Written by: Angela Ward BA(Hons), MSc, MGHT, MGLT, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Have you ever found yourself in a position where consistently there is a misalignment of values and morals with your nearest and dearest?
You find yourself in a situation where you feel guilty of your success, you feel guilty because you are happy, you feel guilty when you thrive. Why? Because the people in your life don’t celebrate your achievements with you. They don’t celebrate your wins with you. And when they are not celebrating your wins, they are also not supporting your wellbeing or wellness either.
Which doesn’t leave you with much of a relationship. These types of people are generally takers to.
At some point, you will realise that you’ve had a lifetime of this. A lifetime of them treating you differently to how they treat other people. They defend other people that do you wrong. They befriend those people, and they place their loyalty with those people, making you wonder what the hell you did to deserve that!
You feel betrayed by the very people that you feel should be protecting & supporting you. And slowly, little by little, it chips away at you, until you disconnect.
The hardest part of all of this is that you know that you have a clean heart, and your intentions are always good. All you wanted was to call in a better life for everyone, even against any adversity. What’s also harder is that now you’ve seen it for what it is, and that you’ve disconnected, you are in no-man’s land. The land of the unknown and uncertainty. You know you don’t want to keep living your life like that. You know that if you stick around, you’ll be miserable regardless of what you do, what you achieve and whatever you succeed in. You can see clearly in your mind a vision of what life should and could be like for you. And you know it’s not how its playing out right now. You’ve changed. You’ve progressed. You’ve opened the relationship with your unconscious which has given you a bigger sense of awareness and wisdom. You are in the phase of seeing and hearing behaviours that you don’t want around you, because they don’t align with who you are now and who you are to become. All you must do is to step into that vision and move out of the stuckness.
Navigating through the unknown can be daunting. But if you hold onto that vision, you can and will create it in your reality.
When you find yourself in this situation – and many of us do, you need to carry out a serious self-evaluation. One thing you must hold onto is never regret focussing on building a better life for you and them, if your sole aim was always to create a better future.
My biggest problem was that I wanted to take these people to the top with me. I came from a working-class family living, on a council estate. I started my adult life as a 19-year-old single parent. I wanted the family and friends to rise with me, to stand tall with me, to reap the benefits with me. But those people didn’t want to see me at the top.
One of the things that we must come to realise is bad experiences and bad people teach us more than good times and good people. The most toxic and unpleasant people in our lives makes us kinder, wiser, and more empathetic. The hardest times makes us stronger. -Steven Bartlett.
Here are a few truth bombs.
You see, we all have had our moments in life that have caused us to carry ‘baggage’. These moments cause scars and if they haven’t healed, they will itch and trigger a physical reaction.
If you’ve been inappropriately treated as a child by men, been in relationships with a narcissist, been through parent divorce as a child, had an absent father – the chances are you will find it difficult to have any real trust in men. Truth.
If you have fractured relationships with your siblings where you don’t connect and you can’t connect, because you have different values, the chances are you will find it difficult to have any real trust in women. Truth.
If you’ve had a turbulent relationship with your children who constantly abuse your love, disrespect your values, and don’t even recognise the pain they cause, you will not have any trust with the concept of unconditional love. You will find it difficult to express love to them. Truth.
If you’ve been in all three of those situations, you will struggle to connect with other human beings.
You’ll keep yourself guarded, but you’ll also never be open. Because if you do open up, you feel vulnerable, because your experiences have shown you that the people you love cannot be trusted with your heart. It hurts too much, especially as it’s been a constant.
So instead, of feeling joy, you have waves of sadness. Then your brain kicks in and literally punches you whilst you are down, and all that self-doubt talk emerges. Which of course makes you sadder, angry, and resentful, to the extent the pain you feel starts showing up in your body.
Your heart aches.
The pain is real and can cause anxiety and panic attacks because you can feel like you are about to have a heart attack. You feel lost, depleted, and wounded.
That’s the reality.
That’s the truth.
If you don’t catch yourself at this point, you’ll generally end up self-abusing to numb the pain, whilst you pretend to the world it doesn’t matter.
But it does.
It does matter.
You matter.
The ache in your heart is enough of a message to you. It’s telling you to break the cycle. It’s telling you to listen, to feel, to hear. It’s telling you that it’s not right. And it’s begging you to do something about it. Because it also knows that the people involved think that their behaviours are normal. It’s in their programming and they are conditioned responses to their own life experiences.
It also knows that the only one that can change it is you.
Through all of this, especially whilst you are in the midst of this wave, what you are really yearning to do is love.
What you truly want is to express love and to let your spirit shine in its purest form. After all, you are a light worker, a way maker.
You have so much love in your heart that what you are truly feeling is grief.
Grief is disguised as sadness because is associated with loss and lacking.
But the truth is, you haven’t lost anything. You are lacking genuine, honourable relationships. So, when you can see it from that perspective; you will understand that;
Grief is love that has no place to go.
If you have no real deep human connections around you, your heart will ache from grief. You haven’t physically lost anything because you haven’t been able to connect. But you are unable to share love either.
Once I realised this – it was a game changer for me. But it wasn’t until after many sleepless nights, many bottles of wine over a period of time, many tears and heart pain, many days and even months of evaluating, deep consultation within and calling on my inner wisdom to help me to see what I needed to see.
So how can you change this? How do you break the cycle?
When you have reached this point, you’ve already stopped having conversations that sustain your authenticity. To be authentic, you must honour all of you and you must honour your truth.
When you talk to those around you about how you are feeling and they shut you down, gas light you, or just ignore you, it’s time for a serious check in with yourself.
