Transformed by Grief with Ellie Thomas

Rewiring Survival Mode Into Heart-Led Living

• Ellie Thomas • Episode 32

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This is an important teaching and exploration of the dance between ‘survival doing’, ‘being’, and ‘authentic doing’ energies. I explore unraveling from the worldly matrix of worth, well-being, success and safety that has conditioned all of us, and embarking on the path to living in greater heart-alignment, energy, and sustainability with your true essence.

Topics explored include: 
• being as the base state before action
• 'survival doing' versus 'authentic doing'
• childhood and lineage patterns that shape a sense of urgency within
• body signals of burnout, and how to attune to them as guidance
• small daily attunements to rewire safety
• rebuilding trust through gentle, honest steps
• letting grief open a portal to true movement

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Music credit:
Embrace by Sappheiros | https://soundcloud.com/sappheirosmusic
Music promoted on https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Transformed by Grief. My name is Ellie Thomas, and I am here to guide you on your transformational grief journey. From feeling lost, raw, and brokenhearted, questioning everything in you and around you, to reconnecting to the truth of who you are and the beauty, fulfillment, and vibrancy of life that is still available in you and through you. On this podcast, we explore the depths of what it means to say yes to life again after you've been broken open by pain and grief. We will explore what it means to create a deep, loving, and reverent relationship to yourself, to grief, and to life in a way that allows you to begin to rebuild from the inside out and to create a powerful foundation for a joy-filled, alive feeling, and fulfilling life you love. Hi there. Welcome back to Transformed by Grief. We are in the final moments of pregnancy over here. Baby's due date approaching quickly, and oh final wave of energy to share and organize and set up everything that's wanting to be left in place while I take some time off to just be in the process of tending to our little one and learning how to be a mama and all of the expansion that's about to come with that through the birth portal and beyond. And one of the things that has been on my heart is all of these fantastic integration audios that I recorded and have recorded. I call them integration audios in the sanctuary, but really they're just bonus audio teachings and explorations and podcast style shares that I have collected in the Sanctuary membership and had available to members through the last six plus months. And these audios have so much in them. And this one specifically has been kind of tapping on me to be shared with the greater audience of the podcast and not just members, as it really goes well with so many themes that came up with the episode that I did with Pilar. And also just this recurring theme that comes up with just about everybody that I have ever worked with and probably will ever work with because it's a huge also part of my journey with myself and in my own process of learning how to move from the head into the heart, into the body, and to trust the guidance of energy that comes from the core of who I am, more than just the protective, strategic intellect that is often quite limited and not connected to the greater potential and the greater kind of movement of energy that I'm here to walk with. And I find this to be true with most people that I work with. A huge part of my one-on-one work in and my work in the sanctuary is really being the vessel of bringing people down from that head space into the heart and body and letting them acclimate and get really comfortable with feeling energy move, and then allowing that to be our guidance system and allowing that to be the part of us that leads and that expression that gets to have space in the world instead of being controlled or shut down or calculated, which most women that I work with are extreme sensitive beings and also energetic powerhouses, and yet through their own experiences have been groomed to lead from the intellect and been connected to their sense of worth and their sense of power and their sense of who they should and need to be through the intellect. And I am a huge advocate through to incorporating and integrating our intellect into these greater parts of ourselves. But first, oftentimes that has to come into connecting with being who we are, learning to be who we are, kind of deconditioning and deprogramming. The intellect is our main source of action and our main source of decision making to then be able to find our flow forward where we get to incorporate that, but it doesn't get to be the reigning part of our lives. And this audio teaching is all about exploring this idea of being versus doing and the dance between the two and beginning to take the exploration of survival doing versus authentic doing and how that connects to being. So I hope you love it. I wanted to let you know that one thing that I'm have been working on has been reorganizing the sanctuary to be a resource for you to tap into at any point. We have for now shifted the context since I won't be doing live calls for a while, but I have been reorganizing these 300 plus hours of incredible material, everything from meditations and energy work that range from 12 to 40 minutes to incredibly beautiful transformational coaching calls that go really deep into grief and much beyond. I