Avoidance Is Not Helpful

Written By Don Shetterly

This subject is one I still haven't fully learned.  Maybe it is because it is a human condition that we employ when things get a little too tough.  Avoidance is one of my go-to-coping skills, but when I avoid things, I tend to make them worse.  It was my survival tactic growing up in a world full of trauma and abuse.


Take for example the recent tooth pain that I kept trying to mask and ignore.  I found ways to compensate for it that kept me disconnected from it.  I'm amazed at just how far I went so I didn't have to deal with it.  I avoided it instead, and by doing this, I've probably caused myself a lot more expense.

Avoidance is being employed by almost everyone at record setting paces these days.  Times are tough in life right now.  We are going through horrible moments as a civilization on this planet.  The atmosphere and energy all around are divisive and toxic.  Everywhere you look there is something that is upsetting.  Even if you try to distance yourself from all of it, the feeling of that toxic energy is still prevalent.

We Turn To Things That Distract Us...

To deal with it, we do as I did on the tooth pain.  We turn to things that distract us and keep us from dealing with reality.  We consume things to help give us comfort.  We act all happy and smiles when we're crumbling inside.  We put our attention on anything but the moment that is happening before us because it is just too difficult.

Avoidance can be good in the short term.  It may help you get from one moment to the next so you can deal with the issue.  However, when we continue to avoid the issues that are troubling, we only do harm to our body, mind, and spirit.  We take in the toxic poison as if it is our sustenance, thereby hurting us for years to come.

Avoidance brings us out of consciousness and awareness.  It puts us in the passenger seat instead of being in control of our life.  When we are out of control, the fear and panic and despair set in causing us further long term effects.

During these times of immense stress and toxic poisoning, we owe it to ourselves to reverse the course.  There are things we can do to help alleviate it and take care of ourselves, rather than just giving in to what is happening.

Here are some things that help in moments like this.

• Try spending some time outdoors listening to the birds and feeling the rays of the sun upon your face.  Try feeling the wind or breeze on your skin and just feel every bit of it that you can.  

• Trying focusing on your breathing for 30 seconds or a minute at various times during your day.  Connect and feel your breath.  This does not need to be elaborate and can be very simple. The act of stopping and noticing your breath can be very centering and be grounding in your body.

• Learn to disengage from the toxic conversations occurring online for they are not as helpful as they may seem.  They get the body and mind all revved up as if you are going into battle.  Online conversations do little but fuel the fire and hatred that is so prevalent in our society these days.  If you disengage, you are stating to yourself that you are valuable and worth more.

• Learn to shut off the TV because the news is not enlightening as you may think.  The videos and sounds and opinions stated are meant to engage you into an emotional reaction.  The more you keep your emotions wound up to the max, the less you are connected to your body.  In time, it leads to avoidance of your mind and body.

We all have choices we make.  We may or may not be conscious and aware of them, but we make these decisions every day.  Either we employ avoidance, or we stand up and choose differently what we engage with in a day and all that we take in with each moment we are alive.

You don't' have to hide your head in the sand to what is going on, but a fraction of the toxic poisoning these days is more than enough.  It may help to picture yourself drinking a glass of toxic poisoning each time you engage with what is going on in the world.  However, before long the effects of the poisoning would be felt.

If we want to change the world, we need to stop avoiding life and learn how to give our mind and body a choice of rest and peace, comfort, and love.  We need to choose wisely because if we don't, we will pass the point of no return, and then it will be difficult to find our balance.

What are some ways you avoid difficult things in life?  What do you do to deal with them?  Share your thoughts in a comment below.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Avoiding Healing

If you're like me in my own healing, you've probably done some avoiding of what you needed to do.  It is easy to avoid healing in our lives because this path is not easy.

Healing is sometimes long and treacherous.  Sometimes it is exhausting.

The only thing is, if we avoid healing in our lives, it will come back up and bite us.  Our body and our mind will work to get our attention and the more we avoid it, the more it will increase.

I know from experience that avoiding things in life, numbing and disconnecting will only take you down a path that isn't pretty.  For me, it took me into a conversion disorder where I was paralyzed and almost on my last breath for good.

It isn't easy to heal, especially when you've been through trauma or child abuse or been molested and raped as a child.  These experiences harm people in so many ways and to get your life back is an exercise in exhaustion at times.  I know, I've been there.

