Are You Ready to Take off Your Life Jacket?
Hello my Dear #FierceOver50 Lovely,
I have not forgotten a story told in a podcast I listened to last March, called Passover and the Science of Transformation. It really resonated with me.
Even though it was a conversation between a Rabbi and a psychologist about the transformative power of the passover seder, I listened to it through a slightly different lens:
You are now past 50 years old, and you realize that the past few decades have been like a deeply challenging journey on a stormy sea.
You were thrown overboard and the genius of your brain is that you were able to construct a life jacket on the fly. You persisted. You survived. And you were washed ashore on dry land, but you never took the life jacket off.
Now, you are walking around on dry land trying to live the rest of your life not understanding why you feel so constrained and uncomfortable.
You still have on your life jacket because its survival skills were so useful to you in the original context, but they are not useful anymore.
In fact, those very same skills might be getting in the way of the transformation you desire.
Let me share with you briefly, how this life jacket has worked in my life as an exhausted achiever. Here are some of the stories my brain told me during my thirties, forties, and, yes, my fifties:
If I can just finish this project, I will feel so much better, so I think I’ll just work right through this nasty headache.
I haven’t had enough sleep, but I’m going to suck it up and power through this day.
I can handle any problem if I make a plan, perhaps throw some money at it, and certainly if I talk through what needs to happen with everyone involved.
I trust my brain; it hasn’t steered me wrong yet. I have confidence in my ability to think through any problem and come to a solution.
Yup, that’s my life jacket and it served me well. It was even kind of brilliant, if I ignored the cracks.
But now, I am learning how to take this life jacket off.
It is scary. With so much success wearing my life jacket thus far, I wonder what will fill the void? What will take its place? Won’t I be lost and cold and unsure? I do hate to feel lost.
For the past 10 years or so, I have been doing a dance with this life jacket.
Sometimes I take it off for a moment, then I put it back on. I worry that I won’t finish a project.
But other times, I take it off and I feel a rush of joy and sunlight through my body.
You see, the life jacket is the tool of our exhausted achiever brains. Oh yes, it is a mighty tool. But it completely eclipses our bodies. Our bodies take the back seat when our life jackets are on.
And turning fifty seems to create a turning point for the women I speak to. We realize that this time, the second half of our lives, is our time. But we don’t know what to do differently.
We don’t know how to shift this state of being. We don’t know how to change our most habitual and comfortable state.
The answer to this dilemma is in our bodies, not in our minds.
Our smart, life-jacket clad brains tell us that surely we can think our way out of this mess. But we can’t.
Even after years of evening yoga classes, I gathered up my exhausted achiever brain, put my life jacket on, and proceeded the next day as though nothing was different.
So what happens for me when I take my life jacket off?
What do I coach my students to do when they realize that they really do want to live differently in their bodies but haven’t a clue how to start?
When I had my life jacket on and firmly in place, feeling or sensing my body always seemed like a dangerous thing to do.
A headache, or pain between my hunched over shoulder blades, or feeling exhausted was always solved with an external solution: ibuprofen, a massage, or another cup of coffee.
Now, I take my life jacket off so that I can feel my body.
I invite and encourage my breath and revel in how many unique ways I can breath in whatever particular situation I am in.
I have learned how to move in ways that open my body to sensations that I had always turned away from before.
I have tools for massaging the parts of my body that ask for my attention and learning from them what they need.
More and more, my life jacket hangs on a hook gathering dust.
When I started on my journey at age 50, I knew something was terribly wrong and that I could not go on as the exhausted achiever I had become.
So I put on my research hat that had served me so well in my career as a professor and began to study, what I now know, is a body-centered approach to wellness.
I developed my Body Vitality Method and I teach body-centered movement, breath, and massage to women who know they are on a new leg of their journeys and need new tools to guide them forward.
As I worked with more and more women, I saw that the best way to support them in this turnaround from exhausted achiever to #FierceOver50 was to invite them into an ongoing program and to do this I created the #FierceOver50 Gathering.
I invite you to explore this program here and, if this speaks to you, to come onboard. Here’s the link to learn more and to sign up.
Love and Gratitude,
AnnMerle
P.S. I hope to hear from you. Tell me about your life jacket and how it impacts your day to day life. Just click reply to this e-mail.