Journey Towards Emotional Stability: An Exploration with Nid

Ever felt disconnected from the world around you? As humans, we often experience emotions that are influenced by our environment, and in today's episode, I, Nid, will guide you on a journey of self-discovery and emotional stability. I'll be sharing my personal journey through life's ups and downs, and how I managed to break free from destructive emotional patterns.

In our youth, we often grapple with our emotions, and I was no different. Growing up in England, I felt a disconnect from the land and seasons, which led me on a quest to find emotional stability. My journey took me through the realm of yoga nidra, breathwork, and even a brain injury, which led me to discover how breathing techniques, aromatherapy, and light body practices can release and process emotions. I'll be sharing my experiences with these practices and how they allowed me to move towards unconditional love and acceptance.

But it's not just about self-love and acceptance, we also have to navigate the complexities of family dynamics and relationships. As my parents age, I have found myself playing the role of an emotional supporter, mediating between different family members and helping them understand each other's perspectives. I'll be discussing the importance of communication and emotional connection in maintaining vibrant emotional health. Join me as we explore the strength within our emotions and how they connect us to the world around us.

You can discover more about Nid's 'Ground Your Emotions' tool in her app that will begin you on the path to finding greater emotional ease at https://www.nidsnidra.com/ground-emotions

Read more on the Nid's Nidra Blog: https://www.nidsnidra.com/blog/journey-emotional-stability

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:42

Welcome. I'm Nid, a karma guide and an intuitive teacher of how to spiritually embody this life. Over the past decade, I have shared various personal stories where I gleam into some of the lessons that I have learned and offer them up for other people to try out and experience if they may support them on their path. It's been a little while since I've shared such a personal story and I see in our currents, turmoil around the world and the recent years how our emotions are really needing to step up as our strengths rather than our weakness, so that we can really start to utilize the strengths and resilience that emotions can give us to heal wounds of anger and the fiery temperaments in this world and allow the emotional waters to help to soothe and calm this rage that is boiling all over this beautiful planet. In many traditions and natural elements are seen as reflections of certain emotional states. When we learn to connect with the elements and align ourselves to the cycles and the seasons, it can gain an ability to process emotions with the support of nature. However, when you live in a city and it's hard to connect with nature, there's a real conscious effort involved in finding these cycles and understanding the elements, and sometimes we need to go and seek like-minded individuals within the city to be able to celebrate these elements or go and do outdoor days away or weekends so that we can reconnect and find ourselves closer to the natural world. One of the stark contrasts of moving to Australia from England was this connection to land. People in Australia just have a more consistent and grounded connection with the earth and the changing seasons, and I really cherish the sun. I'm such a little lizard in my need to be in the sun. It brings me so much vibrant energy and I've always really struggled with being in the cold and that introspective hibernation of the winter season.

Speaker 1: 3:29

My childhood was marked by a lot of solitary play in the windmill I grew up in and I would dance to my favourite songs and weave these dreams of a utopian aquarenage where humanity would get on and stop fighting. I was profoundly empathetic, very sensitive and haunted by nightmares of past memories, including those of my past lives, and these little quirky parts of myself meant that I didn't have that many friends and I was quite bullied and I found people really seemed quite insincere around me. What I didn't understand as a child was that this sensitivity was that I really could see and connect to people's souls, and I found the human personality really confusing. This dynamic of hiding or pretending we didn't have emotions just didn't really make any sense to me, and so I found this life very disturbing and it emotionally distressed me a great deal.

Speaker 1: 4:46

When we learn to rest in the darkness, to truly allow the body to rest and let, in this quietness, nurturing seeds start to work beneath the surface, it can help to stabilise emotions and rather than swinging from the high of summer into the low of winter, which was definitely my extreme cycle of depression and mania, where my emotions felt really beyond my control and I struggled to process them, talk therapy was most definitely not my solution. It made me more angry and more volatile, and all the movement work that I ever did again also it didn't seem to really allow me to process my feelings in a way that gave me stability and ease. So I internalised my feelings, I suppressed them and allowed a lot of self-hate to really fester within me, my anger at this world, at this craziness of what we live within and in my family, this unstable, emotional little girl who lived in a bit of a fairy world was not considered to have much of a future because I didn't really seem to have a way of navigating in this world that was recognised as normal. It is in the darkness of deep rest that we can begin to connect with something much deeper that provides a place of solace and profound connection to the invisible realms. Through the practice of yoga nidra I began to find this place of deep rest.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Both my body and my mind and my emotional state could really allow a softening into, and subtle shifts began in my life in those early days of using yoga nidra, where I could start to notice a different relationship with myself and time. And I began to build this relationship with the ability to witness my own experience and my own feelings. And from this I was able to step out of my victim mode and see that I was operating in this saviour, martyr, victim cycle and that I could begin to make really empowering choices in my communication, that I could step out of conversations and step out of situations until I had regrouped and found another way. And through this practice of yoga nidra I began to find space within myself to start to observe and be aware of myself in a new way. But this would take until my 30s to start to discover myself, my 30s to start to discover, thanks to my brain injury as a teenager, this emotional turmoil was buffered by turning to smoking, and this was my body's way of recognising the importance of breath in processing emotions. At this time I was trying to slow down my breath, was trying to deepen it into my body and to feel my body, to lengthen my exhale, and so smoking was my way of solving this emotional turmoil. I didn't really understand the amount of hate that came with the tobacco and the toxins within it.

