to the subconscious belief systems we are holding on to about life, which is preventing things from coming to us. So the sooner we start being completely and utterly honest with ourselves about these feelings, and being ok with them, no matter what they are, the sooner we begin to transform and heal fear based belief systems into acceptance and allowance.

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child wearing mask

Celebrating Love and Unity with the Handfasting Ceremony

Jules Ravenheart
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Celebrating Love and Unity with the Handfasting Ceremony

Back in October, my partner and I celebrated a year of marriage by holding a handfasting ceremony. It was a small and intimate celebration of our love for one another.

What is Handfasting?

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Are You Carrying Your Family Karma? Three Ways to Absolve It

Lauren
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Are You Carrying Your Family Karma? Three Ways to Absolve It

“Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.” ~ J.K. Rowling.

If some unsightly but intrinsic force has been holding you back from succeeding in an area of your life, then it may be to do with family karma. When abundance isn’t flowing to you it is an indication that there’s an area of your inner world that needs nurturing. While we know financial abundance isn’t everything, abundance in its full glory is something we’d all like to draw lovingly into our lives.

Abundance in your life signifies that there are no blockages in your energy; when your inner world is brimming, literally overflowing with love for yourself and the forgiveness of others, then your outer world will begin to reflect that. This is not an excuse to begin beating yourself up about your failings, but a tool; a knowledge that if you wish to, you can gear to build up a life that you want through your daily practice of inner work and guidance systems.

karma e1484055792875 Be Honest With Yourself.

The first step is to objectively survey your surroundings and ask yourself if you like what you see. If you’re new to meditation or have a hunch you may not have been doing it correctly then after those first deep breaths of letting go you need to do a check over of your body and let that be your first guide.

Use gratitude to give yourself a pat on the back for what you have manifested. Integrate a gratitude ritual into your day or add that element to your inner work; are you doing a lot of visualization or presence and not finishing it by marking out your intentions with prayer? This is an essential part of a spiritual practice; that we conclude it old school style by counting our blessings and sending love to those we feel might need it.

When breathing Prana into the channels and chakras of your body notice any blocks or areas of discomfort. Go into the discomfort and explore it, experiment. A spiritual practice should be playful and if you’re sitting there forcing breath down your throat then that might be the first clue to an imbalance. The more you open and let go, the more feedback and release of emotions you’ll get. Even if you spend a whole session exploring one chakra, then you have made progress.

Begin To Untie The Knots.

These ‘knots’ might be very old and extremely tangled, but it is possible. In using tools such as active imagination and some light research into the body:

Physical Pains And Their Metaphysical Meanings

We can combine with our inner guidance to direct the healing process. For example; say you have a painful right shoulder even when you meditate and you allow yourself to go in to that shoulder breathing Prana in to that area. You are already aware that the shoulders are where you carry your responsibility and you feel that this relates to someone you have conflict with in your life; say your father.

You come to the conclusion that you are struggling because both the fear of your father’s high expectations of you, but also the desire to meet them. You know from your outer world that your career is not exactly how you want it to be. Your exploration into your right shoulder might trigger a deep release of sadness from some other area of your body.

You might then conclude this exploration with an intention to forgive your father and detach from the expectations he’s imposing on you, and a prayer of thanks to show gratitude for all the positive things he did teach you.

keanue

Another example: Perhaps you find it difficult to breathe into the sacral and solar plexus chakras at all during meditation. Your solar plexus chakra is the centre for a lot of karmic ties; your inner child; your centre of joy and general energy levels.

Through visualizing your breath/Prana pooling in your root chakra and rising like the tide to these two centres you might explore how reduced your output of energy also is. Once you have cleansed these centres, their energy might begin to spread their wings so to speak and cleanse the aura around them.

‘Looking through’ these centres also might achieve surprising results. A lot of people who have had some initial awakening have a habit of being deeply connected to their root or upper chakras (third eye, crown) whilst completely forgetting the intermediaries in between. This can leave you feeling detached from your surroundings and unable to connect with others.

This connects to deeply rooted karma of being essential to the wider community but also afraid of them and your true purpose. In your potential as a leader you might’ve wandered away from the most important point of connection and gotten too lofty ideas about your place in the world.

Breathing out through the sacral, solar plexus, heart and throat chakras reach out to friends and allow day to day moments of connection which will address that balance and keep your energy and joy replenished.

Having Taken Action On a Personal Level, Consider The Bigger Picture.

past lives karmaNow you’ve discovered where you carry your family karma, consider the bigger picture. The processes I’ve suggested, if followed correctly and with honest integrity will lead you to emotionally outgrowing any family members who might’ve hurt you growing up. With ascension; as the veils of separation thin and our innate connectivity becomes apparent we are able to see ourselves in the other with so much more clarity than ever before.

Our approach to fears others project onto us becomes lucid and we are able to drop them voluntarily, but also lovingly, without the need to see them as personal in the first place. This understanding can set us free in that we may see the wounded inner child in our siblings, parents and other relatives and give it the nurture our own inner child desires. And wow – when that burden has been lifted you’ll soar!

If you find the past difficult to heal, and you’ve done all the forgiveness work you think you can, then it’s time to rewrite the past. Realize that you have a choice about the role you’re playing and how invested you are in the narrative of your life up to this point.

Scrutinize your thoughts and, using a practical approach, one by one, rewrite them. Send the universe the message that you’re ready to disengage with any karmic bonds and step out of the cycle. What is the opposite of your experience?

Imagine it; experience the energy located within it every day and eventually as with any manifestation things will begin to shift. Once you’re ready to take this to a higher level, whole lifetimes and painful memories will be altered.

Reality really is mutable in this way, and it can and has been done, helping your whole family; your ancestors even. Your family was not chosen to appease you, but challenge and direct you inside yourself. Your soul family is something quite different; always there for you they are the rare but ever present people who feel like home to us, in whatever form they might take.

But don’t think about the goal; just take it one step at a time. Are you ready to absolve your family karma? You are the one to do it, you chose this! Be an example, step up and lead. You’re ready.

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Global Light Minds
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Buddha

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