Be real in our healing...

We just need to be honest with ourselves in our own healing and be real with what we are doing.  Are we avoiding healing through various ways, or are we truly going in and doing what we need to be doing.

There are many ways to avoid healing and even if I tried to list all that I could, there would be many more.  I think at a subconscious level we understand when we are avoiding what it is that we need to do, but often times it doesn't rise to a level of consciousness and awareness.

So, how do you avoid healing or how have you done this in the past?

What are your ways that you numb and disconnect, rather than take a long hard look at what is truly taking place on your healing journey.

#Numbing

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Numbed Pain

If you're one of those people that deal with chronic pain, this post does not necessarily apply to you.  It is something different that I am talking about here than chronic pain where you hurt day in and day out.

What I am talking about is pain that we numb or what I referred to in the title as Numbed Pain. It is the pain that we avoid and disconnect from.  It is our busy days that keep us from feeling the pain in our body.

Yes, we do numb our pain.  We go through our days of stress and nonstop activity, oblivious to the pain and messages that our body is using to get our attention.  We often don't want to face the pain, so we stuff it down and hide it.

When I was traveling every week, my life was on constant go from one city to the next with very little rest or downtime.  When my head hit the pillow in a hotel room of a strange city, that's when I had the chance to rest.   Crossing one time zone after another and sleeping in one strange place to another, I didn't know what rest was.

In addition, I spent most of my waking hours either on the phone being the main support contact or answering emails or planning the next training session.  There was no downtime.  My body didn't have time to feel all the pains and stresses and issues in the tissues.  I automatically and subconsciously avoided it.  I numbed out to the pain.  I disconnected from it.

Avoided the pain but it impacted my body...

The thing is, even though I was avoiding and numbing the pain, it was still impacting my body.  I just didn't realize it nor could I see it.  It wasn't until after I quit the job and had massive amounts of downtime that I really started to see just how much of a toll it took on my body.

It is human to numb and avoid, but the more we do this, the more we miss critical notices from our body of what is truly happening in the body and the mind.  The more we don't feel what is happening, the more stress and issues we are storing within the cellular components of our body.  These things rob us of precious energy and strength.  These things rob us of peace in our life.

Oblivious to numbed pain...

All too often we are oblivious to numbed pain.  We have been successful at avoiding it and now it is like we are complete strangers speaking two different languages.  All the while, it is impacting us in very real biological ways.

If we continue down this road, it will get our attention at some point.  We may be able to hide from it, evade it and ignore it.  Sooner or later, it will catch up to us and the likes of it will not be pretty.

I'm not speaking from some new age concept here.  I'm speaking from experience because I almost lost my life many years ago from numbing the pain.  I ignored it and didn't deal with the stresses and trauma I had experienced in life.  It showed up as Conversion Disorder after some other events became the catalyst that formed paralysis and a near death experience.

I'm not saying that I'm perfect and have learned my lesson well on avoiding and disconnecting from numbed pain.  However, I have done a tremendous amount of work on myself to free myself from the chains of trauma and stress.  It is through this physical and biological healing work that I've learned how to transform this into a life I never thought possible.

The thing is that any of us can keep avoiding the pain and not feeling it.  The more we do of it, the more chronic it becomes.  The more we continue to avoid it, the more it begins to work harder to get our attention.  If we continue down this path, the brain will do all it can to keep us alive but other physical realities of our bodies and minds may become nothing more than dead weight.

It is up to each one of us how we choose our life and what we allow ourselves to become aware of each day.  If we allow pain to be numbed, we will be sentencing our life to great difficulty.  You may be getting away with it at the moment, but just how much longer before your luck runs out and you pass the point of no return?

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Subconscious Disconnected By Numbing

Connecting is not as difficult as it sounds, but in many ways it is difficult.  In fact, most of our lives, we have been living a disconnected life and our subconscious mind is now a foreigner within us.

Yes, there are certain activities that help take us out of being disconnected, but often we have not passed the threshold we need to obtain and so even with these activities, we stay disconnected.  The fullness of our life is hidden and silent.  We get to the point that our subconscious mind is anything but something we are connected to in our life.

I say it is difficult to connect because we all have lived a life of numbing and avoidance.  Many of the experiences we had early on in life were more than our young minds could handle and so numbing and avoidance became the norm.  Even the daily build up of stress acts in much the same way as traumatic events upon the body.  Traumatic scenes and images we view can also bring on the numbing and avoidance.

