Forcing vs Allowing

On this episode I share the difference between forcing verses allowing change by getting vulnerable and sharing a personal experience. . .

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hello there.

Today, I want to talk about forcing versus allowing.

And I think the best way for me to do this is by getting vulnerable and sharing a personal experience with you.

So I hope that’s okay.

Life is funny.

And just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, God steps in and he reminds you that you indeed do not and that there is always room for more learning and more growth.

Okay, here’s my story.

Around 2021, I began experiencing some health issues.

My stomach was hurting and it was bloated most of the time, and I started gaining weight, just a few pounds.

But no matter what I did, I couldn’t lose them.

I was doing everything I knew to do, everything I taught my clients to do, everything that I had learned and experienced before.

So why couldn’t I figure out what was going on?

Now, all of this was happening right in the heart of our big pandemic that we all went through, and doctor’s appointments were a little bit hard to get, so I just continued to try to figure things out.

Now fast forward a year to 2022, and I was finally able to see a health care provider.

She ran some tests, and she told me that I was lacking vitamins and minerals, and that I needed to eat more fruits and veggies.

But here’s the thing, everything she suggested to me was already a part of my diet.

I was already eating it.

And when I told her this, she said, Oh, that’s odd.

Just eat more of them.

Now come to find out, the problem was that my body wasn’t digesting, it wasn’t absorbing, and it wasn’t utilizing what I was eating.

So of course it wasn’t getting the vitamins and the minerals.

I continued to put on weight, and my mood changed drastically.

I felt like a completely different person.

I didn’t even know myself anymore.

I was anxious all of the time.

It was hard for me to ever feel settled.

I felt like I was being chased all the time, that something bad was just right around the corner, and it was coming to get me and drag me down.

I was anxious.

I was nervous.

I was on edge 24-7.

I also began suffering with some depression.

My thoughts turned foggy, and I had some pretty bad fatigue.

It made life feel a thousand times harder, and I was struggling to cope with it all.

Now, if you’re familiar with my story, you will know that I went through this exact thing, something very, very similar to this, at least.

And it was rough, and I did not want to go there again.

So I started trying to force my body to get better.

Yep, I did.

I was trying everything to try to force my body to get better.

I wanted to get back on board with me.

And everything I would try, it wasn’t working.

So what did I do?

I forced myself to try harder.

That’s what I did.

And I still wasn’t getting better.

I was not getting better physically, and I was not getting better mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

So let’s fast forward to 2023, the beginning of 2023.

And I saw another practitioner who told me that I had parasites, which I know that sounds super gross, but it is what it is.

Pretty sure I picked them up from a trip to Mexico in 2020.

They were my little souvenir that I brought home.

But all these parasites had taken over my body, specifically my digestive system, and they were eating all of the nutrients and leaving me with nothing.

So what was happening is my body sensed that I wasn’t getting properly nourished, and so it slowed everything down.

It slowed down my metabolism.

It slowed down how much energy I had, and it also began to store fat, and it did all of this in an effort to keep me alive.

Thank you, body.

The other interesting thing I learned is that 95% of our serotonin, which is the hormone responsible for mood, is made in our gut.

So since my gut wasn’t healthy and it was infested with parasites, which sounds so gross to say, but that’s what it was, I wasn’t making serotonin.

Thus, my mood, my major anxiety, my depression, I even think the brain fog is a result of this.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, that’s nice, Rachael, but what does any of this have to do with forcing versus allowing?

Okay, I’m getting to it.

Just hang on.

Now that I kind of knew what was going on, I started on a protocol to kill the parasites and reverse all of the damage that they had caused.

This is a four month long process.

And after four months, I felt a little bit better, but nowhere where I wanted to be.

I thought I would bounce right back, I would be myself again, the weight would come off, and I would just be living life.

Not so.

My body gained another five pounds, and I was still suffering from anxiety.

Now through this entire two year plus ordeal, I was forcing myself to show up every day.

I was forcing myself to show up in my business, in my family, to keep a smiling face, to pretend like everything was just hunky-dory.

I was forcing myself to find answers, to read more books, to listen to more podcasts, to do more research.

I was forcing myself to lose the weight, because how embarrassing that I, a coach who should know exactly what to do, because this is what she helps people do, couldn’t even figure this out.

