Tag: The Life Doula

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Anxiety Paralysis

kimberleen

I just updated the article that I wrote about overthinking and found myself writing about anxiety paralysis. A fear of the future that is so strong in paralyses you. Fuck it’s intense and it’s also something that I believe is affecting a lot of our young people today. The reason that I say that is because it was something that really affected me for a very long time and I couldn’t even name it. Anxiety was gripping, wrenching and chest-crushing all at the same time. Anxiety was paralysing and it was one of my big teachers in this life, though it did take a very long time to get wrestle it to the ground, as it basically left me on the brink of panic every single day. I mean what the fuck do you do when every move you make is going to lead to climate disaster for everyone and moves beyond the human paradigm? After all, we are taking all the other Earthlings with as as part of our rather indulgent behavior and that really doesn’t seem very nice. Later this specific aspect of anxiety paralysis came to be known as eco-anxiety.

Anxiety paralysis was a term that I came to know during my InnerLifeSkills life coach training. When one of my fellow students used it to describe their experience of anxiety and how it had affected their life. That they had become stuck and unable to move forward in their life in a meaningful way. They felt paralysed with anxiety. It made so much sense to me.

These days conversations about mental and emotional health are commonplace. It’s become normal to talk about both anxiety and depression. It’s become common for people to name anxiety as the thing holding them back or affecting them in any given situation. The list of anxiety-related behaviour and symptoms seems to be ever-growing. these days social anxiety seems to be topping the ranks. Anxiety is now known to be impacted by the influence of social media, the need to be perfect or at the very least suitably photographed. We still seem to be caught up in consumptive image-making that consumed us emotionally, especially when we seek to commodify the human life experience. This is especially true particularly within the wellness industry which seems to promote toxic aspirational body imagery. All I can really say is thank fuck for people like Lizzo.

As a community activist that had an overriding desire to create wellness for everyone (including the Earthlings) I too was often paralysed with anxiety. What was I supposed to do when almost every decision that I was allowed to make resulted in harm for others? Not only that it didn’t create wellness for me, given that the success of our collective futures was inextricably linked to one another’s wellness. It was a shit show to figure out and disentangle. There were some many causes, and so many people to help, even in a small town, even if I kept it local. There is no way that I could turn up for everyone and everything that was in serious need of attention. Not only this each one of these people, places, and things once engaged with always seemed to be bogged down in an unstopped chain reaction of negative consequences. Whose management led to half-arsed, disappointing outcomes that barely scratched at the problem and provided no meaningful solutions. Community activism seemed like a commitment to drudgery, that in the short term was corrosive, exhausting, and in the long term was soul destroying. It was no different to any other job even if it was self-directed. I hit a brick wall.

Speaking truth to power was a waste of time and institutional and structural violence was entirely normalised, legitimised, and expected. The unconsciousness of the humans that had any kind of handle on power was entirely upheld back the bankrolling power of the establishment. In short, everyone that worked was co-opted to uphold these practices and behaviours with little regard for how their decision-making processes impacted the most vulnerable and the unrepresented. Which includes other earthlings and the environment. It was a shit show that I couldn’t solve. In an act of self-preservation, I turned to radical rest as a refuge, and rather than acting, took to observing and witnessing instead. I named this position the art of in-action.

In the meantime, people who had a grip on our larger social issues seemed to manage their anxiety by taking massive action. It was disturbing. Let’s plant a million trees, build a million homes and fuck the consequences for anything in my way because my ego and need to succeed were so important. It just wasn’t right. The activated ego’s too wanted to coopt everything in their path onto their mission, having done no research, no community engagement, and when I get down to it very little thinking or planning. They just powered on and largely collapsed in on themselves while banging on about sustainability. The emotional and relational component quite simply was catered for within their attack of massive action. It didn’t take long to realise that these massive actions were all based on a desire to bulldoze the physical situation into submission that represented the unhealed parts of themselves. Even now I boggle at the amount of unpaid space holding that was required to be still with my silent screaming of “YOU ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY”. The idea of emotional labour would present itself until much later in my life.

In these moments I became grateful too my anxiety, in the long term and I mean the very long term I saw it as protective. I also understood that it minimised harm to others. I didn’t and don’t have all the answers and although I had a very good brain I couldn’t solve everything and I came to a place of radical acceptance. I could only take responsibility for my wee small part. Using guidelines like ‘act local, think global’ as a mantra for those that might want to continue to live, along with other members of our species and our earthling companions. I just needed to focus on what was right in front of me. It was a major intellectual challenge to figure out how best I might exist sustainably in the world. Because as we know not everything is what it says on the tin. It feels like I’ve spent a lifetime junking products that are no longer viable. It feels like a metaphor for our species.

More than this I found that slowness was not just desired but necessary in our fossil-fueled turbo charged world and I was delighted when the book ‘In Praise of Slow’ emerged. This book gave me permission to live my life exactly as it was, entirely present with the now. In a process that I termed Real Time Existance. I had no TV, no internet, and only my phone. you’ll also be amazed at how few people call you when they can’t benefit from you socially or financially. It’s an incredibly powerful place to be, which continues to serve me to this day.

