It’s been 2.5 years since I found myself slung deep into another dark night of the soul, which I am gingerly resurrecting from. Today I'm sharing some of the heartbreaks, the victories, and two key themes of this alchemical and harrowing journey.
Welcome back to The Power of Reclamation Podcast!
It’s been two and a half years since I found myself slung deep into another dark night of the soul, which I am gingerly resurrecting from. During this episode, I’ll be sharing some of the highlights, heartbreaks, and victories of this alchemical and harrowing passage.
Two key themes to highlight today is how our heart intelligence has the power to heal trauma and shame. And, the second is our capacity to uplevel our nervous system’s capacity to hold complex paradoxes, loss, destruction and heartbreak with more inner stability and confidence.
Episode chapters:
(02:02) - The core lesson of my dark night of the soul journey
(04:05) - Why our nervous system seemingly backfires on us
(09:45) - How to recognize fawning as a trauma response mechanism
(17:25) - How heartbreak, pain, and grief catalyzed my personal growth
(24:31) - What is a nourishment barrier? And how does it impact our ability to receive goodness?
(32:38) - A key pivot point in my healing journey that my mentor catalyzed in me
(44:23) - The power of our breath's ability to shift our emotional and nervous system states
(51:43) - How understanding our attachment styles can be helpful in any relationship
(59:44) - The cost of reinforcing a chronically over-activated nervous system (personally and collectively)
(01:01:52) - What is a "dark night of the soul" and how do we resurrect from one?
(01:08:18) - The experience of midwifing my mom through her death
(01:16:53) – A refresher of the Six Power Reclamation Gateways
My Mentor: Shawna Reininger, The Conscious Enterprise, https://theconsciousenterprise.com/shawna-reininger-psychic-intuitive-and-coach/
Anne-Marie Marron
Anne-Marie Marron (00:47.47)
I've been away for a while, two and a half years actually to be exact, and this departure wasn't planned, but most change isn't. And at the time this podcast was only just two year old baby and I, when I basically had to abort and tend to my life as it was completely dismantling. So back in May of 2022, only two weeks after promoting my Dark Knight of the Soul course, I found myself slung deep into the cave of my own dark night and it wasn't the first and
I'm sure it won't be the last, but I'm telling you, this one kicked my ass. I was on a collision course to confront some of my deepest core trauma and I had no idea what was coming. This episode is an opportunity for me to say hello again and to press restart as I begin to share who I'm becoming as I gingerly resurrect from this inner cave. And someone asked me the other day, what's the biggest theme or learning from this recent dark night?
And I found myself rattling off a long list of what the darkness has brought into the light, which was beautiful to see. But today I want to just focus on one specific theme, this one piece of curriculum that is still so deeply underway. And I imagine that I'll be apprenticing to this for the rest of my life. And this core lesson is the art of befriending my nervous system. The etymology of the word befriend means to cultivate a friendliness towards to bring a kindness towards whatever object we are engaging with, whether that's a person, a thought, an emotion, ourselves even, and ultimately towards life. So in today's episode, I wanna share about my journey of becoming my own inner refuge. And through befriending my wild and primal nervous system, I am becoming my own safe haven, my own protector, my own inner refuge, and my own primary attachment.
But before I continue, I need to make a quick plug around the intelligence of the heart, because without it, I wouldn't be where I am in this moment, or who I've become through the kindness of my own heart. I operate a lot for my mind. I have since I was a kid. It's been a strong survival strategy. It often even outsmarts me if I'm not paying attention, and even when I am. It's kept me in check for the first probably 30 years of my life. It was my primary mode of operation.
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But now for two decades, I've been learning how to listen and apprentice to my own heart because it reveals a wisdom and a power and a certain kind of intelligence that's so different than the mind. And more importantly, it cuts through mental narratives that have the power to keep me cycling through conditioning, shame, and self-criticism. The heart knows how to heal pressure points of trauma, which is what I'm gonna share more about today. I've been learning what it's like to be to keep my heart open despite my mind's reactive impulses to protect myself and to make even maybe make others wrong when I feel hurt. And during this dark night, I learned how to keep my heart open despite strong mental narratives that I was feeling related to perceived rejection, shock and trauma. So back to this marvelous and mysterious mechanism that all mammals share a nervous system. This wild and sophisticated network is composed of chemicals, our biology, our genetics, our emotions, our psychology, even experiences of trauma, which both our own trauma, but also our ancestors' trauma. It's composed of our cultural conditioning and any of the associated behaviors and beliefs that make up who we are and ultimately how we operate. Each of these elements serves different functions.
However, they share one similar job, which is seek safety and avoid threat. With one exception, certain types of traumas or past experiences do have the power to subconsciously drive us towards the opposite. Yeah, it's counterintuitive, but we may find ourselves driven towards indulging threat and avoiding safety. So why would our system seemingly backfire like this?
Why indulge threat when the system is designed to create safety as a form of self-preservation? I think it's because early conditioning and the associated wired circuitry that comes with that has the propensity to seek familiarity over logic and reason. And we can all think of those moments when we felt ourselves repeating a pattern or saying something that we know wasn't going to help the situation, that we know isn't good for us,
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but we can't seem to stop ourselves from being attracted to those same circumstances. And without restraint, we fall in head first. Sometimes seeking the familiar means seeking the early learned patterns of our survival that kept us safe, kept us loved, kept us appreciated, while simultaneously locking us inside of our own prison of compliance, even some forms of trying to control other people or even various forms of manipulation, all innocent ways that we operate to feel safe, to feel loved, to find our sense of belonging. I'll share more today about navigating this precarious and predictable gauntlet of threats that seem to come with the human experience. And threats, whether they're real or perceived, have the power to send us into hyperprotection and defensiveness, which makes this terrain challenging to find our way through at times. We all know what this feels like. And some threats, some threat responses are legitimate.
And I imagine that most anyone with a mindfulness and a self-awareness practice will frankly acknowledge that the majority of threats we react to are actually perceived threats rather than real ones. Many threat responses are activated based on unchecked assumptions. The brain fires quickly. Confirmation bias is a brilliant way to confirm our stance through seeking data related to our beliefs and assumptions and basically discarding anything that counters this.
Confirmation bias includes the elaborate narratives and the limiting beliefs that we innocently draw upon to ensure our safety and to protect against threat. The nervous system's mode of operation is more straightforward when we're under a physical threat. Like we all know, we all know the tendency to fight, blame, to criticize. We all know the tendency to flee, to withdraw, withhold. And we also, most of us know freeze and even freeze where we're a deer in the headlights, but we're still functioning, functional freezing. But for mammals with an evolving prefrontal cortex, like homeo sapiens, there's a whole other category of threats that expand beyond the physical. And these threats fall in the domain of psychological and emotional, and they're not as straightforward as physical threats. For example, if a truck is actively swerving into my lane on the highway, without thought, I automatically am going to steer clear of the collision to avoid
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the physical threat. But it's a whole other system of navigation when we're dealing with psychological and emotional threats. And as a leadership consultant and coach, I have been so delighted to see that this language is used more and more in leadership trainings. And in all the corporate retreats that I do, I fold this in because it's such an important thing to understand that half of our operating, well, maybe not even half, maybe more than half.
