What have I learned now that I am nearly at this halfway through life maker? I have learned that everyone has a wake-up moment coming for them. Once it comes, the true magical turning point of your life is how to extend that moment into your forever classroom. Learning is more than hard times and getting through them. All the lessons are there in the first 21 years of life, we just need tools to enter the classroom of what has already happened so that who you think you are can die a thousand times and moving on transforms to moving up inside yourself to more and more authenticity. When you know yourself, nothing can really challenge that kind of knowing.
Wisdom is not in the age we get to claiming we’ve “lived and learned”. An ego death is often what teaches us the most. In my own life, self-destruction, has played a role in my growth and I see this in all humans. The person we mismatched with and stayed with too long, the destructive workplace we had to put up with, and knowing you are holding in pain and taking it out in ways that neither you or others completely understand. We distrust our past pain and therefore it might be vented from time to time, but it takes a walloping dose for us come to the classroom it can be.
Mostly this is a messy time when an event triggers inner work, but I have learned it does not have to be this way. Through pain and unprocessed trauma, for me, came clarity. No one will save you, but there are tools for inner knowing that is such profound wisdom that you will feel saved by your own insights, power from your own facing things, and pleasure for your own ability to look kindly and love your story, scars and all. We don’t live and learn, we let ego die a bit, pick up the tools for inner work, and see ourselves. Some might call it a search for truth, I have found it to be a journey of trust. Trust yourself and everything becomes more trustworthy. Hold yourself accountable and everything becomes a vehicle for more accountability. When I see what is on the news, the attention it requires from me to get to my fear center, I remember I am doing the inner work, processing and reprocessing experience in a classroom for personal wisdom, and the news media is not doing this. Now my mind broadcasts solutions to fear through inner work, the news broadcasts fear in progress without any filter. So, now I know internally what to listen and consume, things that feel like solutions. Do inner work and it “works” everywhere in life. Consume the things that feel like healing and repair, not more labels for what is wrong. The kind of therapy we may all need is a re-education on the past through tools for inner work, not much is in our control besides this.
We think we prepare for life by learning things so that we can go out and find our purpose. What I have learned is the purpose was always there in every memory that was created, in our core personality, in our family dynamic, in met and unmet needs, in the smallest of slights and the iconic hard things. The moved-on life where we work and become something, acquire roles like parent, spouse, partner, employee or voter, is a way to be in the world and survive it but there is a multidimensionality to life that includes being able to be in thrive and go back to survival in doses as needed. I spent a long time unknowingly waiting for safety. In the meantime, I wired myself like a guard at the gates of my life but not inside it.
Today, and everyday since beginning to live inside my life with The Toolbox Approach (TM) to guide me through facing myself, I had another classroom moment. I was walking in a crosswalk, enjoying these safe little lines that give me permission to cross the street, and exercise my body while doing so. All the cars were told to stop and let me do my thing. I like my safety, I like the rules being followed by other people. If I am honest, I was wondering if I like safety a little too much. I was in the middle of this thought, and coincidentally, the middle of the crosswalk when an SUV barreled past me and spun me out of my safety. That is what it felt like, the vehicle’s speed and closeness pushed me like a spinning top, and I whirled and yelped at the closeness of it all. I was fine but I could feel the danger and close call vibrating through me. I heard a man say, “are you okay?” and barely registered the equally shocked man leaning out of his SUV to check on me.
Was I okay? No one ever asked me that before, not like this, right in the moment of wrongdoing that didn’t end up completing the wrongness but while it was still heavily present in the air. It was just a close call, he didn’t actually hurt me, but tears started to open, and I nodded him away for privacy. My classroom began calling me, my past experience was ready to tell me something about almost getting hurt badly, the missing words of concern, no one stopping to ask or acknowledge, “I almost killed you, but I didn’t, I didn’t mean to, maybe I was sort of in my own world, are you okay?”. I think we can all get emotional about this if you let yourself. We all have a past coming up as you absorb what I am telling you here. If affected me when this happened, but not because of the surface level objective danger of it all, anyone would feel something after a close call. We do this a lot in life, share things like, “I was really feeling sick, but it was COVID and my co-worker had it last week so that makes sense”, and leave out the way you’ve lost sleep for weeks, don’t feel the same about your relationship, and hate your career and wish you had more courage or support to change somehow. We have a strange miseducation on processing experience and even when some of us try to go back to look at it for the lessons, they can be very cognitive and short-lived epiphanies. The deeper conversation between you and you is why I developed The Toolbox Approach (TM). I am a trauma therapist that specializes in trust and trauma informed tools and modalities for healing, but the most profound and life-saving trust came from the inner healing I did with myself. All I can really do is share and trust you will make the tools your own.