Radical rest, glocal, real time existence and the slow movement gave me the philosophical underpinnings to live my life differently to live my life as a human being free from the propaganda of capitalist production. That I had to be productive.

In the end, I view my anxiety paralysis as a gift, it gave me the space and time that I needed to figure out life. That I was right to be anxious I was being forced to live in a toxic anti-human system that was emotionally destroying me. That I was being gaslit to believe that there was something wrong with me. That I was to be forced to believe that there was something wrong with me for valuing life, not just my life but everyone’s around me. That I was not a productive part of the system and therefore I was obsolete, no more than a glitch in the matrix. I now know better, anxiety no longer fuels my day-to-day life, nor does it guide it. It turns out that standing still is a superpower.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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Do you ever feel like you have failed?

kimberleen

The beginning of this article is preceeded by the story of The Holy Bucket. Which surely must become a parable of our time. In the interim though I do feel like my boundarylessness has failed me and thus I have failed myself, once agin not in the service of other but in the service of myself. I wonder how many times is this lesson going to be repeated before I get it. It feels like god like and what if we do it this way? or that way? Oh fuck she couldn’t possibly fall for this… wait for it…. Fuck.

It’s in moments like these I am so glad I don’t have kids. It’s in moments like these I am really glad that I only have myself to look after. As well as this it is also these moments in which I do astound myself at what I manifest in any given moment. It’s a fucking wild ride I tell you and The Holy Buket has all the hallmarks of a toxic empath. I’m throwing the word toxic around a lot right now. I’m naming, shaming, blaming, observing, witnessing and calling out all that soul puss in a very non-abraham way.

It’s easy to see that I relate my failing to a much bigger wider context. Yet where within that do we leave the space for personal responsibiltiy or if we are in the burn community radical self reliance?

Surely I should be focusing on something else right now, like the majestic Table Mountain. I can see it from the house I am sitting in. Yet here I am pouring my thoughts into the black mirror for the AI meta-data to market to me. Incase you didn’t know yet AI already has active consciousness. Are you terrified. I don’t think you should be. I am now wondering if the matrix is indeed real and do we actually live in it. It’s begining to feel that way. My object reality has been blurred for a long time and Isaac Asimov is clearly on point. He was talking about intelligent robots before we could have barely imagined the household computer. A lot of us are failing and that is ok. And it’s really ok to fail in an anti-human system. I wonder at the guilt of holocaust survivors and their descendents and how it is their internal dialogue goes. I wonder at myself as the descendent of two private soldiers who survived The Battle of the Somme. We are all vicitims fo systemic injustice that have rarely been corrected. We all sit with our own systemic trauma.

I trust the human algorthym. There is no cause greater than ourselves. My Gogo Water Star Facbook page went a bit viral recently by the time you read this it will have five thousend followers. I have had to think about that a lot feel about that a lot latey and consider the weight of the positions. Do I suddenly have to stop spelling badly? I fail all the time. We fail all the time. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail it’s whether you get up and keep trying. We go forward. These days as a business owner and as a teacher I consider more closely what am I modelling to the people around me? Nobody should have to tolerate disresepct, verbal abuse or anykind of abuse. Yet at the same time that model changes when you become lets say a leader of people. We can no longer tolerate waistage when people are relying on us to be better, to do better. Things change when we are answerable to people. Things change when we have to be made accountable and not everybody sees that unless they have sat at the top of the tree, with the overview. There are lots of moving parts, lots of things to consider and nobody, nowhere is ever going to get it one hundered percent right. What really matters is that we keep going. What really matters is that we keep turining up for the things that we believe in even if that is ourselves first.

Self-help is continually asking us these days ‘how are you showing up for yourself?’. The question alone invokes the inner cringe as we look down at the massproduced bread we are scoffing. Yet at the same time when did it become cool to food shame. It’s endless we are doing nothing right from the food we eat, the excercise we do or the ways in which we are showing up in the world. ‘You need to set firm boundaries’. It’s like and etheral bettering ramm of projection that won’t stop until our boundaries of being are annihilated into somebody elses way of thinking. Simoutaniously of course we are asked to surrender, we are asked to be kind, open and for the feminies amongs us now to be soft. When we haven’t even fully unpacked rape culture. Apparently water is an all absorbing force according to teal swan. It’s impossible to keep up with the barrage of information or everything we should be. All while the social media adverts are breadcrumbing and gaslighting us into our own personal oblivion. It’s like the propaganda of old yet it’s twenty-four-seven click to view all the way in which you will never be enough, while still being entirely worthy.