But the majority of how we often perceive threats is psychological and emotional. Because our modern day minds and bodies are vigilantly tracking for, I safe? Do I belong? Have I proved myself? Am I enough? Am I good enough? Am I perfect? Did I do that wrong? There's constantly, do they like me? Do they not like me? Am I funny? Am I not funny? It's like, am I accepted? Am I not accepted?
So I'm sure you've noticed that our adaptations to manage these threats are much more nuanced and complex than navigating a physical threat. Because now that the majority of us are no longer running from a saber-tooth tiger or previously untreated diseases that science and medicine had not evolved enough to treat, we're no longer dying in masses, we're now confronting the threat of our confirmation bias, our assumptions and the repeating narratives of protection, justification, rationalization, blame, and the list goes on and on. We're driven by the power of our mind. And as a result, our evolutionary response has been to innovate new forms of protection, to help us manage psychological and emotional threats. And one in particular that I want to speak to is called fawning. Fawning joins the world of protective strategies as a fourth F.
in the survival responses of fight, flight, and freeze. The fawn response is an attempt to avoid or minimize danger by pleasing others. A few ways this shows up can be through being overly helpful and doing things for others to gain their approval. Another is neglecting our own needs and boundaries for fear of disconnection or a fear of being gaslit. Another is having trouble saying no. It's often
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fawning, we will say no on the inside, but yes on the outside, and then we will covertly try to sneak out of what we've said yes to. I have seen that in myself over time. Another is responding to criticism with praise. So if somebody is criticizing us, we will try to come back into connection by buttering them up or praising them. Being overly agreeable.
And another is giving constant praise and compliments even if it's not authentic. So if a child asserts their needs and is consistently met by parents or teachers or friends with a behavior of pulling away or dismissing and judging that child for their expression, then pretty quickly, that child's gonna be forced to unconsciously decide, do I continue to be real? Or do I continue to be real if the cost is the loss of connection and even a sense of feeling rejected?
Well, it's pretty obvious that a survival response is going to be, fuck no, find a way to adapt, all of which is happening at a subconscious level. And since humans are wired to belong and feel safe in their tribe of family and friends, it's common for this child to grow into an adult who has learned to fawn as a means to avoid criticism or even to avoid being gaslit or a loss of connection, to be liked, to make sure that they belong.
And our internalized narratives are built upon our direct experiences from the past. Like I said earlier, from our ancestors' trials and tribulations, our cultural conditioning, and the body memory that lives basically as nonverbal intelligence inside of all of us. And all of these data inputs combined to create our sense of reality. This mosaic of input establishes our orientation towards safety and threat and what our nervous system registers as familiar, even if it causes pain, will become the template for how we navigate safety and threats in the future. I was thinking about this and I was thinking, what an awkward blend of masochism and efficiency. Why do we repeat patterns of predictable suffering? Well, part of the reason, we could say part of its karma, part of its soul curriculum.
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But from a biological perspective, the answer is because the nervous system seeks familiarity and it will swiftly employ its hardwired responses as a way to optimize efficiency. For example, if an abused partner stays in the cycle of trauma when the abuser apologizes and promises that they have changed despite no demonstration of a nervous system or behavioral shift, then the abused person stays and even rationalizes the abuser's behavior because it's familiar, because they can't imagine life without this person. But the pattern of not being treated well and the other person not taking responsibility for it is familiar to that abused person. Somewhere they learned that early in life and they're just repeating it as an adult. It's a human riddle. In certain circumstances, it seems so insane that the nervous system would prioritize being efficient and tracking familiarity over safety, over self-care, and even over fierce boundaries. Because what's predictable and familiar will register as safe, even when it's not. Why would we be designed for familiarity to override an accurate interpretation of safety and self-care? Well, basically welcome to living with a subconscious mind. It's this mapping of internalized and customized programs that without conscious thought tell us how to respond to the world and how to respond to ourselves and even our needs. And as I said earlier, they will swiftly and unceremoniously reject even things that seem like on the outside to someone else would look safe, but because they're not familiar to that person, they get rejected. A system prioritizes, our nervous system essentially, prioritizes efficiency and familiarity even if it's painful. And I think it's important to know this. This is where the befriending comes back in, because the more we can understand the way that we're wired, when it's happening, we can have more kindness to it, because we recognize, this is just literally neurons wiring in my brain as electrical circuits based on my history, and I have the power to change this.
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So when we look at a nervous system and how it's really prioritized, basically a mathematical track of if X then Y without requiring conscious thought, again, this is demonstrating the trademark of brain efficiency. And I believe that to evolve is to befriend. It's the ability to take ownership for the reality that we live 80 to 90 % of our lives through the default network system of our brain, which means we operate through subconscious perceptions of reality that we unknowingly seek to confirm and reinforce even when it causes suffering. And mapping our inner landscape of protective patterns is actually an expression of self-love and personal power. It's challenging. It's really challenging to live as a mystic, to live as the mystery. And even as a wellspring of deep wisdom, when the mind innocently tries to reorient us away from our inner stillness, and into excessive doing and busyness. This conversation about the nervous system is really about reclaiming the power of our mind, the power of where we place our attention and how we access our inner witness and basically our ability to bring friendliness towards the totality of our human experience. And each one of us holds a tremendous power to wield where we place our attention, which means it's our responsibility to learn how to use this skill, how to use the skill to access resiliency and interrupt reactivity, how to use this attention skill to cultivate kindness in the face of criticism, or even to receive and give more love, and to take responsibility for examining our patterns of fear, anxiety, scarcity, and lack are not who we are, but they are programs that we have the power to deprogram.
Okay, so with all of that being said, I want to move into sharing a bit about this particular dark night that I am slowly resurrecting from. I want to share some highlights from swallowing all the bitter medicine, but also this I want to share about the alchemy gained from these hardships. So I was thrust into this initiation in May of 2022 when my primary romantic relationship ended.
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Personal challenges had already been long underway related to some health issues that I was challenged by. My body was basically fighting high levels of toxic mold. And little did I know there was much more loss in letting go to come over the next two years. So I'll start with this partnership. I'm going to start with this man who I loved him deeply. I loved him for all of who he was, even the parts that I found challenging.
For me, this was a new way of loving. I was learning how to accept him for exactly who he was, even when our differences presented us with difficult decision points. And I was learning more about unconditional love in a way I had only known. This might make you laugh, but I had only known this kind of unconditional love with certain dogs that I had had in my life, in particular, my yellow Labrador Cherokee that I came into my life in my early 20s and taught me so much about unconditional love. And I think as a side note, it's really my observation that some of the most profound love affairs on this planet are humans with their furry friends.
