Grit.

by Astara

Last week I had one of those lay-you-out-sad days. The kind of day with a surprise twist of triggers leaving me feeling stunned, exhausted, and unrecognizable which turned out to be a good thing. At one point in my morning, I faced puffy-eyes-leaky-nose me in the mirror while dark thoughts bubbled up, “What in the heck? What is going on? What’s wrong with me? Why is this so hard? Where did my joy go?” The challenge held an unopened gift. All the answers would arrive, but not right away. I had to be inside the experience full blast.

A week later, sharing my experience with a dear friend, she offered the word grit as a theme of my emotionally brave experience, which resonated with me. I looked up Grit and found two definitions:

1. Abrasive particles or granules.
2. Firmness of character; indomitable spirit; pluck.

It turns out, grit represents not only the tools of erosion, but also the gifts of that erosion.

The grit of sandpaper is rated by the size of abrasive materials on the paper. Higher grit numbers represent a finer abrasive, smoothing surfaces. Lower grit numbers are coarser abrasives that scrape off materials much quicker. Using the sandpaper analogy of life, painful experiences from course to fine grit not only wear us down, but they can also grind away illusion, ignorance, and limitations. First, we experience disempowerment or power loss. We can then choose to learn what we came to learn. That is when we are gifted with the second kind of grit. Tenacity. Resolve. Backbone. If willing, after a difficult moment’s wake, we are imbued with courage to face any changes and stand in our truth.

Imagine: every difficulty you have ever faced or will face was created by your soul. It was. Each challenge is tailor made by you, for you, to learn certain lessons to help you live the life your soul came here for. Now apply that to the whole of our species. We are collectively creating classrooms of soul learning for each other, helping each other evolve and thrive. Our soul classrooms are fairly intense. To put it mildly, earth is full of density and uneasy lessons. Looking over the centuries it becomes obvious: violence, intolerance, aggression, greed, and tyranny are common themes. Now add climate change, environmental devastation and global viruses to the waves of agreements based on human fears. Global humanity is surfing chaos the likes of which we have not seen before — kind of like a sci-fi movie come alive before our eyes.

Because of this, many of our industries — from mental health to the built environment — are using resilience as a buzzword. This is a sign of our evolution. We are aware that resilience is what we need to learn. Resilience is another word for grit.

For me personally, my entire life has been a classroom of resilience.

Although my parents did incredibly well given their tools and training, I grew up with sexual and emotional abuse. After years of practice building resilience, my recent course-grade sandpaper kind of day revealed that I am now getting more nuanced and masterful in remembering my indomitable spirit amidst difficulty.

So, there I was on a regular Monday, full to the brim of good spirits and creative tasks. Client sessions were on the horizon that are a joy for me. On our typical morning walk with our dog, Brown Dog, my business partner and husband Orion and I had a few minor triggers as we discussed the workday ahead, like small pebbles in our shoe that make it hard to walk. These grew to triggers about our relationship, becoming big rocks we tripped on. Within an hour, trivial pebbles grew to super-charged boulders blocking our path — the tricky personal triggers from our childhood buried deep inside. Now we were time traveling. Although our boulders may be incited in the moment, they have nothing to do with the present. Deep intimacy takes you into the hidden places inside yourself, and what is unresolved can domino quickly from something very small.

Our unskilled reactive behavior rolled right on out. Sideways comments. (Did I just say that with my outside voice?!) Quick defensiveness. In a short time, we were both badly behaved and beyond consolation. For Orion, that meant taking space away from the house. For me, that meant big emotions flowing and tears. I couldn’t have gone anywhere even if I tried. Since fight or flight was triggered, adrenaline was surging through me at full blast. I was shaking too. My still small inner voice suggested, “take a bath.” So, I did.