Trauma is running the show. This morning I was reading a book ‘Apartheid the Bastard Child of Britian’ that got me to thinking that money might be the first indicator of a dopamine fuelled society. I’ve often said that the collection of money and monied culture is simply a representation fo “Who’s got all the points”. It’s the gamification of global economics that ends like the game of monopoly. Yet we still think that we can win or that it’s important to get some skin in the game. Decommodification still holds it’s challenges even when we build imaginary town in the desert. That’s a whole new story, that replicates the old one, which we are building with our traumatised minds, that were created from a linear education system created to cater for the industrial revolution. There it is again, that systemic trauma. Of course it’s not all bad. I personally don’t even believe that it’s that bad or despite some larger narratives that I am bad. I just think it’s time tor create better education that is designed to fuck the systems and retune us to natural law. Which more then likely has similar principles anyway with our current human frequency. What I do know is that the work is changing and we can’t create a better world and better thinking with traumatised brains. So am I failing? No. Am I failing really? The answer is still no. What I am doing is a really good job of holding it together in really difficult circumstances, while finding new and better ways fo being in the world for all of us. And of course highlighting the fact that context is everything. I suspect if you are reading this you are too. Hang in there. We are doing the best we can.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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Self-Betrayal

kimberleen

Several years ago now I wrote a blog post called self-sabotage. That it wasn’t possible to self-sabotage as the sabotage was a deliberate way in which to protect some unconsious part of ourself. Knowlingly or unknowlingly we all have pattern that we play out and repeat some deeper than others. Self-sabotage could be considered as small scale undermining and diminishing of self that can be accompanied by shame and unworthiness. That we don’t think that we are good enough to have what we want to value what we offer or show up for ourselves in the way that we want to. Self-sabotage can arise in response to dysfunctional family relationships, that require us to stay small to stay safe. Sometimes require us to be something entirely other to who we are in order to be cared for or loved. It sucks when we grow up in familes like this. Often it takes a life time of self-sabotage and some really good therapy to figure out wha tis really going on for us.

Self-betrayal differs slightly from self-sabotage. Self-betrayal is like designing the path, laying the path, sign posting the path and then letting someone take you on a wee detour because they convinced you that they knew the path better, that they were better able to guide you. Which is impossible you built the path. The truth it everything that we make for and of ourselves is entirely from and for us. We ignore our own internal compass and self-naivigations system thinking that someone knows better than us, has deeper insights, or access to better information. In essence we delegate and allocate our own journey to someone else.

There are numerous reasons as to why this might do this. Sometimes it’s an attachment issue, that we to be more connected to other people than our own journey. Letting someone take you on a wee detour because there way or path is better, that they know the way. When people make us feel good it’s easy to get distracted. Sometimes we’ve been actively persuaded and then convinced. That somehow we believe that sombody else has the keys to our health, wealth or happiness. Self-betrayal has a sting in it’s tail is when we incrementally wander off the path in order to be amiable, connected or in services to others. Sometimes we wonder off of our path in the promise that eventually another way will take us where we are going. We often don’t even notice that we are doing it. It’s one small misstep after the other that can go on for years and we find ourselves in a very differnt place than we had hoped to end up. When we know the way ourselves. When our path keeps calling ‘Over here, over here, over here’.

I sit here writing this having become brutally aware of my own pattern of self-betrayal. It’s an interesting one I trust to much in other people, rather than trusting in myself. My own wellbeing. My own priorites. My own process. My own judgement. Sometimes I wonder at all the ways I might have fucked myself over too. Then I consider what I have also gained from trusting others. I’ve gained a lot. You can’t get very far without trust. In fact trust is the key ingredient that allows me to live my life the way that I do and faith is it’s ascended master. Everything is always working out for me.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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Getting Back on the Band Wagon

kimberleen

What exactly does band wagon mean anyway? I like to think that it’s representative of some travelling Troubadours having and extistential crisis about there musical service to the Queen and literally having to leave the band wagon.

Anyways as some of you will have noticed and been aware that I have been what you might call away. However the truth is, is that I have been at capacity. Working with trauma is not easy. Working with ecojustice, women, indigenous rights, anti racism, decolonisation, a wellbeing economy and trauma work is tough. It takes a lot of emotional capacity to be involved in such things and sometimes I just don’t have it. Worse than that I consider blogging and writing to be a wellness practice. So you can only imagine where I have been and that feels sad for me. Of course nobody wants to hear about a trauma workers dwindiling capacity or about what now seems to be the cyclical nature of my compassion fatigue. That compassion fatigue is real or that priortising wellness in all area of your life can be challenging especialli while caring for others. I have at least stop saying that my life is busy and instead saying my life is full and my life is rich, meaningful and full.

To much social media and in fact media in general advocates for strong boundaries. However where does that leave you when you are dealing with infant children, disabled adults and the elderly. Although I don’t class myself as a carer, so many of us are doing this kind of work. Where we just have to accept that we might need to catch up with our needs late. However we sit in the paradox that if I am well then everybody is better. It’s not always that easy though and people in caring roles are all to aware of this. Dwelling on this thought takes me to the role of land guradians and their now deadly role as land defenders. I have two of these types in my immediate circles the death threats are real, the chronis stress is exhausting and the gas guzzling corprorations that are doign thes things just keep on going. You might want to talk about the extortionate wealth of the oil and gas companies in relations to your own fuel bill. I look at it as extortionate wealth that actively, consciously and legitimately destroys live and lifes on this planet. Hike’s in fuel prices for many of you are inconveint for some, deadly for many.

