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I Quit

by Ash | April 2, 2019 | Discernment, Featured, Mind, My favorites, My Journey, Personal Development, Spirit, Vulnerability-authenticity | 30 Comments

The day I thought would never come has arrived. This the end of In My Sacred Space.

When Was The Last Time You Cried in Front of Someone?

by Ash | March 31, 2019 | My Journey, Vulnerability-authenticity | 3 Comments

I’m actually not as good at vulnerability as you probably think I am. Here’s why.

The Day I Threw My Career In The Trash

by Ash | March 19, 2019 | My Journey, Personal Development | 1 Comment

Eighteen months ago, I abruptly shuttered my business as a marketing, business, and branding consultant for tech startups. Here’s why.

@ASHRISING ON INSTAGRAM

Instagram post 1995231793868809256_2925114972

People throw the term “narcissist” around like confetti. 🎊 But being a self-centered ass hat IS NOT synonymous with narcissism.
🍑🎩
Everyone has narcissistic traits. It’s part of being human. When you have achieved a specific percentage of narcissistic traits, you are clinically qualified for a personality disorder.
💯%
Some of the REAL tell-tale signs of narcissism (of a personality disorder level) are as follows:
✔️
↪️ Perpetual victim mentality. They’re never wrong. This person has never once taken responsibility for their own emotions, failings, or actions and everything—I mean EVERYTHING—is always someone else’s fault. The world is against them. It’s not that they are in denial or simply choosing not to be responsible—they legitimately don’t have the capacity to see themselves as the source of their own shit. This leads to point #2...
↪️ Incapable of empathy. They are incapable of seeing the world from any perspective that isn’t theirs. You can’t rationalize with them. It’s like they can’t comprehend what you’re saying and they simply ignore it. They don’t have the capacity to imagine how another person feels.
↪️ Masterfully manipulative. Not because they are evil genius level strategists who gaslight you as a means to an end, but because they ACTUALLY BELIEVE the lies they tell others. They live within a delusional mental landscape of their own creation that constantly shifts to accommodate their need for superiority.
↪️ Delusions of grandeur. I’m not talking about being overly proud of one’s accomplishments, I mean Donald Trump level grandiosity. “I am the best, everything I do is the greatest,” and imagining themselves to be of a god-like status. They are drawn to positions of ultimate power and authority, particularly political and spiritual authority.
✝️
A lot of narcissists exist in fields where they can “help” others because it allows them to be surrounded by people who look up to them, constantly compliment them, and provide a sense of worship which feeds their delusional desire for perfection.
✳︎
Comment with a 🤮 of you’re tired of people labeling every asshole they meet with a psychological disorder.
😒
📷: @poppiphotography

Instagram post 2005372549329617980_2925114972

If you withhold parts of yourself to make other people happy, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you stuff your emotions to keep the peace, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you dress a certain way to garner attention from others, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you’re positive vibes only, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you act like a tough girl when you’re dying inside, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you change your body to feel more accepted by the opposite sex, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
>>>Authenticity is something you embody, not something you preach. If you have to go around telling people how authentic you are in order to have them believe you are authentic, you’re not authentic.<<<
✳︎
If you’re attempting to control how other people perceive and interact with you by changing yourself in any way, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
You cannot be a people-pleaser and simultaneously be authentic.
✳︎
If you’re attempting to control how YOU perceive yourself through denial of your shadow, or by changing yourself in any way that doesn’t ultimately create a healing of a past wound, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
Authenticity is not found in your personality, it’s in your core identity, and you can only find your core identity after you’ve done many years of work to drop societal, familial, and gender conditioning, healed past traumas and begun to actively choose how you want to show up, on your terms and no one else’s.
✳︎
📷: @risingwoman
✳︎
#healing #authenticity #personaldevelopment #authentic #personalgrowth #instadaily #motivation #bereal #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lifequotes #soul #wordsthatheal #instagood #lifeadvice #shadowwork #wordsofwisdom #highervibes #beyourself #heal #selfactualization #awakening #selfawareness #lifequotes #reflectingoutloud