1. Are you communicating effectively?
Do you need to address the way you communicate so that you come from a different place? Its no-good trying to have a conversation when you are angry for instance. How you come across when in a state of anger or frustration will not be how you truly want to convey yourself to someone else and could set the tone for more heart ache.
The relationships you have in your life form part of your foundation. It’s part of your structure required to support your growth.
Is your foundation stable and supportive or do you need to build a new foundation?
2. Take time to face how you truly feel.
That will mean riding the feelings of grief with total awareness and tuning into the body. What is it telling you? How are the people in your life showing up? Are you able to speak your truth?
You love your nearest and dearest because they are your family. You are taught that. But they are also spirits having a human existence.
You can love them, but you don’t have to like them, and you certainly don’t have to accept being mistreated either. Sticking by people that treat you differently to the value and morale’s you hold, only serves to decrease your vibrational frequency, and by its very nature will cause you continuous physical and mental harm.
These are toxic relationships. It’s not your place to change them.
It’s your duty to protect you.
If you struggle to connect in with how you feel, find another way to express yourself. Try keeping a journal and give yourself permission to be open and honest. Maybe art is your thing or music, or dance. Whatever it is allow yourself to connect with it, so you can release any emotions that are causing you discomfort. Allow yourself to connect with you. What are you truly feeling? Where is it showing up? What do you need to do to heal it so you can move forward?
Family doesn’t have to be the one that you were born into. Family is a tribe of individuals that resonate and vibrate the same way you do.
In his article Chuck Bean, sums it up with this statement; Expect not your families to be your source of relationships rather turn your great relationships into sources of family.
The key then is to stop reaching out to people who have no time for you. Find people that live their life based on personal upliftment.
3. What is your heart telling you?
How you relate to the world will be how you show up in it and how brightly you radiate. Your energetic frequency will seek out a likeness. It will connect to and attract more of the same. If you are holding onto the grief, the anger, the resentment, but putting a smile on for the world; It’s not your smile that has the vibrational pull, it’s the feelings you are holding onto.
What is your heart truly telling you?
It’s telling you that you need to find a place for that love to go. You have a deep caring and ability to love. Direct that love right back to you. Be kind to yourself. Treat yourself the way you would want others to treat you. If your values are based on honesty, loyalty & authenticity, align to those so you are living your life with integrity.
Feelings of anger and resentment bring you down and make you feel more of the same. That said, you should never dismiss them as its your brains way of telling you that you are out of alignment.
And that alignment is love.
Love is the highest frequency of all.
4. When you decide to act you are moving into new territory.
Breaking away from the circle and the cycle will take you into new territory. If the people around you are critical of your dreams, make new friends. Seeking the right advice is crucial: as is creating powerful alliances.
Tell yourself daily that you know it is possible. You know that it is possible to live a life where you are not grieving because the love you have has nowhere to go.
Tell yourself that it is possible to build healthy relationships so you can share love from the heart and feel safe that you are not going to be emotionally starved again.
You’ll be in a state of uncertainty so seek out spiritual support so you can be guided. Even if it’s just a helping hand, or a listening ear. There are many spiritual coaches out there. Find one that you can resonate with and one that has healed from the same dilemma. When you are true and honest with yourself, when you honour the pain that you feel, you will reveal what needs to be healed. Once it’s revealed and you can accept it, you can start the journey of healing.
5. Grounding
When you’ve been riding these waves and steering your ship, the chances are you will feel drained. Grounding and being with nature are one of the most effective ways to reconnect you into alignment.
If you need to take time out of work – do it. The work will still be there when you get back. If you need some space to be on your own – take it. The world won’t end because you took a day out. It’s important that you go with what’s coming up and not bury it.
One of the things I love is a walk in the woods.
Walking in the woods has shown to have very positive effects on wellbeing.
Dr. Saima Latif, Psychologist at Psychology Direct said: “Spending time in a forest, boosts the immune system functioning, reduces blood pressure, reduces stress improves the mood and ability to focus, increases energy levels and sleep, allows deeper and clearer intuition, an increased flow of energy and an overall increased sense of happiness.”
I passed my hardest moments alone in the woodlands when everyone believed I was fine. I visit frequently, not just when I’ve faced this type of adversity, but just to be at one with nature and breathe in the peace it brings.
When I came to the end of my wave, I finally realised that I was never asking too much, I was just asking the wrong people. Are you doing the same?
I cannot express enough the importance of having the right people around you and being part of a community that share common values. Riding solo is great, I have achieved so much by riding solo.
Yet now I know that to fulfil our inherent need to vibrate from the frequency of love, you need to have mutual recipients so that you no longer live your life in waves of grief.
This is the very reason why I provide the retreats days and the sister circles. Both are a place where we can come together in a community, feel safe and supported, heal, transform, and feel loved.
A place where we can also celebrate your wins.
In addition, the coaching programme is designed to help you to move through that unknown space so that you can find and step into the reality of the vision you hold for you.
Divine Blessings - Angela
Angela Ward BA(Hons), MSc, MGHT, MGLT, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Angela Ward, is a leader in spiritual coaching, spiritual development and personal growth. Her own spiritual journey started back in 2005, after the death of her mother , when the message became loud and clear. 'Being true to yourself is the only priority – the rest will follow'. In 2012 she set up a consultancy company; a hybrid of management consultancy and spiritual coaching. The aim : to help people connect with their spiritual self, to find balance, harmony and resilience , so they too, can have authentic happiness. She runs retreats, coaching programmes and workshops. She is the founder and CEO of the Holistic Therapy, Wellness and Training Centre. Her mission is to light up the world, one person at a time.