None of it was working.

It was just making things worse, to be honest.

Anytime that we use force, there is a lot of pressure involved, and I was definitely feeling this pressure.

Force creates this tension.

Think of it like a rubber band.

You’re stretching this rubber band, and stretching it, and stretching it, and it can only stretch so far before it snaps you backwards, or it breaks.

The thing about force is that it feels really yucky.

It feels difficult.

It feels tense.

It feels hard.

It feels heavy.

It feels stressful.

No wonder I was exhausted.

No wonder my nervous system was staying in full alert all day and all night.

Forcing change feels terrible.

And it’s really hard on our body, on our mind, and our spirit.

When we are trying to force an outcome like I was, we are putting a ton of pressure on it.

And with a ton of pressure, think about a pressure cooker, eventually there comes an explosion.

I was putting so much pressure on myself to heal my gut, to get my health back, to lose weight, to stop feeling anxious all the time, that I eventually exploded.

My nervous system started out hyper activated.

I had a lot of this anxious energy and anxious thoughts and feelings and actions.

Eventually, what happened was, my nervous system couldn’t keep up, and it crashed, and it then made me tired, so that I would slow down.

It made me choose to run and hide and close down my business for a while.

I just felt burned out, and I felt really, really hopeless.

Despite all of my hustling, nothing was working, so why should I bother anymore?

It was such a terrible place to be, and I stayed there for months.

I didn’t know what else to do, and quite frankly, I had enough.

I was done, and I stopped doing everything.

And what I did instead was the answer.

I started allowing.

I just allowed what was to be.

I stopped being mad at my body for being broken.

I stopped cringing every time I saw myself naked in the mirror.

I slept when my body said it was tired.

I ate when my body said it was hungry.

I didn’t work out because I did not feel like working out.

I basically just vegged out, and I accepted all of it, and that was okay.

My thinking was like, okay, if this is how things are going to be now, then I am going to learn to be okay with this, and I’m just going to go with the flow.

I’m done trying to force things to be different because obviously it’s not working.

And it’s just exhausting me.

And I am just going to allow whatever to be.

Since I did that, I have come to learn that allowing is the complete opposite of forcing.

Allowing does not mean that you’re abandoning your goal.

It doesn’t mean that you’re throwing in the towel and giving up.

Allowing is putting in the effort required to reach your goal, but doing it in a relaxing, peaceful, and enjoyable way.

It’s also long-suffering.

Now, this is a tricky word because when we hear the word long-suffering, it has the word suffer in it, and we think of something that’s miserable.

But actually, the suffering and long-suffering does not mean to suffer at all.

It actually means to allow.

So we could think of it as the word long-allowing.

We are allowing the journey to be what it is for as long as it needs to be.

That’s the ticker right there.

While still enjoying everything that comes with it.

We’re enjoying all the learning.

We’re enjoying the effort that we’re putting in.

All of it along the way.

And when we are enjoying something, and we’re having fun, change happens easily.

And it happens seemingly without effort.

Forcing change feels terrible.

Allowing change feels fun.

And it feels enjoyable.

It is such a night and day difference.

When I decided to make the shift to allowing, that’s when things finally started to shift.

I slowed down.

The pressure went down.

I felt safe.

So my nervous system then began to calm down.

I wasn’t stressed out.

So my digestion and my hormones then now have begun to regulate.

My health and my moods are slowly returning.

I hardly have a day where I feel anxious anymore.

And the weight is finally starting to come off.

But most importantly, life is fun again.

Life is so much fun again.

I’ve rediscovered my passions for helping people.

I feel creative again.

And I’m actually having so much fun doing it.

I’m also feeling really grateful.

Every day, I just wake up with so much gratitude.

Sometimes it takes having to go through things that we do not want to go through.

I would never have chosen to walk through that.

Never in a million years.

But in order for God to teach us and to grow us, sometimes we have to go through things that we don’t want to go through.

Now, I wouldn’t want to go back to where I was, but I am grateful for the experience that I had because it taught me so much, and I am really grateful for who I became because of it.

Forcing vs.

allowing.

We can choose to force change, but allowing is so much more fun.

Alright, that’s all I have for you today.

As always, I am cheering you on, and I will see you next time.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

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