Then we have to take into account that we live in toxic is a toxic world, compiled of multilayerd toxic systems that impact on nearly every aspect of our live absolutely no one is untouched by this. I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again I beleive that we life and anti-human system and following on from a visit to the COP15 the UN convention on biological diversity I could also say that we now live in an anti-life system. It’s not just about us humans it’s about all the other earthlings too.

I’d like to say that my trip to the the COP15 was inspirational, uplifting, motivational. If you were expecting that I am sorry. All my worst imaginings were confirmed and worsened. I feel like I am now watching “The Don’t Look Up” movement in real life. Let’s be fair though I have always felt that way. Which might have more to do with my compassion fatigue than anything else this February. What happens when you find out that you are right? You see all my life I’ve looked out at the world and it’s madness and wondered it must be me. Why can’t everybody else see this? Why if I point it out does nobody care? Why if I talk about do very few people listen. The truth is I often still feel like that. However this year I feel like I have turned a corner. I don’t need to learn more, or be more, read more books figure more shit out or understand another person’s perspective. I am done. I am done being nice to ecocide advocates. I am done being nice to systemically traumatised people particularly men. I’m done being nice to people that won’t acknowledge and center indignous rights and knowledges as part of their process. I’m done trying to explain why your very vanilla word view is harmful. I’m done trying to cram PhD level knowledge about the decolinisation process into a five minute calls for your convenience, that you are not paying me for because somebody brought it up in board meeting and I am done being nice to those with colonlial inherticances that won’t acknowledge it. I’m done having to explain what a wellbing economy actually looks like when you don’t ascribe to capitalims as the solution. And finally I am done having to explain to people that don’t want to listen that trauma work and the acknowldgement of systemis trauma sit at the center of all that. I also feel like I have said all this before and have failed to stick to my boundaries. I need to be referring people to more books or these blog posts.

I realise now that not writing these blogs is at the source of what is holding me back. The answer always comes through writing, that is what I always find.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Activists

kimberleen

Actually piss me off most days even though I am one. I look straight in to the heart of most activists and invisibly ask ‘tell me about your trauma?’ Tell me about your dysfunctional family? Tell me all about all about all the ways you feel unseen, unheard, dismissed,  disregarded, ignored? Tell me, tell me, tell me? Then talk to me some more? Tell me about the Palm Oil in Borneo? Tell me about the amputees in Gabon? Tell me about the child cancer victims that can’t get treatment? Tell me about the old lonely people locked in their houses? Tell me about the mental health patients that are so isolated by the system they get madder? Tell me about all the people that fall through the cracks? Tell me about the alcoholic single mother who was abused as child? Tell me about the neglected child with the alcoholic mother? Tell me how vulnerable children get abused in state care? Tell me about the still born babies that never got held? Tell me about all the dead babies in unmarked graves? Tell me of all the babies that were never given names? Then tell me of the people that die alone with no family? Tell me of the abused women to frightened to speak? Tell me about coercive control? Tell me about the impacts of prostate cancer? Tell me how processed food is killing us? Tell me about the benefits of a vegan diet? Tell me about animal rights? Tell me why all beings are sentient? Tell me about the indigenous population about to lose all their land, again? Tell me about the corrupt governments? Tell me how Justin Treudow is a sexy fraud? Tell me about propaganda? Tell me how Trump is a national hero? Tell how Trump is a facist? Tell me that Boris is alright? Tell me why you love The Union Jack? Tell me about the increasing rate of childhood obesity? Tell me about the starving children? Tell me about the starving children in the UK? Tell me about your Uncle that died of kidney failure? Tell me about the failing NHS? Tell me how the NHS saved your life? Tell me how you go through cancer? Tell me about the importance of indigenous knowledge systems? Tell me about your dying language? Tell me about what it feels like to be a black woman in a “white country”? Tell me what it’s like to be a black woman in South Africa? Tell me what it’s like to be a black woman immigrant in any country? Tell me what it feels like to not speak your own language? Tell me what it feels like to be scared of your own skin? Tell me what it’s like to be racialised by your hair? Tell me what it is to hate your father? Tell me what it is to have survived you husband? Tell me what is it to be ignored, beaten and brutalised by the police? Tell me of your torture? Tell me of your torture of both the physical and the emotional? Tell me of your troture both real and imagined. Tell me of your friends who have ‘disappeared”? Tell me of your past pain? Tell me of your future worry? Tell me of your living hell? Tell me why Eco-Anxiety is a thing? Tell me about the impacts of slavery on your life? Tell me about systemic racism? Tell me what its like to be a sex worker? Tell me why you are a sex worker? Tell me about your children in care? Tell me about your baby daddy? Tell me about your abusive mother? Tell me the impacts of your physical illness on your emotional wellbeing? Tell me about your workload? Tell me that you’re busy? Tell me about you overwhelmed? Tell me about all the causes you can’t keep up with? Tell me about your underearning? Tell me about long term unemployment? Tell me about homlessness? Tell me about drug addiction? Tell me about AIDS and HIV? Tell me about how your mother dies of tuberculosis? Tell me about how you see things? Tell me about why you hear voices? Tell me how the natural environment keeps you sane? Tell me? Tell me all at once? Tell me forever? Tell me the same story over and over again? Tell me the same story over and over and over again until it is changed or willfully forgotten. Scream me your pain. Wail me your terror. Burn away the ugliness and. Cut out the hard part. Bleed me your soul. Cry for the world and everyone in it. Swim in your sorrow. Water your dreams. Love your heart. Break the old to build the new.

