Happy Lughnasadh!
In Harvest Your Shame and Trauma this Lughnasadh: Episode 121 of the Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD Podcast, I (your host) Eve Menezes Cunningham invite you to experiment with a reframe of all you’ve survived. Rather than focusing on getting rid of what you can’t change, what if you harvested it instead?
Using the Celtic harvest festival of Lughnasadh as a lens, we explore how the hardest parts of our lives (trauma, undiagnosed AuDHD, the years spent just trying to survive) can become sources of strength, resourcefulness and even purpose.
Working with the FEEL. LOVE. HEAL. framework, I share some of my own late-diagnosis journey along with gentle prompts to help you:
· notice what you’ve already harvested
· reparent the parts of you that needed protection and more tenderness and
· turn what’s hurt your heart into support for yourself and others
And if harvesting feels too ambitious right now, that’s (obviously – there’s never any point in arguing with reality) fine too. Sometimes survival is the harvest.
Wishing you a wondrous Lughnasadh weekend with time to reflect on and celebrate how far you’ve come as well as contemplating the seeds you’re planting for future harvests.
le grá (with love),
Ev3
HASHTAGS
CHAPTERS
00:00 Happy Lughnasadh: Harvesting the shame from your trauma and AuDHD
01:42 What does it mean to harvest your experiences?
03:17 Turning pain into purpose
05:05 Journaling, self-reflection and connecting with your inner wisdom
06:05 Reparenting yourself and embracing post-traumatic growth
07:04 Turning what hurts your heart into action
08:37 Imagining a more healed version of yourself
10:41 What are you harvesting this Lughnasadh?
11:18 When survival is enough
12:15 A grounding practice before you go
LINKS
Lughnasadh https://solestosoul.ie/2019/08/01/happy-lughnasadh-what-are-you-harvesting/
Metta
Book your free telephone consultation and access 100s of body-mind practices at https://solestosoul.ie/free-downloads
If you enjoyed this, check out:
Episode 73: Befriending your Traumatised and ADHD Inner Children
Episode 83: Community as self-care with Elizabeth Potts
Episode 94: Neuro-affirming Self Acceptance with Dr Emma Bede
Choose your own adventures: New adventures in the works including Inner Child Play, Stop Self Loathing, Move Past People Pleasing and Purpose, Meaning and Joy
https://solestosoul.ie/adventures/
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Happy Lughnasadh!
Have you ever considered harvesting your trauma and AuDHD, rather than trying to get rid of things that we can’t change?
Lughnasadh is where we appreciate the harvest and in today’s episode I will learn some ways to not only find freedom and release from some of the more painful things you might be going through, but strength as you harvest, as you recognise your strengths, your resourcefulness.
Welcome to episode 121 of the Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD with Eve Menezes Cunningham podcast. Thank you for being here.
This might be a tough idea and it may also be that it resonates and you might want to delve further yourself and you also consider working with a trusted loved one, therapist, coach or whoever feels right for you.
You’re listening to Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD. I’m your host Eve Menezes Cunningham and each Tuesday (or whenever you choose to listen or watch) you’ll get a new episode to help you learn to love and care for all your parts from the soles of your feet to your soul.
You can find older episodes, full transcripts, links, more free resources, ways in which we might work together including becoming an adventurer, a special price at the moment, at solestosoul.ie/podcast. So that’s solestosoul.ie/podcast.
As we work through the FEEL. LOVE. HEAL. framework for this episode, starting with FEEL. that self-care, the regulatory things that we can all do to help ourselves feel better when we have the bandwidth to do them.
It’s not always possible but thinking about regulating your nervous system, noticing how you feel at the thought of harvesting and release. If you think about some of the more challenging aspects of your trauma and AuDHD, like when you imagine recognising how coming this far has made you a stronger person and when I talk about AuDHD, it’s a disability, autism and ADHD. They are disabling.
They’re also not, in my opinion, disorders although technically they are categorised that way. Much of the disabling elements are to do with living in a very ableist society but that’s where we live. It can be really easy with trauma, with AuDHD to blame ourselves, to internalise that and think that there’s something wrong with us.
But if you were to imagine harvesting, if you were to imagine whether you’ve already done it in elements, which I’m sure you have and it might be a matter of identifying it, or whether you think you would like to, but how can you use your experience or how have you used your experience to support yourself?
For me, I recognise I adore my work so much and it was born out of feeling unable to function. I became a life coach because I didn’t know how to do life. I had wanted to be dead for much of my teens and even early 20s and part of my earlier childhood.
I had happiness as well. I have an enormous amount to be grateful for but I always felt wrong. I always felt broken.
When I became a trauma therapist and I began to heal my own trauma as well, that was a huge part of the puzzle but AuDHD has been the missing pieces for me.
Being able to harvest all the pain that I went through to help you, hopefully it’s helping you, and to help so many clients over the years and supervisees and groups and others, it brings me so much joy to think that my pain has been harvested and I know I worked hard to do that.
I trained endlessly in so many different areas and it takes a lot to build up a practice and I honour that but I’m really appreciative that I kind of had to walk the walk in order to do my own healing, in order to ultimately create, design a life that I adore and also this practice, this work, this podcast, all of it, the writing, all of it, I feel really lucky and if life had come easier to me I might actually be miserable doing something I hate because the misery factor hadn’t been enough to have me make enormous changes as I had to in my early 20s.
