Grief, Growth & Self‑Worth | Weekly Check‑In + Deep Audience Q&A

Happy Sunday!  

I hope you had a fun Fourth of July if you celebrate. I can’t say I did too much other than work on my Tarot presentation and teach a Fourth of July class for the community I live in. 

Deep questions this week, some relating to last week’s talk. Here is the link if you want to check that out first: Letting Go and Beginning Again | Weekly Check In & Audience Q&A.

Plans for the upcoming week

On YouTube:  

A 40‑minute full‑body and strength hip‑opening flow.

On Patreon:  

On the Yoga tier, you’ll receive a fresh new yoga class this week. I’m also beginning preparations for next week, when I’ll be taking a journey into the pines. The last time I visited those mountains, I had an encounter with a bear — it’s a wild, beautiful area. I would prefer no bear this time lol, at least not at such a close distance :)

For our Esoteric tier: a full‑length somatic sensuality class. We will target the full body with hip circles, undulations, breath, booty isolations, and more. :)

https://youtu.be/By5Qnk87d1s?si=pzCc3XkkcxDhOWDo

Onwards with the questions—

1) How do you bring compassion to yourself when your thoughts are working against you?

The most important thing for me is to remember that it’s just a moment in time, and that I will not always feel this way. The other truth I try to hold onto in moments of feeling down, angry, or whatever the emotional upheaval is, is that my thoughts are not reflecting the truth. We’ve all experienced times when we tell ourselves things like: I’m a failure, I’m not good enough, everyone sucks, I hate my life. It’s important for me to remember that even when I can’t stop the spiraling thoughts, they are not true, and they will pass.

Anxiety is a good example of this. I used to have tons of anxiety and occasional panic attacks. Once I understood that the body can’t stay in that heightened state forever, I started relying on that to get back to homeostasis. For driving on the highway, I tell myself I may be crazy tense to begin with, but at some point, I will relax. For panic attacks, I keep breathing and verbally and mentally tell myself that it’s ok, that I am safe, that everything is going to be ok — like a mantra over and over.

In those states, I do not want to let my mind make up any other stories because it will come up with the craziest stuff and make things worse. Which is why I say our thoughts aren’t true. If I believe the thought that I’m going to die in a panic attack, everything gets worse. My thoughts are just trying to give me a story to go along with the discomfort I’m feeling.

When I suffer bouts of depression, I know it’s an exaggerated mess in my mind. I know my thoughts are working against me, and sometimes they do get the better of me, but unlike when I was younger, I know it won’t last. You can’t feel good all the time, and you can’t feel bad all the time. Gratitude is the depression killer, and breathwork and mantra are my go‑to for anxiety.

Anger and conflict are the hardest for me to overcome by will. When those mental loops start, I work on stopping the loop. Over and over, I come back to the moment and shift my thoughts to something else — a creative project, work, anything I actually have control over. You can’t stop your thoughts, but you can redirect them.

2) When you talked about feeling like a failure… where is that feeling coming from?

Last week I shared about having a hard time getting past feelings of failure around who I am when it comes to relationships and being as successful as I imagined. I place a lot of my self‑worth around being able to succeed, and I had always thought of myself as pretty savvy when it comes to relationships.

So when multiple things didn’t work out that I tried, and multiple close relationships went sour, all within a fairly short amount of time, feelings of inadequacy started to creep in. Since I had such high expectations for myself, it’s been hard to let go of needing my value to come from success and what others think of me, in particular, my family.

An extreme version of this would be people who lose all their assets and commit suicide. They placed their identity in their job and who they were with money, so when those things went south, it was unimaginable, and they couldn’t see their place in life anymore.

I placed a good chunk of my identity in who I was with my family and my ability to be likable and successful. So on a much milder scale, I’ve been having an identity crisis. Learning to be ok on my own and learning to accept that I can fail and still be an awesome human is where I’m at now. Life is beautiful, no matter what, if I choose to see it.

Even though my expectations of myself may fail, that is not the end but a new beginning. There is always another door, another experience to be had, and it’s better to trust that the universe has my back and be excited about what will come in when things are allowed to leave or end. That saying “when one door closes, another opens” is true — but it’s up to me to keep an eye out for the opening instead of pounding on closed doors.

3) Is there a fine line between grieving what hasn’t happened yet and feeling entitled to the life we thought we were supposed to have?

This is such a universal life lesson that no one is exempt from. How many of us have had dreams or beliefs that our life was going to be a certain way, and then suffered let‑downs? This has probably happened many times for everyone on different levels — from loss of relationships, health, traumatic events.

There is such a human quality to this question since we all have suffered something that completely changed who we were. It’s part of being alive, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. Grief and heartache are the underlying themes here. You may think anger, but anger is just another form of grief. We lash out because we are in pain, and it sometimes feels easier to fight than sit with sadness.

There is no way through but through, and some people never make it out. These tragic events are something we each have to move through alone. A core idea is that you acknowledge your grief and allow yourself to be upset. You are allowed to feel sad, crushed, despairing, hopeless, fearful, lost, and any other feeling that might come up.

Remembering that if we allow these feelings, at some point, they start to fade. We begin to realize we are the only ones who can climb out of the darkness. Healing then begins to happen little by little, and never as fast as most would like.  With time, we learn to accept this new version of ourselves, and are hopefully able to alchemize the experience into something stronger and more amazing than we could have imagined.

Acknowledge the hurt, and then decide at some point whether you become wounded or wise from it.

Have a beautiful week, Nikki