self-DEVOTION: A GIFT TO SELF and OTHER
As a trauma-survivor, focusing on myself has probably been the hardest skill set to develop. WHY?
Fragmentation and dissociation are common in people who experience traumatic events. I know this to be true because I have experience with them. Essentially, they make life experiences discontinuous.
Discontinuous life experiences are common in people who face trauma or supercharged life events. I didn’t just know this. I had to learn it like I had to learn what it meant about how I operate. Generally, it means that our memories occur more like spurts, flashes, or in intervals with gaps that can be disorienting and alienating. For those who encounter this, because our experience can come in nonstructural ways, this sporadic association to our reality can make trusting ourselves, and our ability to feel safe in doing so, quite the challenge.
For me, and those like me, this means that to know oneself can be difficult because our experiences aren’t woven together like a quilt. There are inconsistencies, loss of time, blackout moments, and even thoughts that we’re not sure are true. Therefore, creating consistency, when it is not something instinctual or known, can be something we need to learn. I know that for me, self-devotion was something I needed to receive an education on, and it required a dedication that I imagine is akin to running a tough mudder.
Learning to claim self-devotion, and to respect it as the Soul of Sovereignty it is, wasn’t familiar, because trusting me and the truth of my experiences wasn’t either. I won’t lie to you, realizing that what I trusted least in the world was my presence and space, was hard, devastating, and humbling. Accepting hurts as something I needed to fully witness, allow in support to heal, & concede to the dark mystery of, in order to make the journey to self-discovery, was even harder.
I often repeat that you need to trust yourself. So, for consistency… trust yourself.
Inviting you to self-trust is not hyperbole or conjecture. It’s also not because sometimes my trauma makes me a little like a Parrot… like a Parrot.
You need it because your ability to BE resides in your ability to feel safe. I say this because tending to our traumas or supercharged experiences is a delicate process that deserves respect and vulnerability, patience and processing, integration, and alchemy. It requires you to be discerning and present to who you are and clear in what you’re about.
It needs you to learn to feel just in being safe and soft as well as protective and picky.
healing requires a heart warrior, It is not for the faint of heart.
I do not share that healing is a path to take seriously to deter you. I believe healing is for everyone. Rather, I say it to prepare you.
Healing ain’t easy, at least not in my experience. It can get easier over time, but then again, it can also get difficult, again, and then back to easy, and then back and forth, again, and again, and again.
Essentially, I want you to know that when it comes to healing, it could be hard before it gets to be healing. I want to share with you the truth I have experienced so that you can prepare to both soften and strengthen to your needs. Ideally, in allowing yourself this preparation, you can detect what you could expect from your journey, and in doing so, become present to what may be required of you while on it.
like life, healing is not linear, It’s more like a spiral or circle.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come to the starting line of my healing and stopped. It’s innumerable and it has spanned YEARS.
There are countless times I’ve emerged, ready, peering down the road I needed to travel with eyes squinting, to see butterflies, free birds, fresh air, ancestral trees, deepened breaths, and abundant euphoria lied ahead, but that there were also Dragons, demons, and the supersized -BIG GULP- monsters, I’d have to face too. Despite the fullness, presence, gratitude, and joy that I could perceive existed, the hairy parts of healing & the effort it would take to trust I could get myself there, scared me enough to completely disregard the levity of it, to decide time after time, NOW IS NOT THE TIME.
Self-devotion taught me how to find dignity in MY LIFE stories, Those I remember and the ones I’d rather not.
Self-devotion taught me that in order to face my life, I’d need to establish presence. It taught me that I’d need to create space to BE in all forms. It taught me that in order to be whole, I’d need to learn to trust the inner voice begging me to listen in, & to consider if intentional, self-devoted attention could get me there.
Presence taught me that I didn’t see myself as whole. I did see myself in a discontinuous form. It revealed that I hadn’t yet been humbled to the love in my humanity, taken myself seriously, or lived like this isn’t a dress rehearsal and I Am Limited Edition. It showed that I was still in the trauma and hadn’t yet been allowed to embrace my maturation as a woman who has learned to be free in her awareness of having trauma-laden-response(s).
Self-devotion taught me that in order to claim my presence, and who I know I am in my heart, I’d have to be willing. I have to be willing to see myself as capable. I have to be willing to claim that I am a valuable investment. I have to be willing to tell the truth about whether or not I was ready, and whether or not I wanted to put in the effort to do it.
Self-devotion requires you to believe you matter, consistently, without faking it.