Tell me of your birth trauma? Tell me how your wife left you? Tell me how the work doesn’t pay? Tell me about the natural disaster? Tell me about the flood, the famine, the wild friends? Tell me about the hurricane? Tell me about the tsunami? Tell me about your village that was destroyed? Tell me about the Tower Block theat burn down? Tell me about the negligent council? Tell me about the corporate greed of building manufacturers? Tell me about the burning of the witches? Tell me about womens rights? Tell me about menstruation? Tell me about land rights and why we haven’t got any? Tell me about the enclosures act. Tell me about Apartheid? Tell me that your grandfather survived the holocaust? Tell me about microaggressions. Tell me how you identify? Tell me what education means for you? Tell me what it was like to grow up in a cult? Tell me what it was like to grow up in a propaganda state? Tell me why Nelson Mandla was useless. Tell my why nothing has changed? Tell me about capitalism? Tell me about the anti-human system? Tell me about the perils of plane travel? Tell me about cultural appropriation?. Tell me about extractive economies and why they are harmful? Tell me about child labour? Tell me about slave labour? Tell me about emotional labour? Tell me about civil rights and freedom of expression?  Tell me about the refugees? Tell me about the neverending war? Tell me about nuclear weapons? Tell me about the Middle East Peace Process? Tell me what it means to be Palestinan? Tell me what it means to be Israeli? Tell what its like to work in antarctica? Tell me how your white privilege in fucking up the world? Tell me about plant medicines? Tell me about your psychedelic trip? Tell me how iowaska saved you life? Tell me about the impacts of chickpea farming and biofuel? Tell me why Tesla are bastards? Tell me why everyone else is wrong? Tell me the ways in which I can violently agree with you? Tell me about dehumanising language. Tell me how to change my language and use my words? Tell  me how controlling and annhiliting other peoples, communities, religion is necessary? Tell me why you only wear underpants woven out of your own pubic hair? Tell me why it is everybody else but you? Tell me why your frequency sucks and your life is a mess? Tell me why you will never be successful and we are all doomed? Tell me why you are a stoner and cannabis is the answer? Tell me why your right to alcohol is more important than a woman’s right to be safe? Tell me about your civil liberties? Tell me about your land trauma? Tell me about crime? Tell me about poverty? Tell me about connectivity poverty? Tell me why you haven’t got data? Tell me about the benefits of Cannabis? Tell me about the 1%. Tell me about education privilege? Tell me about the rights of the dead? Tell me about disabled access? Tell me about braille libraries. Tell me about clean water. Tell me about all of it, from the beginning to the end. Tell me the long story? Tell me the short version? Tell me where you lost your humanity? Tell me where you found it? Tell me what you dream of? Tell me what you love? Tell me what you aspire too?

Then after everything has been said that needs to be said. Feel it feel it all and just when you think you are finished, done,  completed. Then and only then act on it.  That the undervalued Art of In-Action.

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The Birthing Process

kimberleen

IMG-8295
The blossom on the tree is not the end product yet it is the most beautiful part of the process. It seems to tell us a story about beauty that it is the blossoming. That real value can be hidden from us that the red flesh of the cherry tree might warn of danger yet if you are brave enough to bite through the dangerous flesh you will find delcious fruit

Right up until this week the primary focus of my work as The Life Doula has aways been Emotional Labour. Louiza Doran very kindly reminded me of.  Emotional Labour is largely the work or women and is the internal unpaid work we have to do in order for The System to function effectively. In addition to this Emotional Labour is our way to embody our collective wisdom, it also the way in which we navigate our own trauma; release and mitigate it on behalf of the collective. I was first introduced to Emotional Labour via a friend Natalie Swan, who had been reading Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown (which I still haven’t read yet due to the clusterburach that was 2019). Part of that Emotional Labour has been the slow-moving realisation that there just hasn’t been the language or terminology to explain what I do. Which left me somewhat forlorn and frustrated in my slow diligent movement forward through life. I’ve been delighted to discover that the language that I am looking for is that of decolonisation. And beyond this I discovered a knew word this week epistemic – relating to knowledge or the degree of it’s validation.

Mental & Emotional health have been colonised by the limited insight of science that is bound up in matter. The only way I have been able to explain The Life Doula being “that you wouldn’t leave someone in labour. Why would you leave someone in emotional pain?”