call the sanctuary your hub for grief and growth, your space of refuge to come and explore everything that's growing in you through your grief and your growth. And so we start from the place of rooted into moving with what wants to be connected with and liberated, very similar to what's being talked about in today's episode. But then we also get to move into like how does this next level of expression want to come through you in the world? How does it impact how we want to see our lives, success, how we're focused on relationships, how it impacts our health, all of these aspects. And so over the past year and a half, so much in the sanctuary has been developed to support you in a multidimensional way from coaching sessions to teachings to meditations and energy work and guided practices to community and so much more. There's so much richness there. And so I've been in the process of organizing it so that as you feel called, you can tap into it at any point that you want to, whether I am on maternity leave or not, and really reap the benefits and really sink into the beauty of what this space was created for to meet you in potentially pain, transition, challenge with yourself or in a greater context of your life, and come into deep exploration and deep connection with yourself and begin to unravel what needs to be unraveling so that you can find your flow forward and really build from a really solid and sturdy foundation of healing, of clarity, of honoring your process and honoring everything that has been required for you to arrive where you arrive, and also trusting what is ready to come through as you've released a lot. A lot of the focus in the sanctuary is about release so that we can make space to tap into what's true and allow that to lead. So it goes really well with. So if you have been interested in the sanctuary, there's so much available still and will that was only going to grow. I've been putting together some mini courses, some bundles. It's all kind of starting to come together, but you can now access it at a discounted price as well. So I'll put all of the information in the show notes. And we would love to have you join. I will still get to pop in and read your things over time. I won't be as active in the next few months, but there are some beautiful community members that have been there for a long time. And you could just pop in and be anonymous and soak it all in for weeks or months at a time, whatever feels good for you. So I wanted to let you know that that is a really, really great place to kind of continue to work with all of this over the next few months as I'm on maternity leave. And if you have any questions, for sure, reach out and let me know. But for today, this teaching and exploration on the energies of being versus doing and the dance between them. And I hope it meets you exactly where you need it to. I've just done some of our energy resetting practices that have been so on repeat in my life as I've been sharing them with you all in the sanctuary. I can feel how much wants to come through around this. And oftentimes, in order for me to just allow what wants to come through to come through, I just gotta hit play and record because or hit record and and go because trying to conceptualize it all in my mind is kind of impossible. So there may be other things that I come up with after recording this, and if I do, I will create a part two. But for now, I want to go back to the origins of what kind of alerted me to okay, it's time to be talking about this again in a new way. And this is something that, as I mentioned on one of our meditations or calls, the being doing dance is one that is in extremely important on my path and has been extremely important, and is one that is extremely relevant to everyone that I work with, and I believe that those that are drawn to my work are all here to kind of come into deeper levels of being and to reduce or release the false ideas of doing, it's not so that we're not doing, because that's not the point of being human and not alive and alive. It's not to not do. Deconditioning ideas of laziness and creating greater capacity within our beings, within our bodies, within our energetic fields to trust and root into the energy of being. So what do I mean when let's go back to like super basics? What do I mean when I'm talking about being and doing? When I'm talking about being, I'm talking about simply the ex being in your pure existence and allowing that to be enough and not even simply that at the beginning it might be that, but allowing yourself to reconnect to the heart of who you are and to feel the energy in with you in you, um gently ebbing and flowing or pulsing, or however you experience it, gently alive in you or fiercely alive in you, and allowing yourself to be in that experience. And oftentimes over time, that experience does lead us to action and does lead us to activity, and does lead us to outward expression, but the authentic templates of doing that come from that are founded by this deep resourced well of connectivity to your heart, yourself, the divine, the truth of who you are, right? Even when you're in stillness, right? And so ultimately you could think about this idea of being as the complete delight, capacity, and safety in simply being in stillness with yourself and as you are. And doing is what it sounds like doing. But there's kind of these two frequencies, these two energies, these two levels of this. One that is mind-driven and given to us through the patterns and the templates of the