Instagram post 2144595770326577276_2925114972

I really hate peanut butter cookies. In my 36 years on earth, I’ve never met one that I liked.
 And yet, every single fucking time I see one, I still think, “Maybe this time…” I pick it up. I take a bite. Nope. Still hate peanut butter cookies.  The fact that I still try it every time I see it thinking that maybe this will be the one and somehow my aversion will magically shift, all the while fully knowing I don’t like them and never have, is the definition of insanity. But that’s what ingrained behaviors do to us.  I’ve found myself exhibiting this same behavioral pattern in other areas of my life, particularly relationships. Falling for the same kind of people over and over. Giving them chance after chance, thinking somehow, this time, it would end differently. But it doesn’t. And I knew it wouldn’t, just like I know I fucking hate peanut butter cookies.  At some point you’ve got to look in the mirror and tell yourself, ‘You know you hate peanut butter cookies. You know you’d much rather have a snickerdoodle or a sugar cookie. The only reason you keep trying peanut butter cookies is because that’s the only thing available. And you know what? IT’S FUCKING OK TO GO WITHOUT THE GOD DAMN COOKIE IF IT’S NOT WHAT YOU’RE REALLY LOOKING FOR.” And the same goes for romantic partners. And friends. And jobs. And any other hypothetical thing your peanut butter cookie could be a metaphor for.

Be willing to wait for what will fulfill you instead of trying to settle with what’s in front of you, lest you keep taking a bite and spitting it out because it’s disgusting. Every. Fucking. Time.

#standards #whatyouseekisseekingyou #raiseyourstandards #consciousliving #value #knowyourworth #consciousrelationships

Instagram post 2141568563324659780_2925114972

ON MANAGING ANXIETY

In my stories earlier this week, I asked what other topics you’d be interested in hearing about from me and someone asked me to touch on how to control feelings of anxiety.  First, I want to say that I don’t think you can control anxiety, per se, but you can learn how to manage it and eventually heal it. Anxiety is your body’s physiological response to an external or internal stress trigger. Particularly in the latter case, anxiety is your body’s way of alerting you that there’s an unresolved, internal emotional conflict rooted in fear. It’s a feeling and we can’t control how we feel.
 As I’ve become more energetically sensitive over the last couple of years, I’ve begun to notice where in my body I physically feel certain emotions. I almost always feel anxiety in my heart or my stomach, or both.  From an energetic standpoint, anxiety occurs when your energy becomes ungrounded. That means that, rather than flowing down through your body and connecting with earth, your energy current is stopping or being blocked at the heart chakra or the solar plexus.

In order to manage this, you want to get the energy flowing down through your body again. Here’s a few yoga, mindfulness, and energetic tactics I’ve picked up over the years to help with that:  1️⃣ Deep Breathing
Take deep belly breaths with your lower belly. Short breaths from your chest exacerbate the fight or flight fear response that’s happening physiologically. When you take deep breaths from your lower belly, it calms your heart rate and helps draw energy down into your sacral chakra and gets things flowing again.

2️⃣ Physical Grounding Take your right hand and ball it into a fist, place it on top of your lower belly, place your left hand over the fist, and then push into your abdomen while bending over slightly. This is another yogic tactic meant to help ground you back into your lower body by bringing physical awareness to it. Bring as much of your awareness to your physical body, particularly the lower extremities, as possible. [continued 👇🏻]

Instagram post 1996002741916212736_2925114972

#love #instadaily #creativewriting #words #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lovequotes #soul #instagood #wordporn #spilledink #wordsofwisdom #sacredunion #writer #poet #poetsofinstagram #poetry #writersofinstagram #quoteoftheday #reflectingoutloud #writingcommunity #writersofig #poet #poetry #poetsofinstagram

Instagram post 2133673324702500547_2925114972

Another something I wrote one morning in June:

Abandonment is a term we’re all familiar with and have likely experienced to some degree in a relationship at some point–the guy you met on Bumble and dated for three weeks who ghosted you; the one you dated in college who moved away; the friend who broke up with you after a disagreement.

Then there’s traumatic abandonment. I don’t know if that’s an official psychological term, but if it’s not, I’m about to coin it. Traumatic abandonment occurs when someone you have developed a long-term, intimate emotional relationship with suddenly cuts off all communication without warning. It’s being ghosted, but not just by anyone–by someone you love and have a deep attachment to.

Traumatic abandonment leaves a devastation in its wake rivaled only by death–except it’s worse, because at least with death (suicide being the exception), the loved one didn’t choose to leave you.

The stages of grief are similar, though they come with one addition: confusion. First, you are confused. Why aren’t they responding? You make excuses. Maybe they’re just busy. Maybe their battery died. The hours go by and then the days. Maybe they lost their phone. Still nothing. After a few days, it begins to sink in.