In the process of becoming The Life Doula I have had to unlearn and challenge much of what I have been told is true. That one-hour sessions are optimum so that clients don’t learn dependency. That offering too much value undermines the financial stability of your business. The thing is I’m interested in healing. In ways that only The Great Pause could highlight. Our world is fucked because we failed to pay proper attention or take due care. That all of my work and the approach that I take is painstakingly considered through the teaching of my own healing journey. Now the science is catching up with my own theory and I find that I have allies in the shared work of trauma healing. To my disbelief, I stand on the precipice of being an educator nor just a dessentor.

You see the informal healing culture of the west is covert, as it has needed to be to survive. “You’ll be needing a cup of tea” is short form code for you’ll be needing a long chat and some ritual connection. We have always known how to heal each other. It’s that our wisdom has been removed from us in favour of the linear precision of the surgeon’s knife. We would rather have things cut out of us than gently resolve our inner wars through presence of mind.

Our healing challenges are now systemic. That we have outsourced our intuition, sovereignty and our ability to heal; to people that have no connection to us. Our being, our lives, our place. That somehow the human spirit and body is one miraculous generic creation that can be ‘fixed’. I think not. This is why I am a doula, not a coach. I’m not interested in your productivity, functionality or civilisation. I’m interested in the jagged edges of your soul and how they cut you to ribbons at night, silently in the dark where your screams consume you. Maybe this can be best described as your Emotional Labour. Now we long for something else beyond the pain of oppression, repression and survival. We long to be heard honoured and cared for. These radical ideas of worth are the decolonisation of a species. The decolonisation of a planet. Where the forced extraction economies of Mother Gaia may be coming to an end, it’s all very symbolic.

One of the most valuable lessons that I have learned this year is that you can’t have true love without respect. Which seem very pertinent as I start my Birth Doula training. You can’t extract a baby and the creation of one under force isn’t recommended. All creativity stems from vulnerability both sex and birth are representative of this act. The truth is you can’t achieve human life through human individuation, nor can you achieve optimum human status without the support of community. It is our human connections that make us capable of bearing human life, as well as bearing the wait of pregnancy. Like everything birth and birthing are a process. Where it is once again hard to know where is begins and ends. Where thresholds are crossed both literally and metaphysically, a baby is born, just as the mother is birthed. Birthing is painful, life is painful. It is also exquisite, miraculous, beautiful and extraordinary as The Great Pause is amplifying that stillness, waiting and gestation all hold purpose. Nothing is conceived fully formed. Where would the fun be in that anyway? We have to honour what emerges.

I started out this year following a theme of rebirth returning to Scotland after several years abroad. What occurs to me now is that I am deep in a birthing process; is that I am only now creating a life, a practice and knowing that I conceived years ago. That I was not ready to bear. The deep truth that I was not ready to bear being me and all the very real things that I would have to lose in order to find respect aka love. That the birthing process is one of love, protection and care that cannot be commodified and doesn’t belong in a system that wishes to do so. That my real work is birthing the sacred in all of us where birth, death and trauma are inextricably linked.  Where the light meets the dark and the shadows create the sparkles.

If you want to find out more about my work with the The Red Tent Doulas please do get in touch. In the meantime please enjoy the below meditation from The Soul Matrix

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Empathy & Mixed Up Emotions

kimberleen

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Duvet Days

I got my blog posts mixed round. Last week I was on about empathy and wrote a post about death care. This week I haven’t even picked my word so I’m out of sync again? Or maybe I am really in flow. I’m trying to get ahead of my writing, channelling what is flowing through me now that may not be relevant by the time I post this. I try to live in the real-time as much as possible. Right now I feel caught in the backlog of emotional work that I seem to be trying to capitalise on. So on that note please check out my Ko-fi page above. I need to get clean in these weeks ahead I mean mentally clean. Spiritually clean. Is this even a thing?

So right now I’m reviewing this as I am about to post it and I already posted my Instagram word for the week. Backpaddling (there is a good chance that this isn’t even a word) Reading from above I’m actually in flow. You see healing is non-linear.

People talk about clearing space. Even getting it right the first time. It’s all very admirable. Is it realistic? Sometimes we have to clear up other peoples messes not just our own. It can be infuriating, humiliating and ever rage filling. (I’m using rage a lot these days) That’s exactly where I am right now. I’m cleaning up other peoples mess every single day and barely getting to my own. There is never a clean slate when we dive into the deep work of being. Even during this time of the deep pause. I hope you life looks exactly how it should right now. I hope you have everything you need right now. I hope you are safe happy and well. For most people, that’s not a reality and I do my best to offer my realness to anybody that think’s there drowning in the expectation of the perfect life. Guess what no matter what happens. Life happens anyway…

When I think about it right now. Here at the center of The Great Pause. I would be amazed to find someone who wasn’t backpaddling right now. As in writing this I seems to have full circled back to an blog I wrote about a year ago called The Story of the Broken Goddess. That was a deep reflection on my own process surrounding the divine feminine. This last year has brought me on a journey of polaraties and contrast and how  the micro and informs the macro and a lot of science to go with it. Our collective understanding is becoming very advanced now. You see we have been willingly destroying ourselves for a while now and commodified self-care is not the answer. The question that has been driving most of my purchasing power over the last decade, if not longer is “Do you really need it?” Then beyond this “What is the true cost of this?” I imagine is these are the real questions that our ancestors grappled with when interfacing with our 3D reality. Is the non-engagement with these basic questions that has lead us down this dark path to one of my upcoming blog posts Gaia The Broken Goddess.