world and what is supposedly successful and worthy and desired, and uh what we should be living or or how we should be expressing. And uh caught up in a lot of that is survival energy. And some of that survival energy is very real because we do need money and we do need to pay our bills, and we do need to have a place to live and pay for food, etc. And yet this has become a very out-of-proportion process in our system. And there are very real and natural survival energies that we are each going to experience in this life because, yeah, that is, you know, there's a hierarchy of needs, and that is a basis. And yet it has been hijacked, might be kind of hard of a word, but it has been the this energy has kind of created a field of expectation that we have unconsciously integrated into the idea of who we think we are, who we need to be, our identity, and how we can move in the world. And then there's the level of, so there's like survival level doing, and I'll get more into that in a little bit. And then there's kind of authentic doing. And authentic doing is when we have removed and become aware of, maybe we haven't fully removed them, but we've become aware of all of the places that we are caught up in the matrix of the world and that survival energy of doing and realized how exhausted we are, and how that actually doesn't quite feel true and right in our beings most of the time. And then we've taken a step back and reconnected to our being state, to our heart, to the energy that is in us, this greater identity than just what the world sees or tells us we need to be. And then from there, a natural flow of action can come forth. And this sometimes looks exactly the same, and sometimes it looks very different. It depends on the person, it depends on the season of life, but the energy behind it is very different. And one is deeply depleting, the survival doing is deeply depleting, and the authentic doing is not only energizing and not depleting, it is often deeply healing and rebalancing and fortifying to our trust and our confidence in our system. And when I say system, I'm talking about kind of our mind, body, soul, energy, triangle, and aura. So just sit with that for a second and notice the inventory in your life. Just by those descriptions, where do you feel like you're really caught up in the matrix doing? And I'll get into it more in a second, and there's survival aspects of it. Do you feel connected or have you felt connected with that deep state of beingness, of connection to your heart, release of the world, and this kind of connection to that greater energy of who you are, and being able to sit in that and let it come and let it be enough, no matter what's happening externally. And have you experienced that beautiful natural ebb and flow of energy that moves you into doing in an authentic way? I'm just gonna sit with that for a moment. Maybe in other seasons this one has been easier than another. Part of the reason that we do so many energetic attunements and updates and um connection in the sanctuary is that those are often the gateway of bringing people out of this matrix doing state and into this deep connection to being that then allows every time you do it, a tiny recalibration, a tiny rewiring of your system to say this is safe, this is okay, there's something here for me. So let's talk a little bit more about survival doing. Survival doing often comes from this idea that we have to prove there's an unconscious push energy that goes with it. It's basically I need to be progressing on this uh I already use the word template, but in this kind of schema of what a good person is or what I think I'm supposed to do in order to be loved, accepted, desired, supported. And it comes with this deep fear of being nothing. That there's this fear that often lives in that, that if you were to stop, you would not only lose everything around you, which there is potentially some truth in that, but also that you would lose yourself, that you would be nothing, that you would be all alone whenever I follow the kind of um deep primal path of exploring this in myself when I feel anxiety come up around something, and I've worked through this hundreds and hundreds of times over the past few years. So I just want to normalize that this is something that as long as this doing energy is kind of constantly pulsing in the world, we are going to feel it sometimes, no matter how much work we have done to exit that. And so in this kind of doing state, when it comes up and when this kind of survival need to do comes up in my self and in my body, and I can feel this energy running, and I'm not sure where it came from. I often follow the emotions and the patterns all the way back to the kind of the root fear, the root primal fear that exists. And usually the root prime first it starts off as um, what will people think? How will I ever get what I want? What will people, you know, how will people relate to me? Will my husband be mad at me? How will how will um others see me? There's a lot of kind of that fluff on the surface, but as I go deeper and deeper, usually at the bottom, at the base of this kind of primal activation is this fear of being fully abandoned, fully alone, without anything, no money, no home, no car. Just like me sitting rejected from the world and from all my loved ones on a curb, homeless without anything. And of course, there's many losses that would be have to be very real for that to happen. But at the base of this sense of needing to do and to keep up with the world and to