The almost hit by an SUV experience can showcase how to hold on to something and bring it to your classroom. Most of us want to share about something too soon or hold onto it like an upload of messy social media content and just push it out without real understanding of what we want from our audience and what the content even means to us. Doing inner work helps me feel seen and heard by myself first, it helps me possess alone time, not suffer it. I create space for the time it takes because I have a life that got shaken many times and I never knew I had a choice and power in me to go inward before I go outward and move on. The moving on, in fact, is an act and takes endless outer work to keep up, inner work builds and builds on itself, and the structure becomes so strong that there is no chink in any facade, it is all real through and through. I could shake off this SUV close call and shake it off and move on, but where is the lesson in that for me?
Since doing inner work, I feel so much more aware as a trauma therapist of self-deceptive helping. No one can really tell me what came up for me with regard to my almost accident, would it help for another person to show me what came up and how to feel better? What about the next time, and the next? We need tools for reprocessing experiences, slowing them down. I try to transfer these tools to people because there is no perfect understander of your story. The only way we can get anywhere close to perfection is through giving you the tools to your own perfect understander. The past is not the past, there is no such thing as get over it, you are forever not over it and if you try to be you stop your classroom. Learning is life, education is not something you get before you start your life, it is life long and it is up to you. I want to challenge you to read on and to look at the past as your curriculum.
The past is carefully woven for you to come back to with tools for unraveling stitches, removing patch jobs, and sewing together new meaning with the same material. Rumination is a key sign that the past you have needs your help. Avoidance is another sign you want to repress, resist and suppress the content that can lead you to your classroom. Your re-education happens in the classroom of your past but first you have to find that hallway and walk down it. How can we do that? We have to be careful revisiting the past. Like today, it was not just a close call, I choked back deeper tears and had to keep walking to get home and get to work, I didn’t have time for a classroom moment and so many of us don’t even know what that is. We create baggage and armor because no one knows about the classroom. To find the classroom you have to have awareness that you have an experience being held onto. Something happened in the deep past, often your youth, or in your adult life past that is closer to the surface of now, or even in the recent past year, month, week or day.
Sometimes we run down the hallway and slam ourselves into a friend or therapist, family member or partner, or even a stranger to get it out and free ourselves of what is coming up. To get to the classroom first you have to find the hallway called personal responsibility. If you run down the hall, claiming something or someone happened to you, you will run down that hall for a long time. A lot of people will hear what you are saying but no one is going to be much help and you will not hear yourself, or it will take a long time to see what is happening. I did have an urge to hop into a family email and give directions for publishing my book and the steps for the working with the publisher on my vision if I died. Yes, I honestly had that thought and urge quite quickly but I knew that was SO UNPROCESSED. It is not that I was not thinking but it was messy social media content, and I had no idea what I really wanted from my audience.
In the Hallway of Your Experience
When I was a child there was this phrase “grown up talk”. The message that landed in me was that the grown-ups got all the real conversations and I was hard pressed to grow up fast so I could participate. We all have versions of not being allowed to talk, it is not an overt message but a covert one. So many families have “strong boy” messages or “good girl” ones. The child that does not get the adults upset or distracted from what is important is good and yet just being a child involves doing exactly that. This is a profound trauma for anyone I have ever met, the fragmented messages for sharing our experiences all have a rightness or a wrongness implied in them.