So over the years, together this man and I accessed a kind of unification through our love and our sexual connection that I had only previously dreamed was possible. I experienced the most profound safety and expanded love, something that I had never even known with another human. I don't know what he would say today, but at the time we countlessly remarked on how neither of us had ever felt so loved and seen by another.
My love for him was unwavering. was startlingly consistent. And I say startlingly because my attachment system is fearful avoidant. It's also referred to as disorganized, which is quite pathologizing terms. But I suppose fearful avoidant isn't much better than disorganized. But nevertheless, this is how my nervous system wired to survive my early life and
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I am deeply committed to befriending it and transforming the ways that it has kept me in painful dynamics with others. Because for a disorganized or a fearfully avoidant detachment style, the trademark to this is I deeply want connection. And based on my experiences, I don't know if I can trust connection. It's also known as the push-pull, you know, with many nuances to that simplistic definition.
But with this man, I didn't push, I didn't pull, and neither did he. We were pretty damn solid, I would say, secure. And during the first few years, when my friends would ask me how it was going with him, I would say, well, he's hot, he's loving. And above that, our dynamic is the most easeful experience I've ever had with a romantic partner. Easy? I remember being surprised by that choice of word, but it was consistent frame.
It was just how we flowed. There really wasn't attachment drama, and this was so unfamiliar for me. Let's talk about seeking familiarity to have safety. I'm not saying that no attachment was a threat, but on some level, my system kept looking for it, waiting for it to happen. Because previously, I was always looking for a way out.
I was needing to find my freedom again, or I was seeking a way back in after I had taken space that I needed. My early romantic relationships had been based on, like the majority of romantic relationship dynamics, on the push and pull of anxious and avoidant attachment styles. And I knew that cycle well, and I had played both sides of the game as needed for decades. I didn't have secure attachments as a kid. So you can imagine landing in a securely attached relationship was a kind of healing balm that really laid the loving tracks for a new way of operating in my relationships. It literally has changed my nervous system. This relationship was different. We both had moments of anxiety, like of course, and we both had moments where we needed space, but this didn't include cold withdraws or anxious protests that typically come from fear and anxiety.
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We had a fluid way of honoring each other's independence and honoring each other's needs. We trusted our bond and we learned the art of reassurance, this very beautiful quality of being gentle and welcoming of each other's fears, but also taking ownership for our younger parts and helping each other see each other's younger parts at play. So for the first time, I wasn't navigating sticky dynamics of codependency.
Our relationship dynamic felt empowering and it was extremely healing for both of us. I was completely devoted. And here is how devoted I was. And if you know me, you know, like, wow, girl, that's big. Because I was married once and I never really have felt called to be married again. I mean, I feel neutral about it. I'm open, but I don't, I'm not seeking it, which is why I was shocked. I was shocked one summer evening when we were soaking in the hot springs after a long hot kiss, I heard myself say, I'm gonna ask you to marry me someday. There wasn't a waiver in my voice, my heart or my soul. He was my person. I had no reason to hold back an iota of my desire for him in any aspect of our life. And he previously married twice, feared that the third would be continue his curse, quote, curse, because that's what he perceived it as. But at the time he smiled, I sensed a little fear, but I also felt him melt with love. And given that I listened to his body as deeply as I listened to his words, I sensed that he felt the gravity of my love for him. And what was so beautiful about my experience of loving this man was that the love for him registered inside of myself, as love for myself too. And what I mean is it amplified love all the way around. And it was new to me. was beautifully disorienting, but also again, very expansive and unfamiliar. So I would have to stop myself sometimes multiple times and really work with something called a nourishment barrier that I learned about in a training years ago, Hacomia, which is a body centered psychotherapy that I am trained in.
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There's something called a nourishment barrier where our nervous systems will kind of put the brakes on in terms of how much it can receive of a particular kind of nourishment. So for me, I could feel the nourishment barrier of like, can I trust this level of devotion and love? Can I trust the love coming from him because it came with no strings of manipulation or agenda?
And I would stop and just literally feel the love circulating through my body and drop my story and just let myself be filled with this current, this frequency of love. And I do feel like it started to shift the way that my nervous system related to love itself. So fast forward a few years to when we were about to buy a home together. And after three months of negotiations, we were trying to buy this house off market. We settled on a price with the seller.
And it was Friday and we celebrated and it was so exciting. We were about to take this next step in our lives together. And then Monday whirled around and this hard-won effort of getting to this place was completely reversed and the cellar pulled out. Literally, I felt sucker punched. And as happens with all couples, we hit an impasse. And I still, to this day, I don't know exactly why the home became the stress fracture that tore us apart. This obstacle seemed like a speed bump to me, but to him it was Mount Everest. And I suggested that we take space to regain our ground and before long, instead of circling back to repair and find a new way to meet our obstacle together, he just stopped communicating with me. It felt to me like he just snapped his heart shut so tight towards me that basically it sent my attachment system reeling.
Could this be? We had just been swimming for years in the most palpable expanded state of love. And it doesn't mean that we didn't have challenges, but we stayed in this love. were able to, our commitment to each other was actually whatever happens, let's stay in the love. So I was extremely dysregulated by the grief and shock. And this voltage of shock and trauma was like careening through my whole body.
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And I could no longer feel his heart. I couldn't feel his kindness. His gentleness was gone. And it was completely destabilizing, to say the least. Really, the cold silence had such a reverberating thread back to my childhood and how when I wasn't complying or doing what was desired, I would get cold silence. And it was such a painful form of punishment for my nervous system. But I think the worst part with this relationship unraveling like that was the shame and the humiliation that I felt. And it's so strange to me even in this moment to use the word humiliation, but that is how it registered in my system because I could not stop loving him. I couldn't stop wanting him back. And my desire only made me feel crazy because given his recent behavior, it's like, why would I? Why would I be wanting to have this person back when they are treating me like shit. But life isn't that simple and neither are our attachment systems. And I know that his behavior was just his only way of soothing and taking care of himself. It wasn't intentional. But I teetered between my adult self, who could see everything so clearly and understand and even have compassion for what was going on, and the trauma from my childhood.