present a certain way, there is this fear of laziness. And some, you know, the word lazy can be looked into even more, which we won't do today. But there's this fear of being seen or feeling lazy and being uncomfortable with simply being that then translates quickly to not getting what we need to survive. And so this might look like I know for me I had stuff with my family around um if I didn't go to the right school, or if I didn't get the grades, or if I didn't participate in the things, or if I didn't kind of hold my end of life up at the house. Like I understand that all of those are important aspects of life, and yet I began to believe that if I wasn't doing all of that, I wouldn't be loved, I wouldn't be accepted, I wouldn't be supported. And this wasn't conscious, of course. But it was kind of underlying and ruling a lot of what I did when at the basis of who I was, I was just deeply exhausted. And I was very disconnected from the truth of who I was, and that truth of who I am isn't necessarily something we put into words or something that you define perfectly. It is that it is an energy and your essence. And a lot of times I see doing in the top in I don't want to say toxic, but in the survival sense as a distraction. Because learning to be and being with ourselves and being with that essence energy at the beginning is deeply uncomfortable and does not feel safe. Because the whole again schema of life, the whole template that we've bought into unconsciously, is that that isn't enough. That if I'm not doing, I'm not anything, and therefore I could lose everything. Which I think you can probably already connect with the mistruths in that. You have all experienced enough moments of being that have deeply changed you and begun to rewire you and created space for something very powerful and new in your life, where you know that yes, there's some doing probably that needs to be done. And yet, if you create the space to be and to connect with that greater energy that will ultimately lead you forward, you are not nothing. And actually, the irony here is that in those moments of being, we can tap into a greater awareness and a greater embodiment of who we actually are. And that's what ends up leading us into authentic doing. So just let all that kind of land for a moment. In the lies of needing to be doing all of the time, survival doing, and those lies are often integrated into what we think of ourselves, and our mind runs wild with them and goes crazy with them and reminds us of them all the time. And in the in the action of survival doing, we are very connected to the mind. It is very mind-controlled. When we are connected to being, it is heart-controlled, it is heart connected. And we know that when we connect to our heart, we actually can begin to connect to all these other layers of ourselves as well. And we can invite the mind to join that and be in conversation. But the mind is not, or the intellect is not the sole leader, it's not the driver. And so usually what happens is early on in childhood, or even this comes in our lineage always as well. So it's not just a childhood thing, but early on in childhood, there is some moment, conscious or unconscious, usually unconscious, where we say, Oh, I get it. If I'm not blank, I won't receive what I need. I won't receive the love, care, attention, support, etc. Or if I'm not doing this, someone else will be in pain. And therefore, in my sensitivity, I will feel bad and I will be in pain. It will hurt me to witness that. So instead, I will just make sure that I'm frantically forever doing this thing or living in this um living in this idea that my mind has put together as a protection mechanism to keep me from these levels of pain. So usually at a young age, and again, this is alive in our all of our lineages too. So it's not just a childhood thing, but for a lot of people, there's this buy-in to the matrix, to the world's schema of success, being good, caring for others, being loved, desired, etc. Being healthy. And you can probably already sense like this is at the basis of everything. For some people, it's gonna be like if I'm not making people laugh, or for if I for me, it was care, you know, caretaking was a huge part of it. For some, I even have research recently discovered that likely I am a really good cook because of my mom's levels of pickiness around food and um expect expectation. And I learned quickly, oh, if I want to keep her happy, which I did because I had this whole thing that her not being happy meant her not being well, which her potentially getting sick again and then dying. So I took on the job of making sure the food was damn good. And it still is, and I enjoy it. But it's very interesting to go back to the origins of some of these things and to recognize that there are these patterns of survival that are superpowers and also need some good old debunking and need some good old unraveling to really be able to come out in their truest expression. And so thinking about where you are right now and thinking about where you are in your life, I just want you to kind of notice where you feel bought in consciously or unconsciously, to the matrix program that you need to be doing, accomplishing. Otherwise, you're unworthy. You might feel unworthy or worthless or guilty or wrong or bad. Where have you in this season been caught up in that? And I was explaining to my sister this past week how when we are in a pattern of the mind or a pattern of protection and safety and survival, it is impossible to see that there