I slept in this morning. Out of bed at 4am. A lazy Sunday morning….

I love my neighborhood before 10am on weekends and during Bronco games. So quiet. It feels mostly still with the exception of big black crows and squirrels that always grab my attention when I venture outside to walk.  

When I woke up this morning, I felt ‘off’. Nothing too drastic. I had a strange dream that seemed to go on and on. I couldn’t shake it, wondering why I would have such a detailed dream in my subconscious. I have had intense dreams that seemed way off the grid as compared to my typical day-in-the-life of me, and have woke up unsettled. This dream included characters and a theme that matched my experience, but was a bit odd and the result of the dream was waking up feeling a bit unstable. The feeling of instability brought back memories of a time in my life where I made decisions that I would label ‘unstable’, or decisions that were not grounded in any sort of stability. 

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I have a very killer and very consistent morning routine. I suggest this practice to anyone who has big feelings that can take over, and/or is noticing results in life that feel stuck/spinning in a pattern. I call my morning routine ‘Quiet Time’, which is also the title of my next book: checkingIN – 8 steps to more creativity, possibility, and inspiration.The checkIN is the first process I created and the one I am revisiting currently on Monday nights with high school students. It’s a challenge to transfer the content to say the least. The experience is reminding me of things I have forgotten over the last ten years since I created the tool. 

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Because it was QT, I was confident that the feelings weren’t in charge, and it was something to witness. I was stable. I was just remembering. 

I allowed the memories to be what they were, and when I allowed them, I was awarded memories from the same time period that were very stable and very authentic. It was a relief to recognize there had still been access during that time period to my stable, grounded self. 

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In retrospect, the stable ground was beginning to tremble before the quake of my transformation almost a decade later (turning 40/breckenridge summer); the behaviors and moods were escalating, the wrecking ball called grad school was about to enter the stage. Keeley was also about to make an appearance. I tell the story of the Breckenridge summer in Part One of The Story I Tell, and the story of Keeley in Part Two. 

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As I reflected on the time and the feelings, I narrowed it down to a heightened intensity of attraction toward men (in my case). I lost any sense of grounded wholeness. I liken it to what is referred to as ‘extra’ when it comes to students in a school setting. 

When the Significant Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG) showed up in my work day as a school social worker, the language I learned about this ‘extra’ was referred to as ‘behavioral intensities’. 

To be clear, there was nothing academic that would have leveled up to anything outside of average. Whereas I couldn’t relate to ‘gifted’ intelligence, I could relate to what it was like to experience behavior intensities. I’ve spoken of this before: if I thought something was funny, I needed to laugh LOUD – much louder than what would be interpreted as ‘typical’. When I had a boy crush, it was high intensity. My younger brother pointed out that I tended to have boyfriends that did not reciprocate the feelings, but yet my emotions were on level 12/15 of a scale to ten. The intensity took over everything. I had a heightened response to anger as well with an escape of creating elaborate fantasies of revenge.

I expose this piece of me to allow others the possibility of reflection into what may be their own behavior intensities, and ultimately to create a shared human experience to wonder and be curious about our own self, as well as the young people whom show up in our day. and how behavior can surface in home, school, and community settings. 

Food for thought:

Emotions. Energy in motion. Can you be open to consider emotions as energetic frequencies that one calibrates to in a bit of an orbit that surrounds one, rather than solely an experience happening within one’s brain/body. This thinking suggests that we can be sensitive to the collective orbit, rather than having a singular, internal experience.

Sensitive? Senses. An individual is continually exchanging energy and information through one’s senses. Consider just the physical senses. One is continually taking in this energy and information, and is tasked with the next step of organizing it in a way that is functional and acceptable to the established physical or external surroundings: social environment. One does not always have time to consider their own autonomy and desired outcomes, or analyze cause and effect. One does have choice. As one matures the patterns can become more easy to recognize and one can get in on the ‘game’ in a way that can be quite satisfying (ie. manifesting desired outcomes with intention). In a busy culture with fast energy via technological advancement, a community/collective runs the risk of reinforcing problematic patterns without the realization of what is happening.

To use a public school theme, let’s look at the first few steps of two familiar processes for problem solving that exist in two school settings I am familiar with (one is K-8, the other high school)…

Engineering Design Process: Ask. Imagine. Create.

Design Thinking: Notice. Empathize. Imagine. (I think this is the order)

Now let’s weave in Social-Emotional Skill Building and Self-Care strategies…

Self-Awareness. This is the ability to notice. One can notice their thoughts, feelings, and impulses/urges that happen before one acts (action: what I say or do, or don’t say/don’t do). One can also notice or be a witness to the results that are showing up in their life – one’s data. *this practice can unlock patterns or intensities of behavior that may be connected to epigenetics and one’s ancestral codes that are being activated in response to energy frequencies and appear to be unrelated and out of sync with present time and space, or environmental conditions: having intense reactions to what appear to be mostly nonthreatening situations, circumstances, events.

Self-Awareness can also be the practice of mindfulness. To notice in a curious way without judgment, comparison, or criticism.

Curiosity can only be accessed authentically in a regulated state. When one is able to be genuinely curious they may ask the W questions (as it is taught in schools) and become the subjective noticer (mindfulness): What is happening? Who is involved? When is it happening? Where is it happening? Why might it be happening?

From the curious state where one is authentic and regulated, one can grow or expand the space to invite in one’s imagination to imagine new outcomes. This could be called brainstorming.

The feeling state may now be considered one of possibility. A state of possibility lends itself to a state of positive expectancy. This is the opposite of a state of fear. When one is moving toward a challenge from a state of fear, one views the ‘stress’ as an external condition that needs to be removed. When one moves toward a challenge from a state of possibility one can access the imagination which is within oneself. This activates the use of executive skills that allow one to imagine desired outcomes and create a plan to move toward the better outcome.

When I have been focused on my content as a business, one theme that regularly shows up in the world of entrepreneurship is: What problem am I going to solve? In this entrepreneurial world, there is an external reward of monetizing the process, which allows one to capitalize and grow from the Design Thinking paradigm.

What happens when one uses the skillsets to grow inwardly. To ask: What problem do I want to solve? Why? And then what? To notice patterns of behaviors. To empathize with feelings. To imagine desired outcomes and take steps toward change that can lead to sustainable growth outcomes for self and others.

I think what would happen is good things showing up incrementally which can make it hard to notice change at first. The incremental growth will gain momentum. The momentum will grow into observable positive change and an increase of individual and collective wellbeing.

Yep. I think that’s what will happen and what is happening much more than ‘we’ realize.