The trauma of having a father who left when I was seven years old and my brother, my older brother, who was my idol and my protector, he died when I was 13. I was immersed in trauma, bubbling up and feeling deep, just making contact with feelings of rejection and abandonment in a way that I never had. And here's the thing about shadow. I have held space for years with clients that are working through their fear of rejection and their fears of abandonment based on early experiences. And through all of those sessions, I sincerely felt empathy and deep care, but I didn't feel any trauma bells ringing inside of my own body until now. And at that point, I was thrust so deep into my childhood consciousness and the trauma that I would soon understand the humiliating pain of
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that was coming up for me was the hurt and the, I still don't know why it registered as humiliation, reaching for someone, basically reaching towards someone for love who was no longer available, no longer willing to open his heart, no longer willing to even talk to me about it. And for months, I would just match his silence and let things be as they were as I worked through my grief. And then this like ravaging hunger for him would drive me towards him again and I would reach out or try to re-reconnect or repair. It was like I was a child and I felt like, well, I just want to reopen his heart and tap back into our sex magic and our heart union again, as if that was going to fix everything. The truth is, I was addicted to our sexual power. I was deeply soothed by our love and I was bewildered by his choice to walk away. I wanted it all back. And I wasn't yet able to accept reality as it had unfolded. I was still fighting. And I knew at the time that I was operating from trauma, but I couldn't stop the cycles. And believe me, I tried. I tried to assert control and use my intellect and stop the pain. But clearly my karma was to ride it out with my eyes and my heart wide open, trembling with grief and shock.
I consider myself a psychologically and somatically pretty sophisticated practitioner and human being, but this was completely out of my hands. I couldn't draw on my prefrontal cortex to explain any of this. And believe me, I tried. I tried rationalizing, but it didn't help. And I wasn't able to get mad at him because I imagined and sensed that he too was in self-preservation and protecting his heart from more pain. And this is a man who can handle just about any type of physical pain, but he would be the first to say to me, I just can't handle heart pain like you. For him, the path to healing was cut off and move on. And despite my ability to see all that I could see, the intellectual knowing didn't soothe the emotional trauma. The noise of the activation in my nervous system and the associated narratives were living in my tissues. They were seated in my attachment system before I even had words to speak.
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I was in pre-verbal trauma. I was in the darkness of it. And this pre-verbal trauma doesn't respond well to intellect and reason. So if I wanted to get off this roller coaster ride, I was gonna need to learn how to hold myself in kindness while simultaneously spiraling through my deepest core wounds. And the change agent ingredients that held me the most during this time was immersing myself in nature,
Sometimes sitting in silence, but sometimes that was just actually too hard to do because my mind was racing. But I would have conversations with my higher power. I would pray. I would spend time with my dog. And I was also held deeply by a few consistent, sacred allies who were lovingly witnessing me over time. And speaking of allies, I want to share a key pivot point that I had while working with my mentor, Shauna.
In this session, she shifted my narrative, which allowed my system to fully relax. And from relaxing, and I'll talk more about this later, my heart was able to feel and it broke free and it showed me how to navigate my confusion and shame in the most empowering and loving way. And I had been stuck for months circulating through confusion about how to actually hold the complexity of what my heart could feel and see and what my nervous system and the narratives that it was spinning were doing to my well-being and my thoughts about who I am and my lovability. So during the session, I was in a shame and emotional overwhelm talking about like, do I hold this love and this grief and this heartbreak? Well, I can see, you know, seeing that his choices were basically to manage his own pain, that this is not about my lovability, but why are these narratives in my mind holding that I'm feeling humiliated and rejected? And I said, you know, I can't throw the brakes on this deep love by blaming him or making him wrong. It's not possible. I see too much. So what the fuck am I supposed to do with all of this? I feel like I have no control. There's no way of resurrecting the past. Some days,
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I'm in acceptance, full acceptance actually, and other days I have to stop myself from reaching out in an attempt to seduce him back. I was waiting for the common response of, you know, he's been a dick, let him go. You deserve better than this, Anne-Marie. But my inquiry was so much deeper and she was able to meet me there. And so her words took me home into my own power in a way that I so deeply needed.
There was a way that she was trusting the multidimensionality of this complex circuitry of my nervous system and my higher self. And so I literally transcribed this from the recording so that I could share this. And this is what she said. And even though this was, gosh, I think this was recorded, this session was way over a year ago. I cannot tell you how many times I have returned to it just for this piece to carry me through. And so here's what she said, Anne Marie, this love, it's an odd mix of flavors. You see him deep into his soul and who he is, and you also see his struggles and his heartbreaks. You see what's possible for him, and that lifts your heart. I see that in you. And then you see his struggle to give this to himself. You're trying to hold the entirety of all these feelings at once. And it's all so beautiful, but it contains heartbreak and it contains unconditional love. You have the capacity to see every facet of the diamond that makes up who he is and also the love that existed between the two of you. For you, as someone who goes deep into your joy and gratitude, as well as your heartbreak and grief, you must know that you have the capacity to hold it all. It's all in your heart.
And it all wants to explode. Weeping, I said to her, so what do I do with all this love and all this pain? And she said, take the emotion of grief and express it as love. See grief as love. Be happy that you can love so deeply. And at the time I was seeing his truck all over town, I mean daily. And it was just such a reminder of
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memories and times together and road trips and his sexiness and his sexy truck and just everything that I was swooning, still swooning over. she said to me, when you see his truck all over town, just say thank you and keep driving. Honor the love. Don't get lost in protecting yourself. Don't get lost in protecting yourself. Those words rang so true. mean, my takeaway was,
don't protect yourself, open your heart to everything, which meant really going into what I was able to uncover was really early experiences in my family system where I felt humiliated for opening my heart and being vulnerable and sharing from such an innocent place. So I share how I would go through these phases of deep acceptance with her and other times I would just collapse in grief and struggle accepting, you know, accepting that he isn't available and he doesn't want a life with me. And she said to me, of course you find this hard, but here's the message for you. His choice to close his heart towards himself is partly why he can't open his heart towards you. This is about his relationship with himself. And no matter how much your heart can give, no matter how well you can love, no matter how deep your love goes, he can't receive it. This is not about rejection. This is just about right alignment. This is the ache and longing for someone to love you as deeply as you can love another and have that be the overwhelming life force in the relationship. You hold great love for him. So love him fully with all of your heart, even though you can't have him.
Because if you deny your capacity to love with all of your heart, then you abandon yourself. I needed to repeat that to myself over and over again. If you deny your capacity to love with all of your heart, then ultimately you are abandoning yourself.
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I had a sense that this unconditional love was overflowing inside of my heart, but it wasn't until that moment and her reflection back to me that I saw a new path of love emerging inside of me. And while it was so unfamiliar to be able to cultivate or even want to cultivate, keeping my heart open in the midst of it feeling destroyed and rejected and humiliated.