So, being in the hallway of your experience is a tool for all of us to feel safe from that fear. The urge to share has been damaged. For some it comes like a tug of war, I need to but I can’t. For others it comes like a hunger strike, I do not need to and I will not do it. Still others find it is more like vomiting, where they can’t believe what came out and how awful they still feel. There are those that learn the sharing recipe that works for them and others and yet their lesson is not always relatable to someone else as guidance.
In the hallway of your experience is a phrase that is a tool for what you need to share with yourself so that you can come to the classroom of your experience. After the classroom, the relating your experience to and with others closes a special circle of understanding. When this is repeated over time, healing and strength is the result. The core character in you blooms and you see that you were never broken.
Steps to Take in Your Hallway
I moved on with my day after the SUV incident, but I marked it down mentally to go back to. I do a daily practice that I can condense to about 5 minutes. It is offered here in this article where I explain the 20-minute version. Basically, I write down fears and anxieties I have for 45 seconds, resentments and frustrations for another 45 seconds, and pressures I have for another 45 seconds. Then I write for 90 seconds about the one out of the three that I wish would just lift out of me and why. Sometimes I skip days but knowing the practice is there helps because certain days I am tugged at to come to it. That was the SUV incident day and that is how I knew to stay in the hallway on it.
When I came back to it the first step I took was to float back to where it happened in my body. To do this you can place three fingers in the middle of your forehead. This creates a little cave over your face. Breathe up and in over your hand into the top of your head and exhale such that you feel the breeze of your breath on the inside of your palm. Taking a couple of these breaths will center you. Then, on the next inhalation and release, the release breath will be the sound created when you say “EYYYYYYEEEEE”, extending the sound until you run out of breath. If you choose to listen above, I will demonstrate.
After this you are ready to float back visually to the experience as best you can. For me, I remembered the freedom of walking, I was really pumping to the music with my arms, I felt like I could not look at my surrounding because I was in the crosswalk and I can feel myself all pumping arms and heal to toe and thighs. I wear weights on my arms, and I felt them. I felt strong and free. Then I felt spun, falling, hit but not, and heard my yelp. I felt my hand over my heart the most out of everything in the experience, I kept putting it there and on my beltline. I didn’t even realize I could remember things like this but we all can. You have to be intentional and float back to the movie. I heard a man “are you okay?” and I felt some uncertainty and tears coming. Again, the most profound thing was the hand on my heart and belt line after, guiding me for where this all happened.
Now, this is the tool really at work. It is called somatic awareness. The best way I conceptualize it is through knowing the body centers: root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, forehead, and crown of the head. My hand over my heart and on my belt line let me know it all happened in the heart and sacral centers for me. Here is what the centers say when they are not okay. Centers cannot speak in words and that is why we try to honor and educate ourselves on the mind body connection. Connection to our centers as sources of information is helpful. It is not happening in any sharing that we know how to do in words. In the hallway you can access this, and it will help you get to the real classroom of experience you need. As you read, have an awareness that these centers can also be in “okay” mode as well and then have a different message lying there.
Root= I don’t feel physically safe. I am not sure if I have what I need. I am not sure if anyone is here to give me what I need. What if I am helpless and alone and no one comes to feed, clothe and shelter me?
Sacral= I don’t feel loved and cared about. Who is thinking of me? Do I matter? Is it emotionally safe to show myself and be considered enough? Who will cherish me? I don’t think I matter or am cherished at all.
Solar Plexus= I don’t feel like I can exert my will and know my purpose here. I want to say no, yes and make decisions but instead I feel like something prevents me and I cannot be strong enough to go my own way and feel good and effective. Am I important, does what I do matter?
Heart= I don’t feel connected to others. I am not sure if anyone wants to connect to me. I fear I have to be closed off to protect myself from dangerous connection. I fear I am forever too open and will be left empty and waiting for connection. I cannot trust. I am burned out from believing in trust.
Throat= I don’t have words for how I feel. I cannot say what hurts and ask for what I need. I want to say what is okay to do and not to do to me and why and tell others that I will not stay if they cannot listen to this. I want to say things about who I am and never lose the courage no matter what happens around me, but I don’t. I want to not speak or speak based on a deep sense of knowing but it isn’t there.