As I drew the bath, the hamster wheel of my mind spun on thoughts. My limited perception and buried traumas had taken over. My conditioning, biology, and ego were in full gear pointing out the many ways Orion was the problem. The deepest part of me knew the first red alert: I was projecting my unresolvedness on Orion. A major indicator is that my immense boulder of upset didn’t match the reality of the original pebble. Thankfully, due to the work I have done over the years on myself, even though I felt destroyed by pain and was solidly inside my trigger, I admitted I had to focus on me. I resisted the pull of the victim tractor beam and took full accountability. Since it is I who create my feelings and responses, it is I who must tend to what I create. I turned my energy inward to where my wisdom resides and slowly began loving up the small scared me from that place.

Responsibility

As adults we are each responsible for our own emotions, yet our relationships offer important mirrors reflecting aspects of ourselves we cannot see on our own. The emotional baseline of our society is quite flat, so we don’t reward reflection and accountability. We reward mentalism, reactivity, and judgment. My theory is this is why we have so many zombie movies. A “zombie” reflects how the overcooked mental activity, combined with the absence of emotional processing, leaves us dead inside — with an insatiable appetite to find the love and vitality we hunger for outside us. Feelings, emotional resilience, and responsibility go against the very core of society’s persistent messages placing authority outside us rather than inside of us. Our culture has normalized quick fixes, hacks, and the victim stance.

We are way more comfortable making our pain about everyone else. This leads to avoidance, blame and shame. Junot Diaz has a beautiful way of expressing this in an On Being podcast a few years back:

“We are not a culture that has built into our way of being, our way of thinking, our civic imaginaries — contemplation, mourning, working through difficult contradictory emotions. That’s not part of our society; and therefore, where society leaves off, we need to take up. Society miseducates us. Society gives us a lot of prompts and a lot of encouragements to be reactive, emotionally reactive. In this, we have received tremendous tutelage. So, the ability to do what our societies seem incapable and unwilling to do is important. It’s incumbent upon us to be reflective, to be complex, to be subtle, to be nuanced, to take our time in societies which are none of these things and which encourage none of these things, because after all, there is nothing, I would argue, more critical than to be misaligned with the emotional baseline of any mainstream society.” — Junot Diaz

Keening and sobbing sure sucks, but it offers an antidote to the emotional zombie mainstream of avoidance and emotional reactivity. I lay in the bathtub sloshing around with childhood memories. Mad, sad, and hurt washed over me. I hugged myself. I turned to the emotional pain inside me and listened. Looking within, I can actually do something about what is happening. And the best news of all, by turning towards myself, I began to gather my vitality back.

I call this Inner Bonding.

Pain whispered, “You disappear. You go invisible inside intimacy.” Then pain showed me more. “Mom, sisters, brother, dad. Past lovers and close friends. You disappear into other’s identity of you in times of trouble. Although you aim for protection, a part of you is annihilated in the process.” Annihilated. The word shook me to my core.

Tears came as pain told me more, “The way you dis-identify is subtle and hard to see. It happens unconsciously at the level of thought and behavior. To change it, you need to decide to no longer disappear. Do not look outside yourself for your identity.”

The whisper of pain gave me pause. The depth and breadth of my self-inflicted power loss — which was in place for decades as protection in response to childhood abuse and abandonment — was not new to me. But there was something new in how I was fully feeling, listening, responding. I could feel it viscerally. Things were shifting quickly now. A small giddiness swirled into the overwhelm.

Then lifetimes rushed into the tub waters with me. Quick images formed in my inner vision revealing lives where I had died for standing in my truth, risking exposure, and expressing. Injuries to my neck and head were in many of them. I felt the weight across time. So many self-rejecting patterns to stay safe! I hugged myself tighter, holding my face and my neck and silently thought, “I’m so sorry. You are safe now.”

My protective personality rushed back at the pain, “I thought I already explored this lesson of self-limitation. For years now!”

Pain whispered, “You have. It took the boulder-sized trigger Orion gifted to see the automatic pilot level of this pattern. Thanks to self-reflection, circuit building, and inner bonding you are now able to meet me long enough to truly shift it.”

Paradoxically, although parts of my identity were dying, I was feeling a stronger sense of self. I felt awful, yet clear. While some thoughts were chanting, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I can’t handle this. I can’t do this.” A tiny whisper of relief grew. I knew it was ego resistance right before big change and so I followed the hint of relief.