Numbing and Avoiding...

When we numb and avoid, we are not feeling.  We are not connected to our body or our mind.  We are not present in life to the degree we may think we are.  In fact, most of the time when you are numbing and avoiding, you're not even aware that you are doing it.  If someone tried to convince you otherwise, you would have great difficulty comprehending what they were saying and questioning strongly how it applies to you and your life.

Numbing and avoiding can be in so many ways.  It can be as simple as using food and alcohol or as complex as using drugs and sex.  Numbing and avoidance can show up through religious practices, constantly buying stuff you don't need, living in fantasy more than in reality or just keeping yourself constantly busy.  There are many ways of numbing and these are just a few, but if you want to read a more exhaustive list that I've put together, check this page out, The Ways We Numb The Body.

We are not feeling everything...

When we are numb, we aren't feeling the full breadth of our physical body.  We may not be and most likely are not aware that we are not feeling everything.  If you are trying to get 100 tasks completed by the end of the day that the boss is demanding you finish, do you think that you would feel all the pains in your body or how the stress is impacting you?  More likely than not, you would not feel these things.  They would get in the way of you performing the tasks you need to complete.  You would be numb to the subconscious mind.

Sometimes we need to numb our body to handle the current moments, but it is when we don't shut off the numbing in our subconscious mind that it becomes a problem  Temporary numbing is one thing, but long term causes great damage to our mind and body.  The more we numb, the more long term damage we do and the harder it is to recover.
 

If we can just begin to understand how much we numb and avoid the hard parts of our life, we will be on the uphill climb to a much greater awareness filled with peace beyond comprehension.  Numbing and avoidance take us away from the subconscious mind where we are empowered and filled with all that we need to take on the challenges of our lives.

We must first begin to understand that numbness and avoidance are two of our greatest enemies in our life.  For the more we choose to not see how we numb and avoid, the more we are robbing ourselves of all the potential for our life.  Numbing and avoidance are negative pleasures.  They help us disconnect, but at the same time, they rob us of our energy and essence of life.  Numbing and avoidance keep us from the deep peace within our lives.

Further Reading:

1. When A Subconscious Mind Is Exposed (Sep 13, 2016)
2. Subconscious Mind Impacted By Past Experiences (Sep 14, 2016)
3. Subconscious Disconnected By Numbing (Sep 15, 2016)
4. Connect To The Subconscious Mind (Sep 16, 2016)

Cleaning Out Our Life's Barn

Where The Barn Used To Be
Off In The Distance

When we first moved to a farm when I was in 8th grade, it had several out buildings, a lot of pasture, a big house and a gigantic old barn.  The barn was majestic with worn paint, but it provided a great place for me to hide, roam, and treat as if it was my own world.  My cats would hide in the left over hay bales and found it was a warm refuge from the weather and my father.

The barn no longer stands where it once did as it has been torn down.  As majestic as it was, full of those old timbers, it was really a mess inside.  It seemed as if someone had used it over the years, but never taken a moment to tidy it up or clean it out.  It was an accumulation of so much that one could have a history lesson inside its walls.

This applied to how dirty it was from left over animal material.  In the low end of the barn, the accumulation was over a foot in depth and was dried and hard.  It had become the floor in many ways and was crowding in on the ceiling.  Our job as kids was to go in and clean this out which meant chipping, picking away at it, and shoveling it outside the door to be spread on a nearby field.

Unseen Steps

In life, I am beginning to define who I am and what I am about. It is not the easiest of times but I feel as if my discovery is exactly where i need to be in this moment. It doesn't pay the bills and often I get discouraged but deep down, I know this is part of my journey to all that is ahead.

If I do not walk these steps, I will not be prepared for what lies around the curve. I must follow my intuition and my gut feeling, no matter how difficult the next steps become on my journey. In the end, I will look back and be amazed at just how all my steps were in sequence even when they were difficult to see.

Yes, it would be easier to just not have to deal with any of this in life and hide my eyes from all that I experience but that is not growth. This is avoidance. I have hid myself from these things for too many years of my life and no longer am I content to do that. I can see how many light years I have traveled and in the difficult times, this gives solace to my soul.


Blog Post & Images (c) 12/8/10 Don Shetterly - use by permission only