On seeking, reaching out, asking for help.

On seeking, reaching out, asking for help 🤝

I had an appointment yesterday afternoon and I met a new practitioner. I’m seeing her again in a couple of weeks and then a few days later reconnecting with another one. Even after all these years, it still feels big, it still feels daunting. It still requires me to lay it all out, be vulnerable, with my story, where I’ve been, what I know and also what I can’t figure out. 

To admit and surrender to the fact that there is something here that I’m currently stuck on and just can’t seem to get past. Despite all my training, despite all my experience working with others and on myself, I still get stuck sometimes. 

I’ve come to know that there is no finish line in all of this. That there will always be the next layer and that it is always a choice to pick it up and look at it or not. To enter the dance of lifting it and unravelling it, or to live with the weight of it up against me. But I can’t do that anymore.

There are weeks here where it all just gets a bit jumbled and confusing. Where there is weight hanging in the spaces between me and each one of them. It takes some time, space and unravelling just to know what is actually mine. And then to see how the aspect that is mine is contributing to how they and I are managing (or are not managing) what is coming up for them. 

I know you’re out there doing it too. Parenting to the best of your ability through the lens of your own challenges, stress, layers. It’s not easy. Some days it’s really, impossibly hard and some days we just can’t do it on our own. 

My lens is high sensitivity. The way that I experience and process the world around me, the way that my nervous system is so easily stressed by the level of sensory input it meets and has to make sense of. Sometimes I’ve got it, sometimes and some parts are more than I can adjust for, navigate, manage or compensate for on my own with even the vast resources I have available to me. 

My growth towards more ease and capacity for life, parenting and working in this world that was not made for me is always going to require that I dance with the parts that I don’t yet know. That I learn a bit more about myself and my patterns every day, week, month, year. Because there is no roadmap, no plan to follow, I have to uncover each next part, learn about it, and what I need to be able to step onto it, as I go. Especially if I want to be able to keep growing not just in age but into each ‘next version’ of myself.

So this week and the next few I’m asking others, who are not me, who the breadcrumbs have led me to, to have a little look in from the outside and to tell me about some of the parts I can’t see clearly yet. To look through their lens, with an understanding of mine. I am nervous and also relieved already at the thought of being heard, held and able to just stop figuring it all out on my own for even one hour. 

I have so much empathy and compassion for every single woman who sits in front of me. Because I know that they are going through the same thing. Showing up with their story, where they’ve been, what they know so far, what they’re stuck on and also their unique lens. Holding up whatever is underneath the challenge and struggle for them, to show me, and then asking me to have a look through mine for them for the time we are together so that they might take a moment of rest and also continue moving forward. 

It’s a privilege to be able to offer that and also to be able to ask for it when I need it. So that even though being in this place feels uncomfortable and uncertain it is just the way of it and it ensures that there is always going to be a ‘next version’ of me up ahead to meet you and offer to support you into the ‘next version’ of you.