Speaker 1: 9:03

When I began the path towards breath work as part of my healing journey, I knew breath was so important to this emotional shift, to find this deeper sense of equanimity through the turbulent waves of feelings. And yet I began breath work and what I was comfortable with were Pilates breathing, capital abartee or the breath of fire and some abdominal breathing. So I had a very active breath work. I could really connect with these practices that actually really supported very familiar emotions to me and this was a comfortable transition to use these three types of practice.

Speaker 1: 9:50

But they weren't really allowing me to touch my emotions, to begin this emotional journey, and every time I tried alternate nostril breathing, it didn't work. It made me really frustrated, my emotions could not come into balance and all these controlled breathing practices of our Pranayama and yoga didn't seem to allow me to surrender. I was still a little bit too disconnected from my emotions and I knew I needed some other tool. So I turned to aromatherapy because this gave me a way in which I could breathe in and allow the shifts to happen through smell, and the smell could change my breathing and allow a way in which my emotions could stabilize. And I would use aromatherapy and candles because I found that candles gave me that connection to the energy of fire in particular, transmuting the energies of anger and frustration that may arise in my emotions throughout the day. When I would light the candle at the end of the day as part of my ritual to let go, it also was a beacon of hope for the future. These simple acts of connecting through fire and oils, that smell of nature, became a real gift when I was living in the city in the initial days after my head injury and struggling to find ways to connect with my breathing.

Speaker 1: 11:23

When I did eventually find the conscious, connected breath, there was so much emotion and to process and to release and I enjoyed allowing what was really beneath all these emotions that wanted to come through, what it is that I feared the most, which was to really allow myself to feel the blessing and miracle of being alive. To really embrace that being human is to have all these emotions and to actually really adore each emotion, regardless of what it is that it brings, but to cherish it and what it brings as a message in each moment. And then there would be the energies of my light body practice, this meditation practice that activates a part of ourselves bigger than our soul. In these years of my life has always been the nightmares, and with the container of the light body practice I've been able to move into those memories of past life, karma, and allow my soul to shift into a new space and way of being the level of compassion that this practice has brought me, without getting caught in the suffering, but to allow it to be a part of this beautiful mix of emotions that compassion contains. And through the light body practices I started to notice my responses to situations were of a much higher vibration of love that really kept me in my power, but also gave unconditional acceptance of others where they were at, meeting us all in the highest way that can move everyone in the group together forwards. I could really can see how this practice had become a container for me to bring myself and others into a state that could shift us as a group beyond just my own individual moments that I was bringing. Through my previous practices. I had elevated all of this and could really feel its resonance.

Speaker 1: 14:03

I promised a recent story that I was going to share in this episode and I mentioned all of this emotional instability and the volatility in my life and this journey that I've been on of discovering my emotional strength, because I really did destroy many things in those years, especially my relationships, due to my emotional overwhelm and there would be outbursts of cutting off family members and the divorce that I experienced and many other things. And this turbulent emotional person and how I've transformed through the practices that I share in recent years has really begun to see and witness this space that I hold and the way in which it shifts a situation and other people in it. And in the last few months I returned back to my family where, probably for the last time in my life, was all my blood relatives and my step family in one situation and it was a beautiful occasion and so thoughtful and well considered by my sister, but with it came all the family stresses of those dynamics that all families seem to contain. In particular, in the past six years my stepfather has rapidly declined with dementia and Alzheimer's and I've been very blessed to have a very great relationship with him as he used to play games with me and allow me to dance around, being silly but also being the person that when I needed rescuing and I needed to call on someone, he was always there, that first person that would be at the end of the phone. And to see his decline has obviously been immensely sad and I'm very blessed that he trusted me over these six years to work with him remotely over Zoom from Australia and we've built this weekly and twice weekly session of movement, conversation, sometimes some breathing, and now it's mostly dance music where he may or may not dance with me or I try and encourage him to play games.