Self-devotion didn’t exactly fit like a glass slipper. Since it wasn’t something I instinctively knew how to access, I had to decide if I wanted to create space for it. I had to come to terms with being someone who could see the value in self-love to grasp its usefulness.
I had to learn to ask myself questions and give answers to why I deserved a loving self-relationship. I had to understand what specifically I could value in the exercise of its practice, in order to understand why I was doing it. And, I had to understand what I could potentially get from doing it, in order to comprehend how I wanted my experiences within it to go.
Self-Devotion requires tremendous discipline; Hurts don’t leave you, they become lessons.
Self-devotion requires self-prioritization and accountability, and this is for the betterment of Self and the World.
Self-devotion requires learning humility and gratitude to see that who we are inside of a moment impacts the full picture, which includes our presence.
Self-devotion requires acceptance and responsibility for reactions to our experiences, so as to generate boundaries that create respectful right-relationship(s) with ALL.
Self-devotion requires clarity for ALL OF THE ABOVE -and much more- to foster a stable and continual awareness of who we are in the world we live-in, as well as in the communities and families we get to create.
self-devotion used to hit me as selfish and exhausting.
I used to think, for a myriad of reasons I won’t go into now, that self-devotion meant putting myself before Others in a way that was not only damaging to Me but the World. It made me feel bad even at the consideration.
I used to think that there couldn’t possibly be enough space for the conscious love of BOTH Me AND Others; that devotional presence was a myth only made continuous by submissive service of pouring love into someone else, an either-or scenario. There was no room for BOTH/AND.
I used to think that prioritizing Others over Self was the right thing to do because I couldn’t fathom potentially dismissing them the way I had felt invisible in my trauma, in the World. My life experiences influenced a relationship to nobility, to help Others feel seen, but didn’t have the ability to apply that focus to Self.
I used to think devotion to Others was right and just, and because I didn’t have to be with Other's 24/7, I could engage those relationships in an “in-and-out way” that seemed more manageable, and more familiar to my discontinuous mind, than putting the consistent focus on Me. My hurts usurped all of my energy, and since devoted attention went to maintaining a connection with Others, there was little space to consider what existed besides pain for me, let alone what makes up a Whole Me.
In short, putting me 1st, used to give me tremendous guilt and anxiety, because having enough energy to give me and to external relationships, was more than I had available at the time. I see now it was too much for me to take on, championing for the World and developing self-belonging at the same time. It may not be for you, and that is the beauty of nonlinear healing. Your way doesn’t have to holistically match mine, or even at all. There can be overlap or not. Either way, I now see that trying a simultaneous self and worldly devotion was not my path, because I was trying to BE safe with Me and with Others before I was safe in Self.
Self-devotion is Sovereign, Realizing this helped me notice something was missing.
Self-devotion revealed that in order to get to know Me, I’d have to create a new relationship with Me, 1st. The World would have to wait. GASP!
In looking at how to develop a loving presence with myself, I realized that what was missing is I’d have to come 1st in order to get it. I’d have to do it my way. I’d have to figure out what my way was. I’d have to get into right-relationship with what self-sovereignty meant, but I’d have to go into self-containment to gain some much-needed 1:1 attention.
While in self-devotional-containment, I recognized major bodily responses to shedding, grief, and love. I was not used to being the center of my attention, and my body was saying it, so I had to soften to it and remember to hold myself accountable for why I was doing it along the way. In this experience, I realized the body is its own ecosystem that requires us to pay attention to not only what’s going on internally, but what we allow to externally impact us, too. It was in that understanding that I discovered there were things about me mentally and physically I needed to learn.
I’d need to learn how to hold myself, and curiously, with accountability to clarity.
I’d need to learn how to take me gently to responsibility to institute boundaries.
I’d need to learn how to begin distinguishing responses to change and practice noticing my reactions, letting them become alive, flexible, firm, or even continuous (this one was very triggering to my discontinuous mind).
I’d have to learn how to fall in love with my nuances, embracing their inconsistency and irregularities as My Normal, in order to honor what is, what is to be released, and what has yet to be discovered in the life cycles of my nature.
I’d have to learn how to notice my attachments and get comfortable in addressing them by being judicious - from a loving space vs a proving-one - about my stability.
Self-devotion showed me that my life was reflective of my presence to choice. That the story I was living and who I portrayed in it, impacted everything I did or didn’t. It also showed that who I was being, no longer gelled with what I wanted in my heart, in my sovereignty.
It revealed that I would stay at the starting line until I was ready to choose different… to BE Different. This allowed me to see that my pain was big, but I was too. Because while that experience is over, I am not. I am still here.
self-devotion made me realize I AM STILL HERE.
