May 10th, 2010:  A New Frontier

I’m looking to a new territory and it seems vast from here but I’m dramatic.  I’m looking to a new way of being, a new frontier.  New in the sense of going where no Connie has ever been before.  Cue the music.

For the past few days I feel like I’ve been teetering between feeling great and feeling teary/depressed/afraid.  I know too much now to cave to the negativity and I’ve been able to focus pretty much on staying in a positive state.  Good for me.  But I’ve been having a growing feeling of being on the verge of big movement into an unknown place.  A place where I feel more expansive and free and a place where I will continue to expand in order to bring what I want into my life.   So, what’s my hesitation?  Just go Girl, go!

Going to this new place requires me to shed the skin of caring about what other people think about me.  And that may sound strange in the ears of anyone who knows me because I always have had a nonconformist streak.  But the fear of what someone may think of me is not a particularly rational one.  It is probably of preverbal origins.

This reminds me of women at the agency where I worked for 32 years.  These were women involved in the criminal justice system.  It was common for a woman to believe that her incarceration had no effect on her baby, or her drug use, or the domestic violence, had no effect on her children because they are too little to remember it.  Ouch! 

Actually the most formative years of our lives are birth to three years of age.  Those are the most critical years in terms of healthy development, hands down.  There are just some concepts and ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us that are recorded deeply into what is called the reptilian brain.   It is the most primitive part of our brains and the one that records the earliest data.   One famous family therapist said we don’t respond to our family’s with any kind of logic or reasoning, we just twitch to them like reptiles.  You get the picture.

So, when I face a new Frontier of Being, breathing past some anxiety I can’t even name is in the process.  But what I know over rides any fear.  And what I know is that I can’t NOT go.  It defies who I am.  So what do I need to go to a new frontier.  I’ll need a compass, some support, great self care which primarily includes shedding the self judgements and the I can’ts.  And the new frontier feels like freedom, more freedom than I have known to date.  What I DO need to do is breathe and breathe deeply. 

With Love, Connie