is another way. We feel like that is the only other way, and in this case, even more so, because we are sold by the world that this is the way that things work, this is the way you do things, this is the way you get, you progress in life, this is the way you grow, this is who you're how you're supposed to tap into your potential and live up to your potential. And it seems like, well, there's no other way. There's no other way but for me to basically kill myself living at the level that the world requires of me or or um demands of me. But when we come back to our being state, and when we sink into the heart and kind of oh, breathe in and make space to separate from that program, and we recognize it with love, and we recognize it that, yeah, I mean, that got me really far, and it also burned me the fuck out. And yes, doing something different requires doing, but there is important restoration needed in order to get to that place of authentic movement, authentic action, as some people would call it, aligned action. And so when we can return and initiate and create the state of being as a constant in our lives, it doesn't need to be the only state that we're living in, but it is the base state, it is the um foundation, or we are building it as the foundation of how we live. We begin to see that actually all that is just a program, all the survival doing is just a program. And we begin to see new possibilities. And things start to open up and come to us. That isn't like I always think of head movement, heady-based movement or intellect-based movement, as I've said this before, squinty eyes and head kind of forward and looking down, and super determined. I know that I have had this and still can have this. And yet the energy of this is deeply disembodied and very taxing. Have you ever noticed how tired you can be at the end of that? And again, that energy can get you far. And then there will be a point in your life, and maybe you've passed this point once or twice before, where there's a clear this just can't be it. This doesn't feel good anymore. I'm super drained. I feel like I'm living in survival mode. It seems normal to everybody else, but something is off here for me. And when those moments come in, and sometimes there are also messages that come from the body around sickness or illness, or feeling um dis-eased, feeling exhausted and depleted, getting sick, having symptoms of different kinds, which, yes, incredible to attend to those from a mind-based health place, but oftentimes those are simply deep, deep signals that the way we're living does not work with our system. And I get it, it is terrifying to even think about that, and it is um maybe not something that feels accessible to change in this moment. But the nice thing about it is that the only steps that need to be made is a reconnection to your beingness, and that begins with the practices we do all of the time to just get into the heart and to the body and to remember in our beingness. Sorry, killing a bug on my floor, but in my in the beingness, there is a deep remembrance of oh yeah, I'm not just a caricature in a scene of life, or I'm not just a pawn in a play, or I'm not just a character. There's something deeply vibrant in me. Whether my body feels that right now or not, whether it feels safe to just live in that and from that right now or not. And like I said, oftentimes the mind can very quickly want to keep us from even tapping into that because it's terrifying. The mind has been wired to say, this is what is required to be good, successful, to have what you need in the world. Therefore, you must do it. And the moment you will stop to reconnect with your being, the mind will say, What the freak are you doing? We cannot stop. We cannot stop. And so part of this process is of kind of moving from survival doing to authentic doing over time or authentic action is through the pathway of the heart and through the pathway of connecting again, yet again, over and over and over again, a little bit more to who we are, and to doing the active deconditioning work about what we believe or don't believe to be true about who we are and what we need to be doing or being to be accepted and okay. And in that usually lives a lot of grief, and in that usually lives a lot of pain, of remembering the pain that still lives in us. And because of that, because it's not just some blissful path, although it is also blissful, the mind will slam on the brakes as fast as it can. It will say, heck no, we're not going there. There has not yet been any proof for the mind to buy in that there can be anything good in just being. And so at first it can feel scary, it can feel like I don't even know how to start, and that's why you're here. That's why we do the things we do every week, that's why I create the space so that you just get to tap in and be part of it and not have to be until you are ready and until you feel like, oh yeah, I need this in my day-to-day life to incorporate this, to incorporate this reconnection to the heart, to incorporate this welcoming of your greater essence and the greater movement of intuition, of awareness, the knowings and the messages that want to come through that are ready to lead you forward. And so we repeat the process over and over and over. And at some point, yes, there is responsibility to say, I mean, there's one great step is joining a space like this and saying, I am here and I'm gonna let this in. And then the next step when you're ready is, and even though it's going to feel deeply uncomfortable