Why do we get into conflict? In my understanding of the world, conflict comes into our lives when something is ready to be healed. Our subconscious mind attracts a conflictual situation to heal and move forward. The conflict comes not from this subconscious part, but from our ego-self, the part of us that seeks safety.
“I don’t want to change! I’m happy how I am! Please, stop!”, she says. She is afraid. She likes the familiar. She wants you to be safe.
But what we know now is that if we don’t process this conflict, we will cycle in and out of the same conditions that bring us this specific type of conflict until the wound is healed.
I want to offer a solution to this hamster wheel of suffering:
We shouldn’t seek to be conflict-free because conflict is actually freeing.
Instead of ignoring or soothing, get into it. There will always be problems in life. Concerns. Disappointments even.
Every solution, every resolution, will eventually lead to a new pain point. This is what it is to be a meaning-seeking, ever-expanding human being.
But what is conflict really about? Generally speaking, it is when we perceive that one of our core needs aren’t being met: safety, love and connection, significance. We want to be heard. We want to be understood. We want to matter.
A short list of the benefits from my own personal experience and that of my clients: deeper intimacy, a strengthening of self, a new understanding of our partners/friends/selves, a freeing of past trauma, an expansion of the heart, an expansion in spaciousness, a letting go of things that harm us, a leaning into things that give us life, enhanced trust, enhanced peace… the list goes on.
The benefits of communicating with an open, loving heart in moments when you want to do the exact opposite far outweigh the momentary discomfort it brings. I know this because I was a chronic conflict-avoider/soother, and I’ve made it to the other side!
Stay tuned for the next few weeks to learn more about conflict skills from the new paradigm: how to warm up to conflict, how to centre oneself + stay open-hearted, how to communicate in a conflict… and more!
If you follow many people in the life coaching or self-improvement sphere, you’ll quickly see that a lot of experts focus on the power of mornings.
Headlines like: “Your Miracle Morning” or “How Changing One Thing in the Morning Can Make you 1 Million Dollars” or “The Importance of Morning Rituals”
The way you spend your morning greatly impacts the way you feel all day; we know, but do we really understand why?
Now I won’t go into great depth, but bear with me. The theory as to why some morning routines are awesome connects with Albert Einstein’s theory of photoelectric effect. Basically, what he’s saying, is that it isn’t the amount of hustle or hard work that will make energy move, but rather it’s the frequency at which it vibrates that promotes the most movement. And in humans, frequency is very much tied to our emotional state.
But why does this matter when it comes to mornings? Because if we spend some valuable time getting into a high frequency emotional state early in the morning, the rest of the day can feel less effortless. We’re already there, moving.
Now, this doesn’t mean that every morning you need to get up and deny how you’re actually feeling if you do wake up on the proverbial “wrong side of the bed”. But the thing is, we can hold space for sadness and anger, AND get into a higher emotional state. Choosing one doesn’t negate or betray the other. In fact, sometimes it’s important to get into a higher emotional frequency to decide how to move through the harder, stickier feelings.
What does that look like? If you’ve been hanging around for awhile, you might anticipate this next answer: It Depends.
Your morning routine is yours to decide. There is no one size fits all template for an awesome morning routine. I can provide some advice based on best practices, but what moves your emotional frequency up will largely depend on what inspires you. For some people, it’s sitting in meditation. For others, journaling. For some, a strenuous workout. For others, some light yoga. And still, some might prefer to spend their morning listening to podcasts or reading things that light them up. The bottom line in that for many of us, it’ll take a combination of a variety of things.
To jumpstart the process of getting into a soul-enlivening morning routine, I’ve created this free resource that outlines a quick and simple journaling activity that was designed to get your day started with your heart open + feet fully planted on the ground.
This doesn’t need to take an hour. You don’t need to go on a 5km run. In fact, it’s pretty easy to make time to create a beautiful morning routine – simply mix and match a few different activities that get you in that high vibe space, and you could be smoothie in hand and out the door within 30 minutes.
To learn more about mornings and how to engineer them to make a difference in your every day, grab my free resource below. In the following email, I’ll be telling you more about my morning meditation routine that has me in all smiles under 15 minutes. Be sure to sign up for your free Morning Routine to get the rest of the goodies.