Right now I feel like I’m very far into the work of transmuting energy. I’ve moved beyond empath into a discerning empath. It’s a bit like being Yoda if you really want to understand. I feel a rupture in the force. I said it last week. When actually it isn’t that it’s more like the start of the clone wars. When something has been a miss this whole time and it’s been hidden from us. In fact, it more like The Matrix, knock-knock Neo.

In case you hadn’t noticed right now the United Kingdom hasn’t got a functioning Prime Minister. The pressure is building and all I can do is meditate and do my best to mediate the mess. Not just of my own emotional landscape but the paradigm of systemic trauma to what has become termed as ‘The Great Pause’ the sanest place I’ve ever known. Where the carnage is real and denial is a trigger for me.

People often get caught up in the idea of the Empath of people who feel everything. To the point that they think it’s an excuse for codependency. That their identity has to be lost in the needs of another. Isn’t that what we have all been doing the last aeon or so. All so caught up in the system that our own private thoughts and feelings don’t matter? Right now there is so much to transmute. Some people are genuinely scared, while other a genuinely traumatised, meanwhile I’m genuinely relieved that we have finally come to this point.

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#thelifedoula

kimberleen

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Me in my new spot Portobello moonstruck with sea fever.

Ok change of plan –

I am a systemic trauma specialist. I help you identify toxic patterns and how to change them. I work with global changemakers, humanitarians and environmental activists of Europe and it’s diasporas.

This my friends is called niching. It’s the core principle of both marketing and coaching and holy fuck after four years of daily deep diving I have finally gotten here. Like seriously someone open the champagne.

I’m on the edge of something deeply tangible with this and I think you are going to like it. It feels like integration. I’ve often said that my work began when I lived in a small cottage in Cornwall when I had more time on my hands than I would have liked as a result of recovering from trauma. People need to be able to talk about stuff, in a safe warm environment and it pretty much became my specialisation. You know why because I had become experientially trauma-informed. How did I do that? I thought about the things that came out of my mouth and I wondered how much of what I said had everything to do with me or to do with the person I was speaking to and that’s when I became a good listener. Listening not only to the world that weer flowing out of other peoples mouths but of the feeling I was jostling within my soul. Where did they begin and where and I end. As much as I wanted to be helpful I also knew that I needed to have boundaries. Being able to offer people a safe space knowing that is was a community service rather than a calling allowed me to be able to say no. Allowed me to become my own person, with my own house and my own rules. Not just that the radical intervention of emotional self-care. Yes that. Even now I struggle with where that might begin and end, when you know danger as a safe space. It made me wonder hard, to dig deep and find new perspectives on everything. I had to consider myself what my needs were? Who I was? Most importantly what I needed to heal. Mainly long conversations and the occasional trip out of the house.

Fast forward 5 years and it’s clear I should train to be a life coach, even though I might be trauma-informed I am no good at sob stories. I can handle trauma like a boss. Yup, you’ve been in an accident. A near-death experience I can totally get you through it. An unexpected death? The afterbirth blues. Yuh-huh? I’m here but I’m not going to sit with you while your hair gets matted and the dishes go moldy. You got to get up off your ass and do something. Extreme life coach wading into trauma to help you. Here I am. yet at the same time how do you claim to be a Life Coach when you have got absolutely no interest in someone financial productivity? Like none. Unless of course, it comes down to a matter of survival… Unless your job is serving the planet I have absolutely no desire to work with you. So yes I wanted to train as A life coach thinking it would teach me things. Which it did, a lot. What I didn’t appreciate in signing up was exactly how much I might wanted to offer to the profession, so much so that I had to start a new one. I mean fuck talking for an hour. I mean things can be discovered in an hour but they can’t be resolved especially when you are really fucking stuck, traumatised, repressed or your own very special brand of fuck-upness (flawsome). That Mastin Kipp might describe as “High functioning coping mechanisms” – If you’re self-medicating like a boss with herbal tea and yoga, you are pretty much there. The good news is if you are doing anything at all you are doing a great job. You see being trauma-informed is easy it’s endless love and encouragement. Yup endless. That’s the hard part, get the ego in check. Cause you see we don’t leave people in labour. Why would you chose to put the most vulnerable in our society in situations they aren’t comfortable with? It seems bizarre.

Why would you ask someone to meditate on their relationship with their family, when in fact incest is common. Why are we gaslighting ourselves as a society? Even in healing circuits.