Love is a Universal Solvent

The bathtub and the water element helped. Love is a universal solvent, just like water. Rather than our typical understanding of death as final, I describe philosophical and physical death as a dissolving back into love. My self-limitation and disappearing acts over the years were attempts at love, trying to safeguard. I let the water take all of it, the fear, the limitation, the self-sacrifice.

I was knee deep in grit. Living into nature’s erosion of myself in real time with no avoidance or denial left me more capable and more resilient on the other side.

The courage of intimacy. Grit.
Coming undone. Grit.
Sitting in the bathtub sobbing. Grit.
Loving the dark parts and listening to them. Grit.
Allowing the small spark of relief to grow at the same time as the pain. Grit.

How do you build muscle for grit and resilience?

One very basic technique is to find one small way back to your power when you are in the thick of it. All of this resilience building is a life’s work, but to get our power back only takes seconds. It takes creative choice and a willingness to receive the flow of our own energy again. Sometimes it is a self-hug. Sometimes it is a positive reminder. Blinking your eyes to see a new reality. I teach dozens of them. It is only a choice away.

Map to the Miracle Zone: 7 Steps to Flow

There are seven tenets I teach in my soul coaching work and practice them myself every day. I call these the map to the miracle zone, and they are helpful reminders of how to get back into the flow of life. These return us to alignment with the laws of the universe — the laws of holism — and from there all is possible. While the shit was hitting the proverbial fan, I was able to do the seeming impossible (miracle). My recent tale of grit can be reduced to these seven tenets:

1. Listen to your soul. I trusted my inner voice and took action from there. I listened to my soul across time.
2. Love all the parts of you. I leaned in and cared for the aspects of me I don’t like all that much. No part was abandoned. Not even lifetimes prior.
3. Take responsibility for your own life. I stopped blaming myself or anyone else for my pain.
4. Embrace paradox. Although I was upset at Orion, I held space for his pain too. I was able to review past lives as well as current life issues. I was able to hold my deep pain as well as my relief and contentment in the process at the same time.
5. Leave some room for the universe. I held space for the information that wanted to come in and through me.
6. Choose where you put your energy. I put my authority firmly within instead of outwardly. I stopped shaming myself for crying or being so low. Both dissipate energy, so I was more strengthened with my energy intact.
7. Maintain an open heart and mind. I embraced my vulnerability and felt my feeling. I stopped pretending, denying, avoiding, or shoving the intense emotions away.

I share the seven tenets of the miracle map with you to remind you: it is possible for any one of us to learn to live in alignment with the law of holism, even when in deep pain. The first three represent inner bonding; they lay the foundation for the remaining tenets.

When we are willing to go in deep enough to access, grieve and feel our old pain, a part of us is finally able to learn and release residual pain. Once that part is heard, it is no longer required to shout at us and can dissolve back into the fullness of our being. In shamanic circles, such freedom is associated with spiritual death/rebirth/dis-memberment and is seen as a re-membering of our full self. It is an upgrade, an expansion, an initiation. From mild conflict, arguments, and small anxious fears to full blown panic attacks, death, destruction, and unfathomable loss, we each have an opportunity for such a brave initiation into the next level of ourselves.

For any of you this past year (or years) that have had a dark day (or two, or fifty) facing into difficulty that have asked, “What in the heck? What is going on? What’s wrong with me? Why is this so hard? Where did my joy go?” I offer the power of grit to that part of you surfing intensity. Grit reminds us that every single act on this planet is an attempt at love. And despite what your protective personality is saying, you are not alone and you are stronger than you think. When you step back into the flow of universal energy you are, you are able to live the life your soul intended.

Subscribe to Inner Space Academy and our Quantum Consciousness bundle inside the Project Awakening collection for exclusive access to the full Map of the Miracle Zone.

If you need deeper support, contact Astara to arrange a private soul healing session that meets your needs. Astara guides you to fill your own soul tool belt and build your indomitable spirit and pluck. Empower yourself to live the life your soul intended through a Heartifact Archaeology session, Soul Alchemy session, or Heartifact Coaching or SOULjourn package.