So think about for yourself, what have you already done to harvest it? Does the idea of harvesting your trauma and AuDHD even feel possible? Does the idea feel offensive? And you might want to do some journaling around it, you might want to do some embodied journaling around it where rather than writing, if writing isn’t for you, record yourself and watch it back and see what lights you up, see what drains you, you can tell by your posture, your tone of voice, all sorts of things that you might not pick up if you’re writing it. And you can do the same by recording audio, you will hear differences in your voice so you’re connecting with your inner wisdom. I do recommend you work with a trusted loved one or a therapist or coach if you need one but you can do a lot of this for yourself.
Me personally, for a lot of the early part of my journey it was all on my own because I didn’t trust people, I didn’t trust other people, so I felt I had to do it all myself. So I’m hoping these episodes help you support yourself. As we move to the LOVE. part of the framework, that supportive energy, that love archetype, that acceptance, just reminding yourself that you deserved protection, you deserved safety, you deserved love, you deserved ease, you deserved support and acceptance, you deserve accommodations, all these things that you deserved and you still deserve.
What tiny and larger steps can you take today to reparent the parts of you that weren’t protected, loved, safe, supported and accepted? How can you move towards that post-traumatic growth? How can you befriend your AuDHD brain even more than you have already or it may be early stages for you?
As we move into the HEAL. part of the framework, it’s about the turning what hurts your heart into action, that co-regulation, the collective care, the community care. So just thinking to yourself how has your experience enabled you to be more of a help to others? We can only take people as far as we’ve been ourselves, so that can be through lived experience, it can be through training and support, but ultimately what you’ve survived means you can go deeper with others than most people can or will.
Do you honour this in terms of your capacity to help others? How about how they’ve helped you and the help that you still offer and receive? Which communities are you able to lean into? Which communities, which groups, which organisations, which individuals? And it could be things you listen to, things you read, music, it could be an actual group of people, of friends or people with a similar special interest to you, support group, place of work, your local community where you live, your family.
There are so many different ways of finding community online, in person. And what are most supportive for you and where do you feel most able to offer support to others in a way that’s wholehearted rather than potentially depleting yourself? How have you already turned what hurts your heart into action and what else might you do? If you were to imagine a future, even more healed version of yourself, if you’re already doing pretty well, but it might be feeling a far away version of yourself. But if you imagine yourself feeling more whole beyond your wildest dreams, like really loving life, like I never believed I would get here.
It’s taken time, it’s taken a lot of meditation, all sorts of like kind of the yoga, all the things I do, all the body mind practices that helped me, the Metta has been enormously helpful. You can kind of search my website for other episodes and blog posts on those. But ultimately, it’s about knowing that you deserve to feel better, you deserve love, you deserve acceptance.
And you deserve wholeness, you deserve to harvest what you have sowed. And where people who haven’t been through what you’ve been through, it might look like they’re doing far better, climbing far higher. When you think about the pits of despair, you’ve already climbed out of, the challenges that you’ve had to overcome that other people haven’t even recognised as challenges for you.
It astonishes me when I work with clients, I often think to myself, I’m very late diagnosed, late 40s. And when I was 50 for the autism. But I always think if I’d known when I was at uni, but working with people who are at uni now, or more recently, or at work now, and such simple accommodations still not being offered.
And it just astonishes me that so many people’s lives could be made so much better. And you can take the strength you have already gained from learning to advocate for yourself, being forced to advocate for yourself, to continue in easier ways and also for others and to let them advocate for you as well.
So I’d love to know, first of all, how you’re enjoying this gorgeous Lughnasadh time of year, what you’re harvesting here and in other areas of your life?
What are you grateful for?
And how can you appreciate your own role in it as well as all the others, all the other factors involved as well?
What can help you connect with the Lughnasadh energy?
Let me know and let me know if you’ve got any questions, feel free to email eve@solestosoul.ie
And happy Lughnasadh.
And also, if this all feels too wildly ambitious, if you’re just trying to survive at the moment, and the idea of harvesting things and helping others feels way beyond your capacity, you don’t have to do anything, your survival is plenty, your healing is plenty. It’s just it can be helpful to think about how actually you’re building muscles that are pretty powerful. And if and when you choose to, and for many people, especially with that sense of hyper-empathy and justice sensitivity, it can be a real motivating factor in terms of taking better care of ourselves, the idea of then being able to help others.
But however you’re celebrating or whatever you’re doing to honour Lughnasadh, I hope that you will take some time to honour yourself as well.
Thank you for being here. Before you go, please take a moment to ground the episode by just pausing and scanning your parts, all your parts, from the soles of your feet to your soul.
So you may want to keep your eyes open, you may want to close them, but planting your feet firmly on the ground, lengthening through the spine if that feels comfortable for you, letting yourself feel held by the chair or whatever it is you’re sitting or lying or standing on, and taking just a moment to scan your whole self, your whole body, your whole energy field, and ask yourself what you’re going to do for yourself right now. It might be as a result of listening to the episode, it might be something else, it might be a nap, it might be something to eat, it might be some kind of movement, but let yourself ground, let yourself get into the habit of connecting with your inner wisdom and notice what you need and give yourself what you need. Thanks for listening to this episode.
If you haven’t already and would like to, please like, subscribe, comment, engage across the platforms wherever you may be accessing this, and you can also email me eve at solestosoul.ie. Thank you for listening, I look forward to sharing more next week.