Speaker 1: 17:04

And through this process I've been able to be a bridge, initially with my step sisters and my sister and mother as we began to navigate this decline, to support my sister in some of the challenges that she has found in navigating being in a more supporting role with my parents, with my mother and supporting my mother, and she uncovers the challenges of grief, of losing her husband and also having to step into caring for him, often initially angry when she doesn't understand what's happening. And my place is to spend time to help her reframe, to bring her emotions back to calm and love so she can be kind, as opposed to allowing this grief that overrides her. And everyone has been amazing what a strong and profoundly compassionate family and I'm so proud and touched by each individual and who everyone is. And yet at the wedding I also knew that part of my role is to be that intermediary between everyone when they get stressed and it triggers each other's parts of themselves that want to fight or be in control and no best to be right and have things their way. My role is to navigate between each of them and to help them see things from the other person's emotional point of view and to move and navigate and flow between these emotions so that we can find ways to come together and enjoy our time together.

Speaker 1: 19:30

And as I navigated five days of supporting my sister with her wedding preparations and my mother and stepfather with, how was the event to unfold and how would he feel and what would it be like with my father there and my step sisters and all the other people that we're going to be gathering? High expectation for a lot of joy, but also a lot of worry, a lot of potential catastrophizing and planning for alternative outcomes. And I set myself the task of ensuring. I went into it emotionally full with things that I knew in my daily practice, including seeing my clients. Every day, first thing in the morning I would do my practices and then I would go and support my clients before I would come out and see my family, because all these things are the things that nourish me and meant that I can show up for my family in my best way. And when I knew I needed a moment to myself, I would find that task that could take me to a place where I could connect in, maybe asking some forgiveness of myself if I was struggling and seeing this complex dynamic of how the family and each individual has their needs. And as we danced through these days together, it was beautiful At the wedding to see how everything came together, the love and the support that was there with everyone, and by no means was it thanks to me as an individual. It was very much a collective effort by everyone wanting to see it as a really loving day.

Speaker 1: 21:45

I was so touched to receive the feedback, not just from family but also from friends, to acknowledge this role that I play, the strength of being an emotional person who can therefore hold others emotions and help them to navigate how to communicate and show more love to one another and I'm very aware that this has been a slow and steady journey for me To be able to hold complex emotions and feel as an empath others are feeling, knowing it's not mine, especially when we have these complex relationships, and to honor that it is someone else's feeling and how would they like to navigate with it. I was told by reflexologist recently that I was a stubborn person. Apparently, you can feel that in my feet and I laughed. I'm grateful for my stubbornness because it gives me the grit and perseverance that's healed my brain injury, my insomnia, my nightmares. It has given me the strength to be the person I'm here to be, to hold space for others as they discover their strengths.

Speaker 1: 23:49

How emotional landscapes are within your body, your navigation system as a human, that every emotion is essential to orient yourself through life and that through safe practices, you can really begin to unfold this emotional landscape and, yes, it can take time and maybe you're not blessed with being so stubborn a person, but we all have our way of finding the time and the patience of traveling through life. Always take your time to know what an emotion feels like for you and your body. No one can give a definition of an emotion. Really, you have created your labels of what something feels like, and if you don't know what an emotion feels like, then ask your body and when you begin to know and connect into these feelings, ask your stories. What memories are connected to this feeling, for this is how we begin to heal the stories and the emotion can be fully accepted and with that acceptance, you can hold that emotion and be with someone else without the emotion taking over, allowing each of us to have our own feelings and to support one another in navigating the experience of them and what to do with them.

Speaker 1: 25:47

How to communicate and maintain connection is so important, and perhaps the practices and tools I share are not for you, and may you find the ones that help you connect with your body, with your stories and with your emotional landscape, so that you can create a beautiful garden of your emotions and allow it to blossom fully. If you would ever like support with your journey, you can connect with me at any time. I offer a free clarity call where we can connect and see what arises and what might be the most aligned path for you, but, most importantly, honouring that emotions really are our strength. Through these times. It's time to get to know them, to regularly be with them and to make friends with each emotion, letting it be a part of the beautiful rainbow of your experience of being human.