Then comes bargaining: once you recognize the person has no intention of responding to you, you keep keep trying. You send text messages trying to fix things. You apologize, or beg for forgiveness, or forgive, or otherwise try to smooth over whatever happened, only to be met with more silence.  Next comes the anger. Why would they do this to you? How could they do this to you? How could anyone, but especially them–this person who said they loved you? How can they just disappear without saying a word?

Weeks begin to pass and the denial begins to work it’s delusion. You tell yourself they’ll come back. You build yourself up with hope. It gets you through the days. Every time your phone buzzes, you think, “Maybe it’s them.” And then you crash each time you see that it isn’t, until it happens enough times that hope becomes cynicism. (continued 👇🏻)

Instagram post 2130280352271263430_2925114972

I posted this on March 23rd, just two weeks before I stopped posting to Instagram. Unbeknownst to me consciously, but perhaps intuitively sensed, this is how I would spend my next five months.

Depression has been calling me since November. I’d been fighting the urge to withdraw from the world since.

When January hit, things began to deteriorate. In addition to the surfacing of unhealed trauma, someone I cared for deeply abruptly cut me out of their life. It ripped open an abandonment wound that I’d thought had long been healed. And there it was, gaping and bleeding as fresh as the day it was inflicted.

Since January, I’d been in and out of depression. In June, it took a turn for the worse. In July, I bottomed out. Over the course of those seven months, the thought that death would bring reprieve from the pain crossed my mind more times than I care to admit. I found myself wondering, for the first time ever, if I should consider medicating myself. I lost my faith in life.

The hard season came upon me and it split me through. My light was snuffed out. I bled water. A thousand tears of grief. The years were purged from their hiding places and I reacquainted myself with the ghosts as they passed from me, one by one. My self-worth lay on the floor. The rage was still tender, even into last week, the ninth month.

I am ready for the soft season to come. To drink the damage into love. The scars are the reminders of wisdom gained—may they be ever present.

This is what real healing looks like. It is hard. It is long. It is not glamorous. It doesn’t look like magical transcendence, it looks like total destruction, and the life you build afterward.

DISCLAIMER: this is not a pity post. I don’t need anyone to be here for me. The people that I rely on have known this was happening in real time. If you didn’t, you’re not one of them, and that is by design. I’m only sharing this NOW because I’m in a better place, finally, and I want other people who experience this to know that they are not alone. That’s all.

Poem by @nayyirah.waheed

#darkness #rebirth #healing #depression #mentalhealthawareness #spirituality #lightworker #healer

Instagram post 1995231793868809256_2925114972

People throw the term “narcissist” around like confetti. 🎊 But being a self-centered ass hat IS NOT synonymous with narcissism.
🍑🎩
Everyone has narcissistic traits. It’s part of being human. When you have achieved a specific percentage of narcissistic traits, you are clinically qualified for a personality disorder.
💯%
Some of the REAL tell-tale signs of narcissism (of a personality disorder level) are as follows:
✔️
↪️ Perpetual victim mentality. They’re never wrong. This person has never once taken responsibility for their own emotions, failings, or actions and everything—I mean EVERYTHING—is always someone else’s fault. The world is against them. It’s not that they are in denial or simply choosing not to be responsible—they legitimately don’t have the capacity to see themselves as the source of their own shit. This leads to point #2...
↪️ Incapable of empathy. They are incapable of seeing the world from any perspective that isn’t theirs. You can’t rationalize with them. It’s like they can’t comprehend what you’re saying and they simply ignore it. They don’t have the capacity to imagine how another person feels.
↪️ Masterfully manipulative. Not because they are evil genius level strategists who gaslight you as a means to an end, but because they ACTUALLY BELIEVE the lies they tell others. They live within a delusional mental landscape of their own creation that constantly shifts to accommodate their need for superiority.
↪️ Delusions of grandeur. I’m not talking about being overly proud of one’s accomplishments, I mean Donald Trump level grandiosity. “I am the best, everything I do is the greatest,” and imagining themselves to be of a god-like status. They are drawn to positions of ultimate power and authority, particularly political and spiritual authority.
✝️
A lot of narcissists exist in fields where they can “help” others because it allows them to be surrounded by people who look up to them, constantly compliment them, and provide a sense of worship which feeds their delusional desire for perfection.
✳︎
Comment with a 🤮 of you’re tired of people labeling every asshole they meet with a psychological disorder.
😒
📷: @poppiphotography

