FRENCHIE FRIDAY: #levelingup
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I miss this kid.
I am currently 35,000 feet above the earth and 1,000 miles away from my Frenchie furbaby, flying to be with family for a very quick trip for a very sad occasion.
At this very moment, I’m listening to binaural beats through my ear buds, sipping sparkling water, regretting that I forgot to ask the flight attendant to skip this damn plastic cup.
Travel itself has gone smoothly so far, and it usually does go well - mostly because of my neurotic planning and the many hard earned lessons I've learned flying in an autistic body whose blood pressure is easy to annoy.
Here’s the list of MUST HAVES if I’m going to have any hope of flying without passing out, puking, or parching my precious eyes and skin:
Peppermint oil as an anti-nausea and coolant for when it feels extra fiery
Orange oil for anti-nausea
Compression socks and sleeves to regulate blood pressure and to serve as an anti-nausea
Organic, gluten-free, chemical free, real-food granola bars to keep blood sugar up and help with the efforts in anti-nausea
Organic oranges to eat during the descent while clenching my muscles and breathing deeply to keep my blood pressure up so I don’t turn into a vomit comet on the way down (I pack a lot of puke protection)
Face cream
Eye drops
Ear plugs
Noise cancelling ear buds
Comfy clothes with layers for the drastic fluctuation in temperature
A ‘not a bra’ bra
Sometimes I also bring my neck-bracing pillow
To say the least, flying is a science project.
If I eat the right things, wear the right things, and do the right things at the right time, I can usually make it to my destination without too much damage - but clearly it’s A Thing.
If travel itself weren’t intimidating enough, there were a number of events leading up to my departure that tested my superpowers for transforming stress.
For one, Milo’s poor paw sprouted what looked like extra toes, two swollen red lumps evidence of an infection that wouldn’t go away with his normal ointment.
The first week was a matter of getting him into the vet. The second week was him being on an antibiotic that made him sick. So it took three weeks to get him on an antibiotic that worked well, deflating the swelling and making him look a little less mutant.
Two, the mission to find Milo a sitter was especially tricky this time. The first one was scheduled to stay at my place for a few days, and I booked them a month out to make sure it was all set.
Two weeks beforehand, they mentioned they’d needed to travel for work, requiring them to leave several hours earlier on the last day than was planned. No big deal, my neighbor can take him out.
But then one week prior to the trip, they cancelled altogether because their travel dates changed.
Okay, fine. Also no big deal.
I’ll just book another, I thought, and this time he can stay with them so I don’t have to hotel-grade clean my apartment.
Rebooking was easy enough, but by Monday, I was already annoyed with the new sitter’s lack of communication and questioning the booking entirely.
When I still hadn’t heard anything back from them by 8:30pm the night before I had to leave, I booked another sitter at the last minute - way better energy, super excited to host him, and all-in-all a good decision.
Only when I opened the app to cancel did the previous sitter finally message me. I stated why I was cancelling and did it.
I’ve no effs to give anymore for connections that don’t vibrate at a frequency resonant to the highest vision for my life.
It took four weeks and three sitters to find the right one - at this point, I’m just glad that I did.
Three, a winter storm swept through the city of my destination just in time to create a looming threat of flight cancellations, a typically worrisome situation that triggered at least two people requesting me to ease up on the snow because this shit always happens when I visit.
Four, two days before I left, my chiropractor worked some serious soft tissue magic that had me absolutely and completely DEAD and inflamed for two days straight.
When you combine all of this with the fact that I had to also leave 80 degree, sunny weather to fly to the frozen, turbulent tundra, you might get the picture of what an interesting build up it was on the way to take off.
The reason I’m painting this picture is to illustrate the intricacies of the multiple areas of my life that became dysregulated and disrupted prior to this trip. A younger version of me would have been frustrated and confused, fighting my way through each situation, scared that everything going wrong meant that nothing was going right.
But now I see all this chaos as the opportunity it is and I engage with it accordingly.
Here’s why.
Whenever we encounter something that feels big - that requires us to level-up, the universe and all the molecular structures around you, rub against you in ways that mold you into the person you need to be to do the big thing you’re bound to do.
This fluctuation in the quantum field triggers reorganization all the way down to the third dimension where your five senses are triggered to adapt and respond in ways that sculpt your cells into a higher vibing antenna - an upgrade you need if you’re to receive the divine download from up above.
The trick is to respond to the chaos by allowing the new data to download through you - here’s the important part - while maintaining an optimized frequency along the way. This is how you transmute and transcend it and turn your stress into a superpower.
More simply: you have to stay in a good mood.
And not just a fake one or feigned optimism - a genuinely good mood.
When you feel good during the chaos, your cells serve as an alchemical conduit, transforming the chaos that comes in into coherence you can use to support your life and the others around you.
Mud into magic.
Pain into power.
Tragedy into transcendence.