This is what was unfolding. And I know that my nervous system was looking for familiar. It would have been so much easier for me to grab onto the thoughts of anger and blaming him and making him wrong or even making myself wrong, which I did quite often. That was a big part of my journey was just coming out of the familiar protective mechanisms of using pain as ammunition towards myself or another instead of being in this larger, more expanded state where I could hold everything. And her reflection about the power of holding the multitude of paradoxes in love for him literally flipped a switch inside of myself. And I felt like I shifted from repeating states of victim consciousness into empowerment and actually celebration for the curriculum that I was working. And somehow understanding purpose and understanding what I was actually trying to teach myself really put everything in a different perspective. And that was also part of what was catalyzing me to stay out of the old familiar patterns of blame and judgment and to know I'm working something else out and I am not gonna give up here. Sometimes we sense a new way of being, but it seems so unfamiliar. Like perhaps it's even wrong because it's so unfamiliar. And yet it's an evolutionary leap. And in this case, without her seeing and celebrating me, I'm not sure if I would have had the shift. I probably would have continued to dismiss this quiet, powerful presence and just override the blossoming that was happening in my heart because I probably would have gone back
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into repeating these narratives of rejection and shame and pain and probably would have continued to have external validation from others about he doesn't deserve you. And I understand where those come from, but they weren't helpful in terms of me being able to hold it all. So as you can imagine, this day changed the course of my grieving process. And when the shame and narratives of rejection would arise, I would keep drawing on this message.
Love him with all of your heart as a way to honor how your heart loves. And with this message, which I often listen to from the audio recording, I could viscerally feel my heart open and I could feel the grief transforming away from those seductive narratives and humiliation of my early trauma and into these expanded states of acceptance. When I say expanded state, like not out of body, but like deep in my bones, acceptance and friendliness towards myself. This quiet, peaceful stillness was starting to just fill my being. And it didn't mean that I didn't have spikes of overwhelm and I'd cry in the middle of the grocery store and hear a song that was on our playlist. And, you know, it doesn't mean that I didn't still have the spikes, but it meant that my ability to tap into this heart intelligence was how I was healing trauma.
And the more that I could be friendly towards every part of my experience, the more these fragmented parts of myself just seemed to fall in line. They seemed to just come deep into resting inside of my heart. Basically, my heart was showing me how to alchemize these painful narratives in my mind into embodied sense of wholeness, into really deeply trusting myself and trusting the presence of peace, even when I'm in the middle of grief and just such heartbreak that there was also peace, that everything coexisted. And of course, this was a moment to moment practice. And in the beginning, shame and humiliation, they fucking ruled. Friendliness towards myself was like really hard to come by. And these relentless waves of grief. mean, it was a slow drip campaign for me to find friendliness. It took me months to build
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the awareness muscle required to consciously elicit kindness and to actually feel the heart intelligence at work, even in the middle of these spikes of trauma. But over time, I could actually see them coexisting and I could see myself have a conscious choice. Which one do you want to give more attention to? Where do you want to place your attention? The most difficult place to extend compassion was towards this one particular narrative, that his withdraw and his unwillingness to stay in and grow through the relationship challenges, that somehow that was personal about me, that his choice to walk away somehow scored in my system as a personal rejection. And basically that ignited this feeling of like, God, am I even lovable? So prior to that pivot point with Sean and my mentor that day, I had spent grueling months in extreme states of activation and grief that sometimes could only be met by me taking a deep breath. My breath became my refuge. I had studied breath work with my Kundalini teacher and I was using my breath to see. I mean, I didn't believe it with my mind. I was like, are you kidding me? Like how I can't even feel my breath right now. But I used it as a practice over time to find out, is it true? Is it true that I can actually shift my state by shifting my breath?
And shifting the focus of where my nervous system is with practice specific practices. And the answer was yes. My breath became my refuge. My breath was the way that I was able to move from states of when the trauma would spike and the narrative would just have me spinning into Anne-Marie stop, take a long slow breath. And in that breath, even though I could feel the expanded, you know, the state of trauma, I could also feel a softening. So the shame and judgment narratives, they were like wild cowboys riding in the landscape of my tender and vulnerable heart. And, you know, I would often become very impatient with myself. Why am I still grieving? He moved on so quickly. Why is it taking me so long to let go, to accept, to move on? And I remember one friend lovingly saying to me, sister, he may be fucking a bunch of women,
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but you have no idea what's happening in his heart. And she quoted something from the I Ching and she said, be cautious of that narrative, babe. Be cautious of that narrative that he doesn't love you. And she was right. I had no idea what was going on for him. I could continue to reinforce this narrative, which ended up feeling like shit in my body, or I could hold one that was more real and true, such as like, I don't know. I don't know what he thinks. I don't know what he feels, but I love him with my whole heart. And her clipping that narrative gave me the space to rewrite how I was unconsciously reinforcing this painful belief about myself. Most days before dawn, I would wake up in deep despair. It was just visceral. And part of it was my attachment system unwinding from his attachment system, which, my God, I could spend a whole episode on what I learned about the chemicals in our body and what happens for women when they're deeply, when they've deeply opened themselves sexually to another, what happens for men, it's different for men and women. But I digress. What I want to share is that during this time of deep despair in the morning in the darkness, I initially just started doing voice recordings on my phone just to process my feelings. But very quickly, this actually turned into what felt like transmissions from this loving presence.
And it was basically, I was tapping into kindness. It felt like I was speaking to my higher power. So for months, I would continue to reach to the source of love for anchoring. I would do it through these voice messages and I would find softness, perspective, kindness. And this energy and presence really filled my heart and my psyche each day. Often it would only provide a momentary relief, but it was laying the tracks of something new. It was laying a pathway for me to have a different experience.
And so I committed myself to this daily practice and sometimes I would even double down and I would do it at bedtime too. It was basically my main form of therapy. I was taking slow and tiny sips of unconditional love from this space and in the face of some of my deepest core wounds. So it actually felt really victorious and it felt completely transforming despite it being so messy. I was so raw and I was so wild in my grief. But
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I was finding love and kindness for parts of my experience that carried the most shame and had been one of the most significant power reclamations. And this just kept happening one after another. Every time I could shift from the narrative of that, you know, fueled by shame and there were, you know, narratives of rejection, humiliation that I had referred to earlier. Every time that I could shift from that, I would come back into even just the tiniest bit of acceptance. It felt like I was literally, like I said a few minutes ago, laying down tracks for a new way of being. And it felt like I was learning how to embrace in an unconditional way both my wild self, the one that could hold everything, and my domesticated self that was so wounded. And the domesticated self, I think it holds a significant amount of shame and suppression in many of us.
I think it's just part of our shared humanity. It's part of a cultural conditioning. And so when expressed with another, you know, and sharing this with one another, can release, it can release us from a prison of thinking that we're alone. And I love how Brene Brown talks about shame and how shame suffers in silence. It grows in silence. And so the importance is finding someone who is worthy and has, it has shown the kindness and the ability to meet us and hold us in our shame.
So during this time, I studied how and when I sought safety from the outside of myself because I really needed to see where am I seeking refuge externally and abandoning my own wisdom and my own sense of rest and peace inside. And this allowed me to slowly start mapping a new landscape for how to seek safety from within. was basically a new way to be held by my wild and wise self while the roots of my core trauma began to unravel.