Instagram post 2005372549329617980_2925114972

If you withhold parts of yourself to make other people happy, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you stuff your emotions to keep the peace, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you dress a certain way to garner attention from others, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you’re positive vibes only, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you act like a tough girl when you’re dying inside, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
If you change your body to feel more accepted by the opposite sex, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
>>>Authenticity is something you embody, not something you preach. If you have to go around telling people how authentic you are in order to have them believe you are authentic, you’re not authentic.<<<
✳︎
If you’re attempting to control how other people perceive and interact with you by changing yourself in any way, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
You cannot be a people-pleaser and simultaneously be authentic.
✳︎
If you’re attempting to control how YOU perceive yourself through denial of your shadow, or by changing yourself in any way that doesn’t ultimately create a healing of a past wound, you’re not authentic.
✳︎
Authenticity is not found in your personality, it’s in your core identity, and you can only find your core identity after you’ve done many years of work to drop societal, familial, and gender conditioning, healed past traumas and begun to actively choose how you want to show up, on your terms and no one else’s.
✳︎
📷: @risingwoman
✳︎
#healing #authenticity #personaldevelopment #authentic #personalgrowth #instadaily #motivation #bereal #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lifequotes #soul #wordsthatheal #instagood #lifeadvice #shadowwork #wordsofwisdom #highervibes #beyourself #heal #selfactualization #awakening #selfawareness #lifequotes #reflectingoutloud

Instagram post 2144595770326577276_2925114972

I really hate peanut butter cookies. In my 36 years on earth, I’ve never met one that I liked.
 And yet, every single fucking time I see one, I still think, “Maybe this time…” I pick it up. I take a bite. Nope. Still hate peanut butter cookies.  The fact that I still try it every time I see it thinking that maybe this will be the one and somehow my aversion will magically shift, all the while fully knowing I don’t like them and never have, is the definition of insanity. But that’s what ingrained behaviors do to us.  I’ve found myself exhibiting this same behavioral pattern in other areas of my life, particularly relationships. Falling for the same kind of people over and over. Giving them chance after chance, thinking somehow, this time, it would end differently. But it doesn’t. And I knew it wouldn’t, just like I know I fucking hate peanut butter cookies.  At some point you’ve got to look in the mirror and tell yourself, ‘You know you hate peanut butter cookies. You know you’d much rather have a snickerdoodle or a sugar cookie. The only reason you keep trying peanut butter cookies is because that’s the only thing available. And you know what? IT’S FUCKING OK TO GO WITHOUT THE GOD DAMN COOKIE IF IT’S NOT WHAT YOU’RE REALLY LOOKING FOR.” And the same goes for romantic partners. And friends. And jobs. And any other hypothetical thing your peanut butter cookie could be a metaphor for.

Be willing to wait for what will fulfill you instead of trying to settle with what’s in front of you, lest you keep taking a bite and spitting it out because it’s disgusting. Every. Fucking. Time.

#standards #whatyouseekisseekingyou #raiseyourstandards #consciousliving #value #knowyourworth #consciousrelationships

Instagram post 2141568563324659780_2925114972

ON MANAGING ANXIETY

In my stories earlier this week, I asked what other topics you’d be interested in hearing about from me and someone asked me to touch on how to control feelings of anxiety.  First, I want to say that I don’t think you can control anxiety, per se, but you can learn how to manage it and eventually heal it. Anxiety is your body’s physiological response to an external or internal stress trigger. Particularly in the latter case, anxiety is your body’s way of alerting you that there’s an unresolved, internal emotional conflict rooted in fear. It’s a feeling and we can’t control how we feel.
 As I’ve become more energetically sensitive over the last couple of years, I’ve begun to notice where in my body I physically feel certain emotions. I almost always feel anxiety in my heart or my stomach, or both.  From an energetic standpoint, anxiety occurs when your energy becomes ungrounded. That means that, rather than flowing down through your body and connecting with earth, your energy current is stopping or being blocked at the heart chakra or the solar plexus.

In order to manage this, you want to get the energy flowing down through your body again. Here’s a few yoga, mindfulness, and energetic tactics I’ve picked up over the years to help with that:  1️⃣ Deep Breathing
Take deep belly breaths with your lower belly. Short breaths from your chest exacerbate the fight or flight fear response that’s happening physiologically. When you take deep breaths from your lower belly, it calms your heart rate and helps draw energy down into your sacral chakra and gets things flowing again.