This self-awareness propelled me forward. It gave me a vigorous perspective to put in the work. It gave me the momentum to change feeling out of control in my trauma’s discontinuous experiences. It allowed me to begin creating a relationship to continuity via the practice of presence, with a softening belief, that my pain-points held healing wisdom.
It was at this time that Shadow Work found me. I define Shadow Work as the process of bringing all feelings back on-line. It is the process of telling whole truths and learning to love the alchemical power in polarities. That means allowing space for, and inviting back, portions of Self that have been dulled, silenced, & rejected.
Through Shadow Work, I found Carl Jung. Through him, I also found Individuation and Sovereign Autonomy… not to mention depth psychology, which is the foundation of my Coaching, and again… a myriad of other awarenesses of which I will not go into now. But, stay tuned…
individuation, wholeness, and sovereign autonomy, propelled me beyond the starting line and into a relationship with Self-Devotion as a practice of Universal Wholeness. Maturation.
Individuation says heal yourself and embody a healed World.
Wholeness says learn to love yourself so you can regard the value of Others’ self-love, in the World.
Sovereign Autonomy says claim self-responsibility with gratitude and as a gift, so as to witness it same, in Others, in the World.
Individuation, wholeness, and sovereign autonomy are self-devotional tools. They give us the clarity to see that understanding yourself is the greatest gift of love you can give the world. In learning to love our polarities, we are able to value being with juxtapositions (in the World) and create awareness to our wobbles, to know how they impact us.
It is my experience, that with these tools, we are able to feel safe with unknowns and dissimilarities. We can become equipped to see differences as unifiers that create a family in the community, to allow discernments about those who we keep close vs those we need as distant relatives. When we are able to feel secure in Self, and with judgments, we become consistently capable of finding safety, despite who we encounter or where we are. We Become Safe Because Of Self.
Self-devotion taught me I do not ‘fit’ in a World that promotes divisiveness, cancellation, or cruelty.
Self-devotion taught me to see that I didn’t, and still do not ‘fit’ in a World that pits us against each other. It showed me that I don’t because I have lived in an internal World where I had been doing that to myself, my whole life. And, now, I have the skills to support no longer choosing to stand for that which I object. I Choose Whole Love For ALL.
It unveiled that my gift is to spot discontinuous energies because it is the medicine that brought me through my own trauma, and it showed me how to survive, BE, and transform it into wisdom, answers, and a path to healing.
It revealed that I did and do desire an existence that has consideration for the value of nuance and the encouragement to look at it for the healing it reveals is available to us ALL.
It taught me that we all have challenges in life, and rushing through, or attempting to devote ourselves to them before we are ready, doesn’t let us fully receive their nutrition and richness.
I understand if self-devotion feels intimidating, but can that awareness be the both/and that allows it to be inviting, too?
I understand if you aren’t ready to be with your hurts in a way that allows them to become a lesson, yet.
I understand if you are frustrated by the innumerable attempts you’ve made at your starting line.
I understand if you’re eager to get beyond discontinuous experiences but feel frozen in the how.
I understand if addressing your trauma(s) feels bigger than you.
I understand, so please, allow yourself to come to the following asks slowly and know that they’re only included here for you to begin - when you’re ready- to discern your BOTH/AND.
What would happen if you slowed and felt into Self with the intention to see how you feel when it’s not all about what you’re trying to avoid?
What would be possible if you got to know Self as who you are vs as “Shannon with ALL the Trauma”?
What would be possible if you allowed softness, not only for where you are but for where you’ve been, to recognize that YOU ARE STILL HERE? (I am so glad you are here.)
What would be possible if you put self-devotional love on pains so you can start to see what you’re up against and what you stand to gain?
What would be possible if you declared stability by respecting your needs, your unevenness, your boundaries, and your discernments, in a way that supported you to trust and develop safe practices designed to create consistency with Self?
What if you tried on self-devotion in a way that grounded into seeing Self-understanding as the greatest gift of love you could give to you and to the World?
If giving yourself the spotlight feels a bit more than you’re prepared for at this time, again, I understand. Thank you for taking care of yourself and for allowing your clarity. I applaud you for the presence, boundary, and stability in that decision. Beginning Monday, 2/7, the LWS Coaching Newsletter will kick off a month-long FREE Practicing Presence Masterclass. Content will center around nurturing your presence. Consciously, subscribe, and if it feels good, dip your toe in and learn how to begin practicing self-devotion with your presence.
With Blessings,