So over two years of this loss and deconstruction, it was clear to me very quickly that I was given the curriculum of learning how to remain openhearted and resilient while drinking from a fire hose of loss, death, attachment, panic, and deconstruction. There was just no way. There was no way of waiting until the storm passes because at this point, and this was occurring to me actually sooner, this was probably a few months into it, but I realized that
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like, I have a business to run and yes, I have a heartbreak to tend to, but I have a life that I need to keep tending to. And at that point I was also, I was not able to find a home initially right away. And so I was bouncing from Airbnb to friend's house to another Airbnb and simultaneously looking for a house. I moved over 30 times in nine months. was quite the journey. And so in a way, there was no way I could feel safe inside of that much loss and uncertainty without finding a way to harness the power of my nervous system in the states of my mind. And so this led me fervently tracking my own narratives and my intention to interrupt the way that they were reinforcing painful stories that kept me really imprisoned. And the main message about befriending the nervous system that I want to share today is that, and I'll share more about this, but it's really about understanding our wiring, understanding our attachment style, really can be very helpful in any relationship, but accessing the heart intelligence. And so I'll be bringing an expert guest into this and we'll be talking so much more about how to befriend the nervous system over time. But here's the heart of it. This is really what I want to share about the nervous system today. The state of our nervous system drives the states of our mind.
And each narrative assumption and perception of reality just reinforces the story of who we are or who we're not. And if unattended, these narratives have the power to reinforce habituated impulses to control our lives and basically everything in it. And it's not because that level of vigilance is fun. It's because we believe it's the only way to create and maintain safety is to be vigilant.
And each narrative will either reinforce the parasympathetic aspect of our nervous system, the aspect that emanates a sense of calm, trust, open-mindedness, and acceptance. This is also called the ventral vagal or a state of resiliency. Or another state that can be reinforced is the sympathetic state, which is the state of doing, taking action, which is beautiful that we have this capacity. when we're
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triggered by a psychological, emotional, or physical threat. There's a certain kind of hypervigilance that drives hyperdoing and hyperaction, which can quite honestly take us away from ourselves because we're operating so much in these identities of who we think we're supposed to be. And then the third area of a nervous system state and state of mind that is associated with it is called the dorsal vagal. And this is when we're in a collapsed state.
It's usually when we feel helpless, depressed, despondent, and we don't really know how to mobilize. This is when there's procrastination and we just can't get ourselves engaged. And each serves a function, each of these three parts of our nervous system, the ventral vagal, which is the resilient state, the sympathetic, which is the active state, and then the dorsal vagal, which is the collapsed state. They all serve a function when we're in a real threat response, but anything that's used to an extreme can become problematic. Especially, like I said earlier, when these states ping pong around, but they're based on perceived threats rather than real ones, we're basically just taking ourselves on a ride. Most of our culture, myself included, have been wired to walk around with limbic system overactivation, or some call this limbic system impairment. This represents being stuck in high states of sympathetic charge without coming down for rest, without taking the time to reset our system, we stay vibrating in a very high doing, acting, moving space. It's an out of balance baseline from which one operates on a daily basis or even for months or years and some for an entire lifetime, which means we have become used to living in and reinforcing highly overactive states of mind and body, which notably driven at a subconscious level by anxiety and fear.
And this can be both physical threats that drive this, but in our modern day, most likely it can be also driven by psychological or emotional threats. And as a result, certain behaviors, addictions and beliefs are reinforced through desperately seeking the next distraction or the next big experience or the next escape. And from here, our nervous system seeks more adrenaline rushes, more dopamine hits, more caffeine,
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more activities or substances that are gonna soothe our overactive mind. I these are really all innocent attempts to feel safe, to feel okay, to feel alive, and to establish a sense of importance. Maybe even for some of us, this hyperdrive is just to simply mark our existence, to prove that we are here making a difference, doing the right thing, being loved, being remembered.
And operating from the hyperactivity of mind and body can often make it more challenging to access this parasympathetic state, which translates as the loss of our intuitive sense, our inner guidance, and even insights into additional options to interrupt perceived dead ends or impasses. Because the parasympathetic state is our ground of creative ideas. It's our ground of innovation, and it's the place in which our innate wisdom can be most witnessed and felt. So I wonder, is there really safety and rest living in a system that has inadvertently been wired towards constantly seeking, doing, achieving, proving, performing without access to rest? How much of our intuition and our higher wisdom do we unknowingly steamroll when we're in highly activated states of anxiety and doing?
I'm sure you've noticed this in yourself, that it can be more challenging to be creative or even generate more options and even to access our deeper well of wisdom when we're in a reactive state of mind. I was working with a client the other day and he's a really successful executive, but an overwhelming schedule. And sometimes when he hits that overwhelm, he literally feels like he goes into that collapse on the nervous system ladder that I spoke to earlier, that dorsal where he has no ability to keep moving. But if we take the time to talk about different options, he feels just there are no options. The only option is to plow through work nights, work the weekends, and have no life. But if we back up together, when he's in that state, he gets to lean on my prefrontal cortex and the co-regulation, and we talk about what other options there are. And before long, he's unstuck, and he's able to keep moving. So
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I know it for me, it's been undeniable that when I relax, I have a higher access to my heart intelligence, my intuition. I'm able to see new narratives that are actually more loving and kind than some of the cruel ones that might be repeating in my mind. And this is one way that I'm becoming my own safe haven, my own inner refuge. So I intentionally take responsibility for the state of my nervous system and the associated mental and emotional states that come with it, based on where I'm living inside of my whole being. And it takes energy and devotion and time to map our inner landscape and to build this level of intimacy with our conditioning. But without understanding the terrain, it's much more difficult to interrupt or transcend it. So as far as I can see, we either remain an overdrive, which can look like an over-identification with patterns of doing and high states of experiences or even driven by anxiety and fear, or we break free through resetting our nervous system's baseline from the sympathetic overstimulation to learning how to cultivate more ability to feel parasympathetic rest and to have a quieter sense of moving through our lives with friendliness and with higher intelligence, more accessible when we slow down.
So the greater our courage to boldly bushwhack through the jungle of our fear-based narratives or our fear-based shame and the conditioned strategies that protect our heart, the greater refuge we become for all of our parts, which of course ripples to everyone that we encounter. There's one more key contributor that I want to talk about today that reinforces this limbic system over activation, and it's a piece of cultural conditioning. So I'll be elaborating on this a lot with future guests, but for now I want to begin with this question. Do you think the concept of punishment or sin is a collective control mechanism? Do you think there are psychological scripts planted in the mainstream consciousness that attempt to disempower the masses? Such as shameful narratives about, for example, women who enjoy sex are called sluts or someone being selfish for having needs could just be someone
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that has the need to feel cared for, to feel kindness, to feel loving touch. And why does that sometimes get pathologized as being selfish or having needs? Personally, I feel that punishment is a patriarchal control mechanism. It's a subtle programming from structures of power over that set forth an agenda to fuel this subliminal belief that if we suffer, we must have sinned, and therefore we somehow deserve the pain.
