On Monday I talked about honesty - in telling the truth, and in not failing to tell the truth. I talked about honesty that was based on love, not fear. About whether our honesty is about connecting more deeply or about the avoidance of punishment and pain. But today I want to go deeper. Because I know that for me - and for many, many others - there are multiple layers of truth that we simply do not acknowledge. Truth that we completely fail to realize exists.
There's a post going around Facebook the last few weeks that goes like this ...
On Wednesday we talked about 'Otherworld' and the idea that the world revolved around more than just me. And we talked about the fact that this kind of thinking makes it easy for us to misinterpret people's motives and intentions and end up assuming that people are being 'deliberate and malicious' far more frequently than they actually are. Having identified the problem, now we have to figure out how to get to a solution. And I think that the solution is to assume that there's probably an explanation for the behaviour, and then get curious and see if we can figure it out!
So on Monday I introduced you to the idea of sitting with your hedgehogs (your emotions). It was a great description that helped me to understand a new way of interacting with my emotions. But what I discovered for myself, for my kids and with an increasing number of the families I work with, it's difficult to sit with your hedgehogs and name your hedgehogs if you're not actually clear about what emotions you're having in the first place.
Having grown up in a world that was very anti-sex, discovering my own sexuality - and developing a healthy sexuality - has been a long and slow process for me, with many a challenge to navigate. In search of the next step in that journey I picked up a book a few years back that came highly recommended, called 'Come As You Are', by Emily Nagoski. Although the book contained many a very thought and idea about sexuality - and I would highly recommend it to any woman looking to dig into her sexuality more deeply - one of the biggest things I learned from Dr. Nagoski was one about responding to our emotions - or as she calls it, 'sitting with your hedgehogs'.