Forehead (third eye)= I don’t see myself in the future very clearly. I cannot see the growth and smile knowing it will happen. I feel like I see only struggle. I feel afraid to see. I want a plan, steps, and expected outcomes rather than a trusted vision that is gently just there as real future vision for myself. I don’t trust things could be better just by keeping self-promises. I have to know what the right thing is and what the outcome will be for my ego.
Crown= I won’t rise above this and see the greater purpose of all the things that happen in life. Everything is getting by, no one is connected to anyone and there is nothing in nature or the arts that speaks to me. This struggle is all there is.
This step involves being honest with yourself, “In that moment was I okay?”. No, I was not okay! This involves no cognitive interpretation, “I was okay, I was just flustered, and the tears were just for a second, that guy was nice and stopped, he realized he scared me”. Nope, I kept placing my hand on my chest and then more absently holding my beltline. It all happened in my heart and sacral. I had to realize I was in a place of “I don’t matter” and disconnection.
The second step involves watching my urge like a movie. The urge might have been acted upon, that happens, we have to deal with it. You can still come to the hallway and find your classroom of experience anyway. I wanted to send a family email “In case anything happens to me, promise me the publisher uses all I have written to share my vision of healing”. As embarrassing as it was to me that I really almost did this on my phone while I was walking but the sun glare was really bad, I went back to that part as well. I watched it and then rated its intensity on a scale from 0-10. I think it went from 8 to 7 as it was happening only because I am doing inner work. By the time I reached the top of the hill it was a 6 but again only because the walking helped me focus on getting to a goal, home and to the rest of the day which usually involves a pretty important timeline to stick to.
At this point, I know you might be thinking, does she really do this, is this really necessary? Well, it’s up to you, all I can say, and I think my family and patients would too, it must be working because I have come back to life by using my own tools and I was NOT OKAY for nearly two decades, but I am a present and an effective therapist with many fellow healing warriors to account that what I do with them works. I work on me, and I had to enter the classroom to learn what all the expertise could not tell me, our stories are aching to be reprocessed so we can know the healed versions and grow.
What Does this Remind Me of?
The next step is realizing that you can link this to something else because our somatic awareness is always speaking in timeless importance. How it felt, in somatic awareness, is based on how all the things like this feel. It’s like a painter’s color wheel; the categories of basic colors all have various tints. Your awareness of disconnection has a unique variation of tints when you look into your life. You can ask yourself, for example, was it disconnection like when I broke up with my first love? Or was it like when I lost my cat to a bladder infection? Maybe it was like when my brother and I estranged for several years?
For me, the SUV experience brought me back to something I never talk about. I was glad I was using tools because that told me that I have struggled to understand and process this experience to this day. I nearly died at a concert when I was 19. My family is aware it was a terrible night and accident given I had dental reconstruction for years, but that night I had a deep disconnection with life. I went down a dark tunnel, not a lighted near-death experience at all. Realizing I forced myself to be okay with it all upon waking in the hospital, rushing through all the stitching and bracing up of my teeth to keep my friends from waiting and so they could go back to the concert was a profound realization. This was my pattern with many of my traumas, if I could smile on the outside, I would be fine. The darkness I felt all around me when I was unconscious that night is something I realize now was a message of what can happen if you do not deal with your life. I remembered from a place that doesn’t fit the words of what actually happened. Now, in my reprocessing, I can sense that this and that many of my traumas happened to send messages; “come back to this, do not end up a dark soul”.
You may not have the traumas I have but you have linked experiences waiting for you to apply these steps to them and gently come to the classroom of your experience. Once you have linked something you write down, “I think this incident connects to………..”. Then begin the third eye meditation several times again. At this point, it could be time to consider the other articles in the Holding Space Subscription or finding a therapist to guide you through inner work. I have a book coming out soon, “You Are Not Broken. Break free from the fixing yourself mindset with The Toolbox Approach”. This will guide people through coming to inner work and introduce the Narrative Healing Phase. There are also a menu of courses coming up on Patreon, once we get good enrollment, we will alert participants of the 2025 start dates.
It’s up to you to let things call to you and walk, not run, down the hallway of your experience, then consider entering the classroom with The Toolbox Approach (TM).
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