And paradoxically, the belief that we deserve suffering or punishment makes any struggle twice as painful and confusing. And this is how patterns of self-criticism, shame, and powerlessness are fed and maintained. Some collective belief systems have been embedded with shame and guilt, which has the power to keep us small, diminished, paralyzed, and even confused. These are the kinds of beliefs that orient our psyche towards fear and helplessness.
And eventually we give our power away without even knowing it. Sometimes these fear-based power over tactics, such as manipulating others to get our needs met, are just a means to manage our own vulnerability in a world that has so many scripts about who we're supposed to be. So it's time for these shameful patterns to deactivate. It's time for collective rewiring that allows for empowering ways of seeing ourselves and the world.
So I want to return back to this dark night that I'm slowly crawling my way out of. And recently I shared with someone that I was resurrecting from a dark night of the soul. And he said to me, what does that mean exactly? The term dark night of the soul dates back centuries to written accounts of mystics and spiritual revolutionaries from diverse religious backgrounds. And these sages described the dark night as a metaphorical passage in the desert of our subconscious and our psyche, which modern day neuroscience would refer to as a passage through our default network system. But many report very similar journeys, inner landscapes and deserts that include deconstructing their identification with the ego, limiting beliefs, as well as their religious, social, and cultural conditioning. The phrase, dark night of the soul, is used to describe what happens when the conceptual frameworks of our life and the associated meaning that we have ascribed to them fall apart.
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The process can feel completely disorienting, confining, and devastating to our sense of self. It's often described as an ego death. And a dark night invites us to embrace a metamorphosis process of deconstructing and resurrecting. And more often than not, we're shedding outdated ways of being in order to rebirth into a brighter version of ourselves. Sometimes ways of operating actually need to die.
Dark nights provide us with the opportunity to integrate core wounds and reclaim our power. Their common occurrence is when we hit our next threshold of evolution. I remember during Brene Brown's TED Talk on vulnerability, she laughingly recounts telling her therapist that she thought she was having a nervous breakdown. And much to her surprise, her therapist responds with, no, Brene, you're actually having a spiritual awakening. Each of my dark nights has resulted in a fruition of healing, liberation and empowerment. With each illumination and revelation, I see more clearly the source of my suffering and how I innocently have been reinforcing it. And with each dark night, usually some form of resurrection follows. My favorite symbol for resurrection is the phoenix rising. You've probably heard of this infamous immortal phoenix rising. It's become so mainstream that it holds its own place in the world of emojis now.
The phoenix is a mythical bird often depicted rising from the ashes after being consumed by flames, which symbolizes the power of transformation and renewal through destruction. Some say the phoenix was a daredevil flying too close to the sun and burned its wings out of arrogance and self-aggrandizement. Perhaps this archetype, as our unhealed wounds, is responsible for initiating our change and growth. I suppose it depends on our personal cosmology of what it means to be human and spirit. Some say the phoenix is an archetype for humans' ability to burn through outdated ways of operating as a means to be reborn. In other words, some form of ego death, purifying our own conditioning, freeing from our identification with fear and powerlessness. This legend says that near the end of the phoenix life,
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it settles into a nest of dusty old twigs and proceeds to burn the house down, reducing itself and its nest into dust. And from the ashes, a fledgling phoenix rises, renewed and reborn. The phoenix rising is symbolic of rebirth after complete destruction and death. And this mythological bird represents something about the nature of immortality and what aspects of us is everlasting regardless of the number of deaths, both physical and egoic. So back to my story. I'm in the process of resurrecting my own phoenix rising. The initiation is catalyzed by the loss of my home, my partnership, a health crisis, and eventually the death of my mom. All stacked together in short order. And when my former partner slammed the door shut to our profound bond, I was bewildered and shocked, as I said earlier. It was so similar to when my brother died and disappeared off the planet. And when we're forced to find relationship closure on our own, I think the grieving process takes more time. I don't know if that's true, but for me, it's been very different to have sudden death or someone shut down and not be able to talk or connect and be in some kind of closure together.
The sudden death of my brother left me as a 13 year old with endless questions about God, life, belonging, and the scary empty void that I felt when he died. The same was true with this relationship. My former's partner, his withdrawal and closing his heart down, just, it left me to find the closure on my own. I didn't have the benefit of asking questions to learn about what happened for him or why his migraines made him unable to talk about emotions and how my suggestion for us to take space so he could regulate his migraines and nervous system resulted in a slam door. What made him give up so when it got hard? I had to learn to live with not knowing and finding a way to accept reality as it was without blaming myself and without blaming him for the outcome. What I felt most proud of is that I kept my promise to him and to myself,
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and I stayed in the love. And the phrase staying in the love was what we often said when we would bump into difficult choices and crossroads, that we were gonna stay in the love no matter what. And that felt important to me. I didn't wanna allow blame or alienation to poison our beautiful love. I felt compassion for him in the way his heart shut down. And I knew that it was probably one of the only ways for him to move forward with his life. And man, it took me months, literally months to eventually feel that compassion and love I had towards him fought towards myself and finding that friendliness towards me and the young and disoriented parts that had been ignited from early trauma rising as a result of this experience. And as I mentioned earlier, just under one year into this dark night passage, I found myself a death doula to my mom. And during her final days, it was just the two of us kept company by her little dog, Angel.
I made my mom her last meal, shepherd's pie with mashed cauliflower. We read from a file of poems and scriptures that she wanted to share at the celebration of life. We talked about her life, the heartbreaks and the blessings. And ironically, this day was a Friday, March 31st, the day that my brother was born. It was so moving to me to be in this conversation on my brother's birthday, had passed decades before, having a conversation with my mom about her preparing to leave. And later that day, I watched her from across the room writing on this purple envelope, which eventually made its way to my bedside table. I noticed on the cover was the familiar cursive writing of my name, Anne Marie, on the cover. It ended up being my birthday card that would take place just 17 days after she died. She was tracking my birthday during her moment of death. I was floored.
