How to transform bad situations into healthy (and harmonious) ones
You can shift your reality from toxic relationships to healthy ones by investing in the quality of your inner world (your thoughts, emotions, beliefs). These 5 steps will guide your transformation.
Last week, I outlined how to identify if you’re currently in a toxic situation and the 5 reasons why we often find ourselves stuck in them.
This week, I’m sharing the steps I’ve been taking for years to shift this reality for myself.
While I’m not perfect at it (I’m not sure “perfect” is even something to aspire to), I can say that I now have happy, heathy relationships in both my personal and professional life, and I want that for you, too.
You deserve to have that. We all do.
Unfortunately, because of the 5 why's, we don’t often believe that.
As a refresher, they are:
Belief: You have a deep-seated belief that you are not worthy of love and acceptance exactly as you are today, and because you don’t believe it, you are susceptible to letting people into your life who further confirm it.
Familiarity: The reality you find yourself in is familiar to you from your childhood and something you’re wired to “accept.” So you are used to the chaos. The pain. The discomfort. It is your “normal.”
Hope: You sees signs of possible improvement and because of that you find yourself hopeful that change is coming.
Fear: You are more afraid of the unknown than you are the known. It’s common as humans to prefer predictability over the fear of change.
External pressure: Cultural, societal and familial expectations can often over power our personal pursuit towards living a healthy, fulfilling life.
The good news is that if you’re really ready to devote your time to shifting your reality, you can.
Being “ready” means taking full responsibility for your life, forgiving those that have in your mind wronged you, and envisioning how you want to feel every day so that it may become your truth.
Let’s dive in…
Step 1: Take control of your inner world
Decide today that self-awareness is your new super power. In this moment, you can recognize that you’ve spent most of you life in the comfort of a “victim” mentality.
Signs you have?
You believe life is happening to you, not for you.
You are hyper-sensitive to constructive criticism.
You carry resentment and struggle to forgive people.
You feel powerless and believe you can’t change your situation.
Start believing today that you have the power to influence the outcome of your life by investing in the quality of your inner world —your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and imagination.
Here are 3 suggestions on how to do this:
When a negative belief comes up, challenge yourself by asking if you really have evidence to support that thought. How many negative thoughts have you had in the last 24 hours about yourself or others? Make a habit of writing down every thought you have in your day so you can be honest with yourself about the quality of your imagination.
When you start obsessively thinking about things out of your control (your entire external reality), get into a practice where you raise the vibration of your thoughts. You can do this by:
Looking at a flower and thinking about how pretty it is
Close your eyes and picture yourself in your favorite place. Feel what its like to really be there.
Pick one simple thing you are grateful for and hand write it down.
Start every morning on a walk listening to positive talks on Spotify or YouTube —Byron Katie, Abraham Hicks, Michael Singer are my top 3.
Take these small steps to shift your imagination away from fear and lack, towards trust, beauty and possibility. If you only do Step 1 every day, your life will change.
Step 2: Identify your core “wound”
We all have a core wound. In astrology, it’s your Chiron. In Buddhism, it’s the sacred wound. It’s my belief we’re born with a wound, which is reinforced in our childhood, and then we spend our adult lives on a mission to heal it and grow.
If you’re comfortable looking up your astrological chart, you can read about your Chiron. Mine is Cancer in the 11th house, which also happens to be my sun (hence my mission and why I do this work in the world). It means my “wound” is that for most of my life I have struggled to have a strong sense of who I am and how to take care of myself, and because of that I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere or belong.
If you’re not into the suggestion to look up your Chiron, here’s a journaling opportunity for you instead:
Can you recall a moment or period in your childhood when you felt particularly misunderstood, unsupported, or hurt?
Write out a list of memories and see if you can observe common themes. Examples could sound something like “I never felt like I belonged, I am not enough, I am unlovable, I am not safe.”
When I do this exercise, two experiences surfaced as the most painful and the root of both were that I am not enough to be accepted and belong.
When you’re done looking back into the past, answer this question:
How do those feelings or memories manifest in your current life?
Ultimately, as you invite in healing around your wound, the frequency of these experiences in your adult life will go down, too. All the other steps I share here with you today support your healing.
Step 3: Learn to listen to the wisdom of your mind body
Our bodies are the translators of our feelings and the strongest guide we have to identifying what feels good and what does not. For years, I obsessed over eating healthy and working out because my body always hurt— I was tired, achey, and always getting sick. After I exhausted every possible avenue for physical wellness, I realized my body was trying to get my attention to tell me that the environments and people I was spending time with weren’t healthy for me.
Once I realized this, I devoted my daily practice to tuning in my body so that I could hear what she was saying. My goal was to turn up the volume on what my body was communicating, so that I could turn down the volume of my thoughts.
My suggestion for how to do this is the most simple, but often the hardest. You need to lay around and do nothing. Have a practice of rest. Carve out 10-20 minutes a day where you lay down, maybe put your feet up the wall, put on calm music, put your phone on airplane mode, and just lay there and breathe.
Enjoy. 🧘🏼♀️
Step 4: Decide how you want to feel and release your reactions
We find ourselves in toxic environments because it’s how we feel internally, and that feeling is being projected outwards to create our external reality. Think of it like an actual projector. You feed it a story and it displays on the wall for you to watch.
If you feel chaotic on the inside, your surroundings will resemble that chaos. Your internal state is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If someone comes at you triggered, that’s not a situation you can control, but you can control your reactions. Do you want to meet them in their chaos, or do you want to preserve your peace? If you react, your vibration is their vibration. In that sense, you’re meant for each other. Every day is full of these little tests.
Honest question: How reactive are you? Rate yourself on a 1-5 scale. 1 is you never react. 5 is it’s hard for you to make it through an interaction without reacting.
Something I did to release my reactions was making a commitment to myself on how I want to feel. Every time I felt a reaction surfacing, I focused on these feelings instead.
So how do you want to feel? Pick 1 or 2 primary feelings you want to feel all the time.
Peace and ease? Satisfaction? Bliss? Calm? Inspired?
This is your new intention, carry it with you. Set an alarm on your phone at the top of the hour, make it your screensaver (do people still have those?), drop it on post-it notes everywhere in your home. When you feel chaos or pain creep in, close your eyes, breathe and repeat…. peace and ease, peace and ease, peace and ease.
Step 5: Create daily rituals that lead to integration
There’s no such thing as doing something one time and turning it into a habit.
Approximately how many minutes do you spend a day trapped in your thoughts? Or on social media?
Start by taking 10% of that time and put it towards these steps.
Here are rituals I do every day:
I go on a walk and listen to an inspiring conversation on Spotify.
I journal for 10 minutes. Sometimes about what I’m grateful for, about my inner critic, or about a time where I felt really safe or inspired.
I take in the beauty of my surroundings. Whenever I feel trapped in my head, I focus on the ocean, the flowers, a cute conversation happening between a couple at a coffee shop.
On my laptop, I have a post-it note that says “peace and ease”
In my calendar, I have a repeat event each day at 5pm that says “I’m proud of these 3 things”
Before bed, I lay there and breathe on my Higher Dose PEMF mat while listening to pink noise sounds
The outcome of integrating all of these steps? Suddenly, you’ll start believing you are worthy. How you’ll know when it’s working? Those people or situations will no longer be your reality.
With peace and ease,
Ashley
CEO + Founder, Liminal