FROM THE ARCHIVES: Ep. 33 Sentience

[lips smack] So today, I'm flying solo, and I wanna talk a little bit about sentience.

If you've been following along on the podcast, my Instagram, my emails, or if you've worked with me, or if [chuckles] you know me, I am sure that you have heard me say we are sentient beings.

So what the heck does that mean? Like, it's okay if you don't know what that means.

We're not meant to know everything.

So when I googled the word sentience, here's what came up in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "A sentient quality or state, um, a feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought." And then I clicked on sentient, and what came up was, "Responsive to or conscious of sense impressions, aware.

Finely sensitive in perception or feeling." So put simply, we are feeling beings, like in our body feeling, not thinking feeling.

Through our senses, we feel things in our body.

Our sentience, our feeling sense, it's probably, like, the most intelligent of our senses, and yet for most of us, not all of us, but for most of us, it's been shut down from a really young age.

As, as a kid, you may have heard things like, you know, "Oh, don't be sad," or, "Suck it up, buttercup," or, you know, "Stop crying," or, "It's not ladylike to be angry," or, "Boys shouldn't cry, that's weak," um, or my favorite, "You shouldn't feel that way." And as a parent, maybe you've said these things to your kid.

Be gentle with yourself.

You probably heard those things as a kid and, you know, just continued the vicious cycle of stomping out unfavorable emotions.

But what I'm learning through therapy is that, you know, we react from a triggered place typically, you know, from a younger part, an older version of ourselves, an unhealed piece of ourselves, like, as opposed to responding from our most aligned adult self.

[lips smack] And our kids can be really triggering, especially when they're reflecting back the things that we may not really love about ourselves, right? Especially when they won't stop crying and we're tired, especially when they think they know everything [chuckles] and you know that you're right.

And I think that most parents, myself included, feel an immense responsibility to make everything okay, right, to fix what's wrong.

Um, it's like a natural instinct for some of us, I think.

But our kids, our kids are just on this earth, right, having their own human experience, and what I'm learning is that we don't have to fix them.

They're not broken.

It's not our responsibility.

Like, ugh, take a breath.

[sighs] It is not our responsibility.

That feels good, right? I mean, they are traveling this spiral journey of life, learning and growing, and oh my goodness, the things that we learn when we actually slow down to listen to our emotions and allow ourselves to feel them.

So we just really need to hold space for the kids, for our kids, the kids in our lives, to be where they are in the present moment.

Feeling can be really uncomfortable, like so uncomfortable that, oh, we've come up with some really savvy ways to numb those feelings, myself included.

Um, gosh, like an emotion that I really struggle with feeling and allowing is anger.

It makes me nervous when people around me are angry, and I seem to consistently push away my own anger, to push my own anger down, like I swallow it whole sometimes.