Have you ever wanted to do something really bad? You feel the desire burning inside of you ? You know this feeling. And as time passes and you are not able to accomplish this desire, you end up getting super frustrated, yes? Recently, I discovered that needs, not emotions, are the trump card. When an infant has a need, 99.9% of the time they have an adult close by to tune in to that need and meet it. We know the need has been met because the infant is soothed and becomes content in some way. We know the infant’s need is not met when the crying persists. But as we age, conditioning and belief systems begin to creep in and children are dealt with in varying ways. What is more, there is often a suggestive approach to child care and child rearing that involves parents and caregivers suggesting to a child how they are feeling, what they need, etc. When a child says, “I am thirsty, I need a drink of water,” tired parents might say, “No, what you need is sleep, back to bed.” And so it goes for all of us, we become programmed at the thought and emotional level. We learn to question our needs, question our feelings, question our very thoughts! When we feel a genuine desire for something, we often talk ourselves out of it or parent ourselves saying things to ourselves like, “No, that’s not responsible,” etc.
It is ironically, often, our own self-talk and self-parenting that leads us to denying our own needs and desires. And it is the denying of our needs and desires that CAUSES the emotions. Infancy teaches us that we all have innate needs. We need water, food/nourishment, connection/closeness, safety, security, warmth, stimulation, experiences, education, growth, development and progression… These are not things that we can go without and yet the vast majority of us exist without all of these basic needs met. We cannot address causes at the effect level. We must instead use the effect to inform us of the cause.
Having taught all of my adult life, I profoundly understand the Law of Progression. The Law of Progression states that growth happens progressively, over time, as students gain mastery of skills in a systematic way. That means we cannot learn multiplication until we first learn addition because we need addition skills to multiply. In our society, we use chronological age to determine readiness. When a child turns 16 we say they are ready to drive. When a child turns 18, we declare them an adult. There are no tests or assessments performed on children to assess their emotional age. We do not evaluate children along the way to gauge where they are lacking skills and tools that are vital to their adult life success. And so, millions and billions of people are entering adulthood with not only an exuberant amount of unmet needs, but also a lack of awareness that they even have unmet needs. And as a result, we have become a society of “socially acceptable” in so many unhealthy ways. Our promotional platforms prey on this mindset!
When a person’s needs are not met, they will often lean on other means to bandaid fix the situation. So, if a person. has a need to rest and recharge, but the very roof that they have over their head requires them to work no matter what, they will turn to self-force or caffeine or other means to mitigate the situation so that they can continue to survive. But surviving is not thriving. It’s not living. And it’s certainly not conscious living! If this person were a student in my classroom, I would immediately see and feel the behavior patterns and begin their education by having the child rest until the child’s nervous system was back to normal where they were in a state of learning reception. But society does not approach people like this. There are no programs in place for burnout. No funding for burnout and no intervention program that heals burnout at the causal level. Right now, that responsibility is on us.
Years ago, I had a terrible bout with burnout. I did not have the liberty of not working so I had to come up with a solution that would enable me to kick out of burnout and make money. My solution was self-discovery. I needed to understand. I needed to find the cause, rather than the solution. I needed to become my own student so that I could help myself. THIS is how I learned about unmet needs and the importance of self-care on a conscious level. I had always been intuitive about the needs of others, but when it came to myself, I often used coping mechanisms with varying degrees of healthiness to survive. But burnout FORCED me to awaken. Looking back, I see the blessing that burnout was, but at the time, I was beyond frustrated because my lifestyle had no time for exhaustion. I needed my energy to move my and my family’s ship forward. (or so I thought).
This is how I discovered that I did not know anything about life or love. I did not even know myself! And so it was that for the next 10 years, I would do nothing but educate myself on all things self-discovery, spiritual awakening, consciousness, love, relationships, energy, purpose and direction, self-care, psychology, generational trauma and genetics, the laws of the universe, self-empowerment, gifts and talents, and SO much more! (My daughter nicknamed me “book-a-holic”). I essentially got my own doctorate degree in healing. I simply had this burning desire to understand. My motive at the time was to simply get my energy back so I could be the mom my daughter needed, but what I ended up receiving was a miracle! What I got was myself!
Healing is what happens after pain. Absent pain, there is no reason to heal. One aspect of pain is unmet needs. The longer we go without unmet needs, the more pain that we begin to feel emotionally until eventually we have pain that needs healing. It’s only when the pain becomes great enough that we seek out the healing in the first place.
For me, I had the unmet needs of self-care, self-love and self-worth. I lived my life exclusively outside of myself caring for everyone else! Only caring for myself and tuning in to my needs and desires could heal me. I did not need prescription meds, I did not need psychotherapy, I did not need advice. All that I needed was to learn to listen and hear myself. As I tuned in, I began to discover that I needed rest, recharging, quiet, calm, peace…I needed self-connection and self-expression, but creative self-expression like storytelling, poetry, etc., not relationship expression. I needed release which could only be found in creative pursuits for me. What this taught me about myself is that our emotions that are trapped need to be released. Only once we release these emotions can there be “healing.” At the time, I did not understand any of this. I simply felt the need to express myself. After I expressed myself for a good five years, suddenly I felt okay and began to feel new desires and needs arising. I needed to be responsible, to be self-sufficient, etc. And so I pursued those things which led me to “release” emotions related to those things which led to new needs arising. I am still on this path of following my needs and desires and “releasing” emotions. I have come to accept the process not knowing how long I will go through this before I can declare myself officially “healed.” But I have gone through the process enough to know with certainty that NEEDS are the trump card, not emotions. The emotions do not ever release in me until AFTER the need is met.
This journey is different for everyone. Only you can tune in to yourself and discover what you need and desire. When I first began this journey of meeting my own needs, I started simple. At first, I set a goal to drink water every day (something that was very hard for me). I would set a goal to drink a glass of water daily. If I completed that task, I had had a successful day. Over time, I increased the goal to drink an entire water bottle, or a liter of water. This goal setting ebbed and flowed. I’d go weeks forgetting entirely about my water drinking falling into unconsciousness on the subject. Then I would be focused on another goal like taking a walk every day. It was about feeling my way through this process of self-connection and self-care. I was learning what it felt like to tune in to myself and gauge my needs and then follow through on meeting them. The ebbing and flowing was because I would regularly fall back into caretaking patterns that tugged me away from my own goals. So I had to work my way through the layers of codependency and caretaking in order to reach a place where I shed some of those behaviors before I could truly integrate the new self-care consistently. But the more that I focused on self-connection and self-care, the better I got at meeting my own needs.
As we tune in to ourselves and practice meeting our needs, we will discover that meeting our own needs requires shedding behaviors in other areas in our life. When we add something to our lives, we often have to take away something else. We begin to learn what is important, what we value and what we desire in our life. And the healing process of letting go of what is not valued has its own pain and healing journey! And that is why I have learned to accept that the self-discovery/authenticity journey is not like getting a college degree. There is no set graduation date. There are a lot of variables and only we can figure out the best path to take to reach our goals! But reaching our goals IS possible! It just requires radical acceptance of where we are right now and a willingness to trust the journey even when we doubt it. Several times the universe has brought me backwards to learn something again even when I felt that I knew the material. Only once I accepted the regression was I able to gain the wisdom of remedial training! Healing is not linear. It’s happening to us every day whether we realize it or not. Consciousness has simply enabled me to be able to see what is happening!
The more that we learn to trust ourselves and meet our needs and desires, the more we will understand this process and the closer we will get to living the life that is right for us. Our needs are the trump card, so I believe in you, discoverlies!
Much Love!
Self Discoverly 