and very hard, I am going to commit to bringing this into my day-to-day, to connecting with my beingness every day to beginning to build a sense of worth, of trust, of safety, of well-being, and simply being me, not needing to approve anything, do anything, answer to anyone. There is a remembering of who you are outside of all that action that regrounds you and restores you and re-energizes you slowly. And sometimes the next right thing after something like that, if there's space for it, is to go take a nap. Or to just recognize how tired you are, and to really, really be real with yourself about what is possible and needed in this season if you're that tired, and to prioritize restoration. And in order to do this, there's a lot that needs to be worked through. There's guilt, there's limiting beliefs, there's fear, there's memories of pain that unconsciously come up that will block us. Built from heart-connected action and kind of this overflow energy that leads you forward. It requires being willing to unravel each of these, each of the lies slowly over time for the rest of your life. And that might be hard to hear and a hard truth, and sound like, oh, I don't even have energy for that. I might as well just keep doing you can, and then your body or your great your intuition or all your parts will at some point say to you, Yeah, we can't do this anymore. And you'll have a choice. There's a choice point in these being doing moments. Oftentimes those choice points are relating to grief and to loss and to breakups and to endings and to unknowns. You know that. We work with that every week here. These are these portal moments, these entryways that are saying, okay, it's time. It's time to build some trust. And I just want to say this is some really deeply radical stuff because um we are of the first waves of people in our world even contemplating this. There are millions and millions and millions of people that this isn't even in on their radar yet. And yet I believe that it's going to change very quickly, and it already is changing. And so I like to say all of this from a place more of what is your body and being telling you? What is happening in your life and what is it showing you right now? How are you feeling about your life and how you feel in your life? And how is that alerting you to this dance between being and doing? And maybe places that need to be unraveled, maybe places you need to make space for stillness, for just being, for just experiencing the greater energy of your own heart every day. This doesn't need to be a, oh, the world is changing when I want to be at the forefront of this. No, that's not the conversation. The conversation is how are you feeling in your life? Usually when we are called to do come into this kind of deeper, greater layer of connection to ourselves and trying this on, even if we've done this before, there's always more layers. We I lost my train of thought for a second, but I think what I'm trying to say is when we're called into this, it is a very deeply spiritual, natural moment. It doesn't come from the mind, it comes from the rest of the system being like, hold up, this isn't sustainable. This isn't how it feels good to live. This isn't us in our truest essence. This isn't us living in our potential, no matter how good it looks on the outside. So I think that's where we'll end for now. I can feel that there are more parts coming, but I think going back to this like really basic exchange and really looking at this process and really taking some time to reflect in your own life about where you are and where you feel kind of caught up in the being matrix and disconnected, I'm sorry, in the doing matrix and disconnected from your beingness and et cetera. And even reflecting on where you, when you do connect to your beingness, where you do feel guided forward, even if it's just to go take a nap. But when we tap into that beingness, we tap into a deep well of resource that might feel shallow at the beginning because we're tired, but it's not truly depleted. It just needs some space to really um the well itself is profound. And in the rest or in the recalibration of simply making space to be in our being, little by little, it is filled again. And I also want to say this is not a process of quick change, and yet we can feel the results really quickly when we say yes to this exploration in our day-to-day life. So I'm gonna end there. Please drop your questions, your reflections, those really help me know where to take the next exploration of this. There's an integration flow that's going to come out soon that will allow you to kind of play with all of this in your body and continue to um sink into it and notice what it feels like to be in your being versus what it feels like to be in that survival doing this. And then in that, what are the messages? What wants to lead you forward? What is um, what is that authentic movement that's ready to happen through you? And gaining more and more and more um comfort, safety, trust in that state within yourself, getting to know that part of you more and feeling like you can lean into it. Okay, can't wait to hear how all this lands. Talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to Transformed by Grief. Please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and to share it with a loved one that needs this medicine today. If you're ready to deepen into your own Transformed by Grief process, you can join the Sanctuary membership or work with me one-on-one at at least love.com. See you soon.