This is what human beings are designed to do.
Imagine a storming cloud of energy coming through your head on the right and traveling down into your body. Your body is designed to take that storm cloud and create a beautiful rainbow that spews out sunshine on the left.
Knowing this made my task very clear.
No matter how tempted I was to worry about Milo’s paw or get angry about the antibiotics…
No matter how scared I was that Milo wouldn’t have a sitter…
No matter how much rain, sleet, and snow threatened my trip…
And no matter how depressed and dead my body wanted to be after the chiropractor…
My single job was to feel my way through the feelings so I always landed in a place of relief, ease, and gratitude.
Not an easy task! But there’s a trick to it, and I’ve been doing this for a very long time.
Humans are onions - or at least our emotional circuitry is. If you know which layer of feeling you're experiencing, you can simply peel away the layers until you get to the juicy, joyful center. You just have to know which layer at which to begin.
I discovered this human hack while working with trauma clients way back when. In its infancy, I called it the spectrum of emotion and put a drawing of it on the wall. My clients learned pretty quickly how to make it work.
When you are conscious of a feeling, you should be able to take the corresponding action to make it go away (or more accurately, to move out of you).
Emotion is energy in motion. When we act in alignment with our feelings, the energy moves out and we become cleared of it. This makes space for the next situation sent to evolve our soul.
As you may know from following my work, we have 20 emotional circuits, which means we have 20 categories of action.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s talk about four:
Anger - FIGHT
Guilt - FIX
Fear - FLEE
Sadness - FROWN
So if you’re aware of a feeling and can take the action, it will go away.
If you’re feeling angry and fight for your needs…
If you’re feeling guilty and fix the situation…
If you’re feeling scared and flee successfully…
If you’re feeling sad and slow down and frown…
the energy dissipates.
Being human gets tricky though, because sometimes we’re aware of an emotion, but no matter how much we act on it, it doesn’t go away.
This happens when we have endless arguments in our head and the frustration doesn’t resolve. This happens when we feel embarrassed in ways that stay with us long beyond the event. Or when we worry worry worry and never feel any better.
When emotion gets stuck like this, it’s because our body learned to favor certain feelings in our youth. Now as an adult, the task is to go under the conscious emotion and deal with the unconscious one.
This can sometimes take serious therapy, but it can also happen pretty quickly if you know what you’re looking for.
Here’s a simplified version of the emotional onion or the spectrum of emotion.
Shame is the outer layer of the onion. Unworthiness is armor and this is the strongest layer. Shame makes us stop feeling so we never feel hurt.
Beneath shame lies anger. Anger is still protective because it keeps us edgy and on-guard, ready to kick ass all the time.
Guilt - or what I call a sense of responsibility - is under that. This is also still pretty protective because it keeps us actively seeking solutions to fix whatever is wrong.
The layer of fear is a bit more vulnerable and raw. It evokes a flee response and because we’re no longer actively attacking the situation, it leaves us more exposed. But since fleeing still requires a lot activity, it still serves some protection.
Under fear is sadness.
Here is where we are particularly vulnerable - so vulnerable that most of us don’t even venture this far into the onion.
Sadness triggers no activity. It’s an internal facing emotion which actually requires us to stop completely and address our powerless and the separation we feel from being in a separate body.
To use the spectrum, explore deeper than the one you’re aware.
If you’re stuck in shame, examine anger you might feel instead. If you’re stuck in anger, explore the sense of responsibility you have in creating the situation. If you’re stuck in guilt, admit your fear. And if all you can do is worry worry worry, just be sad.
It works!
For me, I had to keep returning to sadness to prepare for my trip. Sad that the trip was a sad occasion. Sad that Milo was sick and there was only so much I could do. Sad that I’d need to leave my baby with a stranger yet again. Disappointed I couldn’t control the weather. Sad that my body couldn’t do what I wanted it to do.
This practice didn’t require that I cry every day, but it did demand that I slow down.
Soft heart, slow pace.
That was my mantra, because that was my lesson for leveling up.
And let me tell you, by the day of my departure, I was certainly in a higher frequency!
I handled the last minute sitter change like a champ. I did what I needed to rest my body to prepare for the trek. And when it came time to separate from my baby boy, I was able to tolerate the sadness, but also celebrate the joy of knowing he’d be alright. He was finally with the right person, and I was going to be with my family in ways that were meant to be.
The weather even showed up on my side.
Joy is in the center of the emotional tootsie pop, and it’s what makes going through all the other less-joyful layers worth it.
So the next time you’re stuck, try shifting into a deeper layer on the spectrum and see what happens. If you find your way, you’ll get to experience sensations that actually feel light and delightful.
This is the practice that calibrates your sensations so you can call in substance that suits you. It’s gravity optimization at its best.
Seeing as I’m in the skies transcending Earth’s gravity entirely, I have an especially poignant perspective of that superpower.