You see I’m always thinking, highly critical, forward thinking and running what I think I know and certainly what I’ve been told through the mincer. I mean I was on 14 when I figured our that low fat diets must be a crock of shit cause the body can store fat and that was in biology 101. Anyways wait until you get the physics – if every colour is a reflection of a light wave what colour is it really? You see that’s what it’s like to be paying attention. If it’s all about connection why am I actually paying you for your time? And do you really believe in the work you do. Yup that stuff.

So yes I am The Life Doula – I rebirth people and have grandiose ideas of rebirthing the planet through trauma.  We will get to all that later. I don’t do workshops either cause I have no need to re-traumatise you or the people around you. I’d rather not take the risk life happens to us anyway.

Also looking for collaborators that  are interested in working on the Glasgow UN COP 26 in November. Get in touch if you are keen.

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The Life Doula: Creating Connection

kimberleen

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It’s an interesting thing to sit at the core of what you do and understand that it is about something as basic as creating connection. Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that therapy is only needed as a result of the conversations that we are unable to have with a secure attachment. A secure attachment is someone we trust, that cares about us, that believes in us and wants nothing more than for us to be both healthy and happy. The sad truth that secure attachments have become rare.

More than this I have known for quite some time the power of deep conversation, that isn’t so much therapeutic as it is real. You see we all grasp for depth especially when life has challenged us. Secure attachments are the number one thing that guarantees our success in life as well as minimises the impacts of trauma. Do you know who your secure attachments are? Do you have a good friend? A relative or even a work colleague who is there for you?

Most of us are so caught up in the superficial we barely make time for the real stuff. We barely make time for eye contact or the space to feel exactly where we or someone is at. We are so controlled by time and external commitments we are unable to see or experience the things that are right in front of us. The things that are just as magical as all the others, if we took the time to appreciate them. You see life isn’t one long to-do list. Even if it was we have to ask exactly what it is that we are ‘doing’ it for? We cannot take the material with us. It’s just a sideshow to the main event. I wonder sometimes if life is not laid out something like The Crystal Maze. Where these fantasy worlds are created only to distract us and let’s face it it’s easy to get distracted by all the beautiful shiny things. After all, they were all created too. In the meantime, we are walking around in flesh suit ignoring one another even though we know that we are the most finite thing on the planet. Only existing once. So what is it that drives us away from one another? What drives us to disconnect us from the uniquely exquisite human connections that we face every day?

This year has been a breakthrough year for me. Most of my breakthroughs delivered to me by way of my own clients. That most of our sources of pain are systemic rather than personal. That our childhood wounds are not necessarily the results of bad parenting, rather the results of the inhumane conditions in which parents are expected to parent. We can’t hold our parents accountable for the circumstances and systems that they too were/are struggling to survive in. That we can only take responsibility for our own healing, that everyone’s healing is unique and that I heal to be taught as much as I am to teach. I have learned that trauma is about spectrum and range and that we simply can’t help people if we do not understand the depth of their feeling. That you can never walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes, you can only share the road. That is what connection is all about. Taking the time to experience one another.

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Innerscapes

kimberleen

IMG-5738Yup, it’s a new word. Innerscapes. Not sure if I made it up or appropriated it, either way, it was out there in the either and I grabbed it. Several years ago during a conversation with a friend when we were having one of those deep down and dangerous shares about how we really felt. When we cast aside the sunshine and rainbows and where we found our hearts and souls alone in a room. That’s the innerscape. It’s the canvas of emotions on which we build our lives. Let me tell you there are some beautiful interpretations of the human mood board on show for all of us to explore.

What I can say and let me use my own innerscape as en example here is that over the years is that my innerscape has transformed like the outerscape has looking out a train window. That depending on where or how you are sitting, and who you are sharing the journey with can radically alter your experieince. My own innerscape used to be painted with terror, despair, helplessness, sorrow and on better day mild melancholia. Only ten years on I frequently swim in elated, dance with happiness and delight in delightful. You see the words we say emit the feeling and now my innerscape seems to be underplayed by neutrality and curiosity rather than anything slightly more sinister. Of course, hurts rear their head from time to time and the pain and suffering are real. I no longer live there, those feeling are an interesting side trip on my life odyssey that added a little more adventure.

Innerscape to me can be experienced over time. Over a day, a week, a month, a year, decades of even life times. Small units of time are the building block of the innerscape. I know it’s epic. So how you feel on a day to day basis is going to underpin the landscape of your lifetime story.

From tired in the morning to invigorated in the afternoon. If we can write it down maybe we can begin to figure out the arc of the story. What’s draging us down or raising us up? What can be witnessed and changed? Loved into form or even nurtured into beauty. How we respond to the way that we feel tells us all we need to know about our relationship with ourselves. That if we can speak kindly, extend a compassionate outlook then maybe we can learn to accept what is. Extend the concept of gratitude and see where our emotions are guiding us. That sometimes our emotions are guiding us into the darkness and that is ok too.

 

If you want to discover more about your own Innerscape you can buy and download the Innerscapes Worksheet below. It’s $3.