Day by day, I administered her morphine while verbally celebrating her life and courageous decision to let go, to rest, to feel how loved and adored she is, to actually become peace again. And she did. Initially, she was on a crusade to fight for her life through doggedly pursuing clinical trials and other last measure options. But one evening, I needed to deliver some honest and hard truth,
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that I had learned that day about these potential clinical trials, and they involved her jumping through numerous medical hoops, which would take weeks, maybe even months, to then only be placed on a lottery from which she may or may not be selected for this final clinical trial. The waiting, given her symptoms, was daunting to her, and that was a sobering discussion, but she was still ready to fight. She was still ready to do this on Monday. So I went to bed, overwhelmed and tired, and I prayed, please guide her to make the decision that is in the highest good for us all. And the next morning, I returned from Walking Angel and I popped my head into my mom's bedroom to see how she was doing. And immediately I was moved by this tremendous shift in the room. Her eyes, her face, her whole body had softened. And that fight that I felt the night before, like coming through her eyes and her tight body, was replaced with something else. And in the softest, gentle voice, she said, Anne Marie, I know what we can do. And I said, what's that, mom? And she said, I can go into hospice now. And we sat there in silence while tears streamed down my face. And I said, mom, I think that's a really good idea. And these tears were tears of joy because it was incredible to watch her come into this readiness and this peacefulness in her own time.
My mom got to choose her death. I've never seen my mom surrender to this in this way to anything in her life. She was a fighter. She was a stand back up, keep going no matter how hard the knocks are kind of gal. And here she was, soft, open, ready and fearless. It really felt like grace, like beauty and the mystery of compassionate work. It was a profoundly sacred experience to midwife her out of her body and to watch her take her final breath, just over five decades after she birthed me into the world and watched me take my first one. I have so much to share about forgiveness, surrender, death, rebirth, and love, but I'll save those for later episodes. But by the time my mom was ready to die, I was more trained than I had realized to access deep inner peace and deep listening in the midst of chaos and in the midst of making really difficult decisions. Because prior to her death, I had
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almost a year under my belt of practicing befriending my nervous system, I was now operating at a whole new level of capacity and skill. And the discipline that I had brought to down regulating my nervous system was weaving a beautiful tapestry of acceptance, peace and presence within myself. And my mom actually felt it, maybe before even I did, because at one point she looked at me and she said, Anne Marie, you are true peace.
Thank you for showing me the path of peacefulness. And from a mother who had a difficult time seeing me or accurately reflecting myself back to me, this was the most powerful reflection that I could have ever received before she died. That's a bit about my dark night and the losses, the shame, the resiliency, and the expanding capacity to hold it all without making anyone wrong. Of course, it's been a practice, but there'll be more to come on befriending our nervous systems, which includes our attachment style, our hard intelligence, and the capacity to hold all these paradoxes and complex contradictions all at once. So I really feel like embracing life's challenges are our initiations, and they have the power to reveal a deep well of wisdom that lives within all of us. And dismantling our conditioning, which I also refer to as our domestication, activates the source of our personal power and brings forward our medicine for the world, because initiations are the path of evolution. They crack us open, they break us down, they leave us breathless. And eventually through their alchemy and transmutation, they present us with gems of wisdom. They're the pathway through which we retrieve our personal light and our power. And if we're honest about what we see, we'll need to admit that life on earth is filled with hardships and it's filled with the unknown and loss.
And evolutionary process through these fires is the empowerment gained by rising again and again. Rising to live, to love, and to embody our fullest heart, wisdom, and destiny. To be human is to traverse a lifetime of micro and macro initiations. And each one of us is a hero or a heroine on a mysterious journey of experiencing pleasure and love and connection, but also encountering
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repeating patterns of anxiety, darkness, loss, and heartbreak. In each lifetime, we may undergo a thousand heroic journeys. And some are small and almost imperceptible, while others cut a swath across the totality of our lives. In either way, each one reveals to us how we hide, protect, or grasp for recognition, essentially whatever the flavor of ego identification is that we've been orienting from.
These journeys are often a reorientation of our reality and our sense of self. And your personal life story has healing components for the whole of humanity. And your ability to grow and self-reflect and course-correct reactive behaviors, thought patterns, and ways of orienting do ripple benefits to every single one of us. Choosing to integrate these exiled parts organically opens more space to rest into our authenticity and into the truth, of our inherent worthiness. So while awakening to the truth of who we are is a deeply personal journey, it doesn't happen in isolation. There is a mass movement underway in which people across the world are aflame with a similar mission and purpose. And each time we find one another, we strengthen our reserves and we plug our life into the larger electrical current of a tipping point of consciousness. This is a personal and collective journey, and our stories need to be told.
They fuel our courage to keep going into the darkness and to retrieve our gifts. They inspire others to embolden their own courage and take the leap with us. Our children, oceans, forests, and all the species that roam this planet need revolutionary leaders who are willing to take responsibility from the inside out. Brave hearted people who embrace disowned aspects of self and own the impact that their adaptive strategies have on themselves and those they love.
It's good to be back. Stay tuned for a lineup of inspiring guests who will engage us on the topics that fall within the six power reclamation gateways. And a quick refresher of those six gateways is that the first is centering power. And this is our ability to manage our reactivity and sustain a calm presence, especially in times of uncertainty and change or even just extreme complex life experiences. The second is relational power.
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And this is the art of consciously engaging and loving transparent and co-creative relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with all of life. The third is self-acceptance power, which I'm also referring to as friendliness power after this dark night. And this is defined as compassionately and courageously discovering and befriending and integrating as well, exiled parts of ourselves home into the fullness of our hearts. This is where I truly feel that our heart intelligence has the power to heal trauma and that there's a different way to go about this that isn't just through our mind. The fourth is wild power, which is a devotion to the passionate roar within each one of us that seeks to dismantle social and cultural domestication in order to claim our most authentic self and our most free and sovereign self. The next is intuitive power, and this is the ability to listen, and cultivate a connection to our whole being wisdom. This includes the intelligence of our mind, our heart, our emotions, our body sensations, and our gut instincts. And lastly is erotic power. This is the capacity to intentionally direct our life force and our creative energy towards states of union, joy, innovation, and pleasure in all areas of our lives. I mean, obviously this is part of our sexual expression, but it's not just there. This is our life force.
So in 2025, I'll be launching the Power Reclamation Ground Zero program, which will cover how to reset your nervous system from this over-functioning, sympathetic doing into an easeful pendulation between doing and rest, which ultimately is where our safety and our inner authority and our sense of belonging can be most felt and be most met, both inside and outside. I'll be offering a community platform for us to gather with various offerings each week, as well as sharing more about the leadership immersions that I've been offering for the last three years, which are deep private dives with me over the course of six or 12 months. So stay tuned to all of that. And lastly, if you have a burning topic related to power or embodiment or leadership or unified love, please send them to me. I'd love to address what's alive for you. hope you enjoyed the show today. If you want more, you can subscribe to this channel,
Anne-Marie Marron (01:19:31.842)
This will automatically queue up the next episode for your listening. If you have a burning question or topic you want to learn more about, please send an email to Ask Anne Marie. The direct link is located in the show notes. And please leave a review. This keeps me inspired and focused to bring you more. If you want to learn more about my work as a Power Reclamation guide, leadership coach, and organizational culture consultant, you can visit my websites in the notes. Thank you again for joining today.