2️⃣ Physical Grounding Take your right hand and ball it into a fist, place it on top of your lower belly, place your left hand over the fist, and then push into your abdomen while bending over slightly. This is another yogic tactic meant to help ground you back into your lower body by bringing physical awareness to it. Bring as much of your awareness to your physical body, particularly the lower extremities, as possible. [continued 👇🏻]

Instagram post 1996002741916212736_2925114972

#love #instadaily #creativewriting #words #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lovequotes #soul #instagood #wordporn #spilledink #wordsofwisdom #sacredunion #writer #poet #poetsofinstagram #poetry #writersofinstagram #quoteoftheday #reflectingoutloud #writingcommunity #writersofig #poet #poetry #poetsofinstagram

Instagram post 2133673324702500547_2925114972

Another something I wrote one morning in June:

Abandonment is a term we’re all familiar with and have likely experienced to some degree in a relationship at some point–the guy you met on Bumble and dated for three weeks who ghosted you; the one you dated in college who moved away; the friend who broke up with you after a disagreement.

Then there’s traumatic abandonment. I don’t know if that’s an official psychological term, but if it’s not, I’m about to coin it. Traumatic abandonment occurs when someone you have developed a long-term, intimate emotional relationship with suddenly cuts off all communication without warning. It’s being ghosted, but not just by anyone–by someone you love and have a deep attachment to.

Traumatic abandonment leaves a devastation in its wake rivaled only by death–except it’s worse, because at least with death (suicide being the exception), the loved one didn’t choose to leave you.

The stages of grief are similar, though they come with one addition: confusion. First, you are confused. Why aren’t they responding? You make excuses. Maybe they’re just busy. Maybe their battery died. The hours go by and then the days. Maybe they lost their phone. Still nothing. After a few days, it begins to sink in.

Then comes bargaining: once you recognize the person has no intention of responding to you, you keep keep trying. You send text messages trying to fix things. You apologize, or beg for forgiveness, or forgive, or otherwise try to smooth over whatever happened, only to be met with more silence.  Next comes the anger. Why would they do this to you? How could they do this to you? How could anyone, but especially them–this person who said they loved you? How can they just disappear without saying a word?

Weeks begin to pass and the denial begins to work it’s delusion. You tell yourself they’ll come back. You build yourself up with hope. It gets you through the days. Every time your phone buzzes, you think, “Maybe it’s them.” And then you crash each time you see that it isn’t, until it happens enough times that hope becomes cynicism. (continued 👇🏻)

Instagram post 2130280352271263430_2925114972

I posted this on March 23rd, just two weeks before I stopped posting to Instagram. Unbeknownst to me consciously, but perhaps intuitively sensed, this is how I would spend my next five months.

Depression has been calling me since November. I’d been fighting the urge to withdraw from the world since.

When January hit, things began to deteriorate. In addition to the surfacing of unhealed trauma, someone I cared for deeply abruptly cut me out of their life. It ripped open an abandonment wound that I’d thought had long been healed. And there it was, gaping and bleeding as fresh as the day it was inflicted.

Since January, I’d been in and out of depression. In June, it took a turn for the worse. In July, I bottomed out. Over the course of those seven months, the thought that death would bring reprieve from the pain crossed my mind more times than I care to admit. I found myself wondering, for the first time ever, if I should consider medicating myself. I lost my faith in life.

The hard season came upon me and it split me through. My light was snuffed out. I bled water. A thousand tears of grief. The years were purged from their hiding places and I reacquainted myself with the ghosts as they passed from me, one by one. My self-worth lay on the floor. The rage was still tender, even into last week, the ninth month.

I am ready for the soft season to come. To drink the damage into love. The scars are the reminders of wisdom gained—may they be ever present.

This is what real healing looks like. It is hard. It is long. It is not glamorous. It doesn’t look like magical transcendence, it looks like total destruction, and the life you build afterward.

DISCLAIMER: this is not a pity post. I don’t need anyone to be here for me. The people that I rely on have known this was happening in real time. If you didn’t, you’re not one of them, and that is by design. I’m only sharing this NOW because I’m in a better place, finally, and I want other people who experience this to know that they are not alone. That’s all.

Poem by @nayyirah.waheed

#darkness #rebirth #healing #depression #mentalhealthawareness #spirituality #lightworker #healer

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